Feminist Apartment Hotel

The members of the feminist alliance were convinced that by confining women to the home, society was prohibiting evolution and economic progress. They thought women could do it all, motherhood, marriage and careers were not mutually exclusive. It all relied on the spatial organization of the home and the community. They were determined to rearrange home life so women could do it all, by inventing a new type of housing. The group hired Max G. Heidelberg as an architect to design a collective housing complex, with 400 rooms, kitchenless apartments, communal housekeeping facilities, and a nursery. The complex was to be owned by the residents and offer daycare to employed mothers. The housekeeping duties would be performed by an employed female staff to free the mothers of the expected housework, still, the act of care for the place would be performed by women, and of a lower social class. The complex did not take that exploitative notion into consideration. Heidelberg aimed to ease the burden of that by getting rid of molding, and wallpaper, rounding the edges of the home, and choosing built-in bathtubs and dull-finished hardware. Ultimately, the hotel was never built because of the lack of interest or constituency.

The goal of the complex was somewhat interesting, to free the mother so she could be an active member of society, however, the creators wanted to capitalize on the private home which lacked awareness of the intricacies of gender and socioeconomic class. Domestic work must be reorganized equitably in terms of gender and class before the domestic workplace can be redesigned.