Building the Welfare State

In the post-World War II Netherlands, women architects faced enduring challenges to practice, exacerbated by the marriage bar that confined married women to traditional housewife roles. Within this context, women’s organizations such as the Women’s Advisory Committee (VAC) in Rotterdam emerged as a vehicle through which women could make contributions as voluntary advisers to the construction of new neighborhoods. This article explores the VAC Rotterdam’s advisory work through extant documentation related to different social housing projects in Zuidwijk IV, now known as Lo’s neighborhood. Zuidwijk IV, which includes buildings by architects Jaap Schipper, Grijpma and de Roos, and Ernest Groosman, is one of eight sections of the garden city of Zuidwijk, itself only one of the ambitious postwar public housing schemes built on the southern edge of Rotterdam. The article concludes that, despite the VAC Rotterdam’s valuable input in shaping social housing design, their persistent advisory efforts were only intermittently respected

Human welfare · Welfare · European history and politics · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Historical Education Studies Worldwide · Architecture

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