Bartlett Research Conversations: Oliver Brax

Housing Savages
Moral Reform in French Workers’ Housing, 1848-1889

Speaker: Oliver Brax
Supervisors: Professor Murray Fraser and Professor Barbara Penner 
Guest panellist: Dr Jacob Paskins, UCL History of Art 

Abstract

The much-studied expansion of social housing has overshadowed its am­bivalent origins, rooted in the identification of the working-class as a poli­tically and biologically dangerous group. This PhD thesis considers deve­lopments in workers’ housing in France from 1848 to 1889, a period during which the necessity of addressing the issue of poor living conditions was first recognised. It aims both to re-evaluate this seminal yet neglected pe­riod, by analysing the built environment as a space of political conflict, and to explain how notions of surveillance and moral reform found a material expression in the first examples of collective workers’ housing. Through spatial, social and ideological analyses, this thesis offers insights into how innovative architectural programmes embodied a belief in the rehabilita­tive effects of nature and private property. By giving a material form to a moralistic and Orientalist discourse, these buildings conflated different groups considered as ‘savages’ by elite opinion.

About The Bartlett Research Conversations

The Bartlett School of Architecture’s Research Conversations seminars comprise work-in-progress and upgrade presentations by students undertaking the Architectural Design MPhil/PhD and Architectural and Urban History and Theory MPhil/PhD. All current UCL staff and students are welcome to attend.

Held regularly throughout the academic year, the seminars are attended by the Programme Directors, Professor Sophia Psarra and Dr Nina Vollenbröker; PhD Coordinators, Dr Stamatis Zografos and Dr Stelios Giamarelos; and other PhD supervisors.

Image: 

Cité Napoléon, Paris, aerial perspective [Veugny, Marie-Gabriel. 1849]

Credits: Marie-Gabriel Veugny, 1849, A.S.M.J.R.A. l’Empereur d’Autriche. Cité ouvrière d’un arrondissement de Paris. Plans, coupes, élévations et détails, ‘Vue d’ensemble de la cité d’un des Arrondissements de Paris’, graphite and watercolour on paper, Paris, Bibliothèque des Arts Décoratifs, [Photograph by the author. 2023]