Housing Atlas – ADC

It is hard to imagine a more opportune time in which to publish a compendium on housing, given our current escalating homelessness and our chronic maldistribution of wealth, both of which give an implicitly political significance to this encyclopaedic study. For by now it is self-evident that we will never arrive at an ecologically valid pattern of land settlement as long as we persist with our laissez-faire, inherently wasteful automotive suburbanisation. At a moment of considerable pedagogical confusion in our architectural schools, not to mention the profession itself, this mammoth didactic volume arrives to remind us of the way in which the habitat as a whole remains the ultimate responsibility of environmental designers. This magnum opus is not so much a book to be read as it is a document to be worked through in our schools in order to deconstruct, as it were, the full ramifications of its content; i.e. the way in which each successive housing scheme, arranged in chronological order for the entirety of the century, evokes comparison to other assemblies of a similar genre and even to other equally canonical examples that are not accounted for in its pages.

This study is such a tour de force as to render a review of limited length virtually impossible. The culmination of a long-term academic, intercultural collaboration between Orsina Simona Pierini of the Politecnico di Milano, Carmen Espegel of its parallel institution in Madrid, Dick van Gameren of TU Delft and Mark Swenarton of the renowned University of Liverpool School of Architecture, this magnum opus is not only the consequence of years of painstaking research and debate but also of the equally overwhelming task of redrawing all the archive material to the same hard-line graphic standard, consistently representing the works at the scale of 1:10,000 for the situation plans, 1:1,000 for the general layout, and 1:500 or 1:250 for the dwelling units. The net result is the precise documentation of 87 housing schemes, chronologically arranged for the span of the century, beginning with Parker and Unwin’s Hampstead Garden Suburb of 1905 and ending with Herzog and de Meuron’s infill housing realised in the Rue des Suisses, Paris in the year 2000.

Henceforth, housing interventions will tend to become singular free-standing objects, suspended within the space-endlessness of the seemingly limitless metropolitan domains, thereby spontaneously dissolving the traditional boundaries between town and country; a process that had been anticipated by Ebenezer Howard, in his famous garden city thesis of 1898. This already accounts for the topographically inflected Zeilenbau form of Ernst May’s Romerstadt estate built on the outskirts of Frankfurt in 1927, where the parallel row house terraces assume a gently curved form in plan in order to accommodate the course of a nearby river. In retrospect one is astonished by the extraordinary variety that housing will assume over the course of the century, ranging from free-standing communal slab blocks, such as Moisei Ginzburg and Ignatii Milinis’s Narkomfin Building of 1929, the one extant Soviet Constructivist Dom- Kommuna which will be the ultimate inspiration behind Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation, Marseille (1946-52). Equally impressive as an all-encompassing free- standing single block was the monumental microcosm of Karl Ehn’s one-kilometre-long Karl-Marx-Hof (1926-1930), the ‘flagship’ block, so to speak, of Red Vienna’s working- class perimeter blocks. Serving the same class, but totally diminutive by comparison, was the Justus Van Effen blok (formerly known in the ‘60s as Spangen), the claim to fame of which, then as now, was its pioneering use of an elevated street, circumnavigating the interior of the four storey block at mid-point. It is this feature that will ensure its influence on the British Brutalists, culminating in the gargantuan Park Hill estate in Sheffield completed to the designs of Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith in 1961.