Grete Meyer-Ehlers (1904-2003) – The Life and Work of a Pioneer of Empirical Research on Housing Practices

• Applicant: Dr.-Ing. Julia von Mende
• Subject Area: Architecture, Building and Construction History, Construction Research, Sustainable Building Technology
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 533842656

How to research housing is discussed against the background of differentiated housing practices. The work of Grete Meyer-Ehlers (1904-2003), Bauhaus student, professor of home economics and art education at the Pädagogische Hochschule Berlin and housing researcher, is of particular importance in connection with questions about the methods of interdisciplinary housing studies. In her publicly commissioned housing research from 1957 to 1972, she used interviews, photographs and drawings to methodically interweave the investigation of the physical material, such as the design of floor plans and furnishings, with the actions of the inhabitants and their appropriation. Using these research methods in the sense of today's practice theory perspectives she arrived at precise statements about housing needs and planning options. She developed her research methods largely autodidactically. Contrary to the model of the post-war years, her research critically evaluated forms of housing for small families within the framework of so-called housing satisfaction studies and, at the end of the 1960s, took a look at newly emerging forms of collective housing. This pioneering work in empirical research on housing practices has received little attention to date. Furthermore, her career in relation to gender roles and interdisciplinary research perspectives gives reason to look at the personality of the researcher. A reappraisal of her life and work is intended to shed light on this blind spot in the historiography of architecture. To this end, her life is critically reviewed, her studies are documented and analysed, the methods used are historically classified, and references to current qualitative methodological approaches of practice-theory oriented research are examined. Primary and secondary literature as well as documents from archives and from the partial estate of Grete Meyer-Ehlers serve as the source corpus. In addition, interviews with contemporary witnesses will be used to gather informal knowledge about the professional and personal stages of her life, her relationships, and the reception of her work. The project contributes from an architectural-historical and -theoretical perspective to the history of empirical housing research within interdisciplinary housing studies, which has not yet been comprehensively researched. It also opens up links to the history of empirical social research, to spatially oriented gender studies (geography) and to the history of the science and culture of housing.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants