Architecture in the Family Way: Doctors, Houses, and Women, 1870-1900

James A. Love is an associate professor of environmental design at the
University of

Calgary.

This thorough examination of attitudes toward health and housing in
England during the latter part of the 19th century underlines the
centrality of middle-class women in these issues. People were becoming
aware of the germ theory of disease and were grappling with its
ramifications for domestic construction.

Consisting of five essays (“The International Health Exhibition of
1884,” “Doctors as Architects,” “Female Regulation of the
Healthy Home,” “Childbirth at Home,” and “Domestic Architecture
and Victorian Feminism”), this book is essentially the author’s
doctoral dissertation. Surprisingly absent from the 50 pages of
footnotes and references is Reyner Banham’s pioneering historical
study of environmental control, The Architecture of the Well-Tempered
Environment. The author also fails to explain her virtually exclusive
focus on England.

Caveats aside, Architecture in the Family Way, is a solid work of
social history that will appeal to architects and laypersons alike.