foreword
The minimum dwelling has become the central problem of modern architecture and the battle cry of today’s architectural avant-garde. As a slogan, it is announced and pro-moted by modern architects, because it sheds light on a situation that has reached a point re-quiring the radical reform and modernization of housing; as a battle cry, it calls for answers to the question of the current crisis of housing.
The greatest demand is for small-size and low-cost apartments, as confirmed by the statistics of both central and western European cities. These statistics show that the number of small apartments has grown during the last decade at an accelerated rate. Just as in the last century during the years of the growing expansion of large industry, so today the emerging class of industrial workers, along with the underqualified, unemployed, or underemployed workers of the so-called fifth estate of the imperialist era — that is, the masses of millions of those who are the tools of the current economic order — lack sufficient means and are forced to live on the lowest level of the so-called subsistence minimum, while our cities fail to offer them an opportunity for decent human living.1The question of the minimum dwelling has confronted
1) In Germany, as a result of massive unemployment and underemployment, which has to be taken into consideration as a phenomenon of today’s economic order and as a permanent feature of this order, some architects try to solve the housing problem of the unemployed, part-time workers, and those who work for wages that are insufficient to cover daily expenses by resettling these people to the country, by a kind of garden colonization of the countryside. This Umnsiedlung [resettle-ment] is considered in Germany of great import, and the word is used as a slogan of lifesaving power. While the times of the industrial boom caused an influx from the village to the city, we ex-perience a countermovement in times of production slowdowns, that is, the flight of inhabitants from the city back to the country, with a concurrent decrease of the population of cities. Workers, having lost their jobs as a result of industrial rationalization, are returning to the country, only to find an agricultural crisis there as well: evidently, they are now expected not to return to agricul-tural pursuits but to take up gardening instead, which is supposed to provide those who earn sub-subsistence wages a supplementary income. Leberecht Migge, a German landscape architect, has become the apostle of this resurrected gardening ideology by promulgating the growing together of man with the soil and his cottage. These worker’s colonies, just like the former industrial settle-ments surrounding cities, do not solve the housing crisis but actually cause it. Even if the land
contemporary architecture with the urgent task of facing today’s social reality and its con-comitant acute housing crisis. In fact, the housing crisis and poverty had been with us for decades even before 1918; but after the war, the situation has become catastrophic, a hope-less picture of misery causing cruel and unprecedented hardships, and has spread even to those strata of society that had previously remained unaffected. Statistics on poor health and housing conditions in European cities have become more or less commonplace. In the cities and villages of all countries of western and central Europe, the extent of the housing crisis can be summarized as follows.
Everywhere the number of people seeking housing is greater than the number of self-contained apartments available, which means that the housing shortage not only persists but is actually increasing; in all cities, about a quarter to a third of all apartments are deemed to be unsanitary, inadequate, or overcrowded, with approxi-mately two-thirds of the population living in these overcrowded apartments; approxiapproxi-mately 20 percent of the population of all large cities lives in barracklike hovels or trailer colonies at the periphery or, being homeless, spend the night wherever they can. Statistics on wages and salaries show that approximately three-quarters of the inhabitants live at the level of the so-called subsistence minimum, or even below that level, and that rents often consume more than half of the income of these people.
The activities of the International Congresses of Modern Architecture (Congrès interna-tionaux d’architecture moderne [CIAM]) and the executive committees of the delegates of CIRPAC (Comité International pour la Réalisation des Problèmes d’Architecture Contempo-raire) have focused the attention of international modern architecture on the most immediate problem, the problem of the minimum dwelling, that is, the “dwelling for the subsistence minimum” (together with the problems of the contemporary city). The International Con-gresses of Modern Architecture inaugurated their activities in 1928 in La Sarraz in Switzer-land, where the principles of their work were established and where their first manifesto was published. The second congress, held in Frankfurt in 1929, discussed the problem of the min-imum dwelling (Habitation minmin-imum, Wohnung für das Existenzminmin-imum). The results of these congresses were published in the memorial volume Die Wohnung für das Existenzmin-imum, which contains 100 reproductions of small apartment floor plans for family, rental, and hotel-type housing. It is an excellent handbook and catalogue of various available housing types of diverse quality.
Clearly, the subject of the “minimum dwelling” cannot be exhausted by a single congress. For this reason housing was retained as one of the principal themes of the following congresses.
The Third Congress, which took place in Brussels in 1930, occupied itself with this theme as well, but expanded its interest to the question of rational site planning of residential districts for popular housing. Concurrent with the congress in Brussels, the Belgian group organized a series of lectures and exhibitions, a kind of “Minimum Housing Week” (Journées de l’habita-tion minimum). The Czechoslovakian group, which was formed about half a year before the Brussels congress, participated for the first time and played an active role in the lecture series of the Journées de l’habitation. Members contributed site development plans for two projects
parcels and materials for these garden settlements were purchased with the proceeds of unem-ployment funds, and even if the people built these cottages themselves, it would still be necessary to amortize these investments and burden the cottagers with heavy financial obligations, besides isolating them from the cultural life of the city and forcing them to live in conditions that do not meet the standard for acceptable human living. In reality, these garden settlements end up as colonies of barracklike shacks and house trailers and are thus being turned into a permanent slum for the poorest of the poor.
for collective housing (Havlícˇek and Honzík, Gillar and Sˇ palek) to the exhibition, and also pre-sented a detailed report on housing conditions in the CˇSR, which was published in the con-gress proceedings. The Czech group also stated its position during the discussions on the question of high-, medium-, and low-rise housing. The author of this volume made a presen-tation on the subject of the new architecture and the housing question in Czechoslovakia dur-ing the same lecture series. The results of the Brussels Congress were published in the second volume of the proceedings of CIRPAC, with the title Rationelle Bebaungsweisen [Rational De-velopment Methods]; it contained a few dozen reproductions of deDe-velopment plans of resi-dential districts with small apartments (together with floor plans of these apartments for low-, medium-, and high-rise houses, as well as mixed height developments).
For its future work, CIRPAC agreed to continue with the themes of the minimum dwelling and rational site-planning methods, while at the same time expanding them to the urban scale, since such a change of scale indicates — by definition — the need for rational regulatory plans and discussions about whether to build high-, medium-, or low-rise buildings. During the CIR-PAC conferences in Berlin (1931) and Barcelona (1932), it was decided to designate as the main theme of the next, fourth congress — which was to take place in Moscow—the question of the city: functional city, constructivist city. For the Moscow congress, the Czechoslovak group proposed to work out the economic, sociographic, building, and traffic analysis of Prague and, eventually, other cities in Czechoslovakia.
The international collective cooperation of modern architects, stimulated by the congresses and guided for some years by CIRPAC, has contributed very effectively to the elaboration and clarification of the problem of the minimum dwelling and has helped shed new light on the question of popular dwelling in many of its aspects, for the question of popular dwelling is not only a special concern of architecture alone but, if we are to understand it in all its com-plexity, needs to be dealt with by the full interdisciplinary cooperation between architects, sociologists, economists, health officials, physicians, social workers, politicians, and trade unionists. It cannot be considered separately from questions of production, societal condi-tions, the prevailing economic crisis, the material standard of the strata of the “subsistence minimum” (particularly the proletariat and working intellectuals), the level of salaries and wages and their dynamics, and — more generally — the wage system as a whole. The housing question would be viewed one-sidedly, wrongly, and distortedly if one failed to deal with it ac-cording to its relationship to the economic system and the structure of society, on the one hand, and with respect to the given state of the family and the domestic household, the ruling ideology, prevailing morality, customs, and the legal order, on the other hand. To deal with the question of the dwelling for the subsistence minimum — that is, the question of a popular and (most of all) worker’s dwelling — is possible only synthetically, in all its aspects and within the context of all its economic, hygienic, ideological, and sociopolitical ramifications.
It is for these reasons that this book does not consider it as its primary task to offer the reader merely a tally of modern solutions for small apartments along with their analysis, evaluation, and interpretation; or to offer various suggestions on how it might be possible to equip pop-ular apartments efficiently and at an affordable price, or on how to build low-cost housing; or to show by means of graphic examples correct or incorrect solutions. At this point in time, all this would only end in carrying coals to Newcastle, since we are currently witnessing a veri-table flood of such architectural publications, both professional and popular, dedicated to this subject. During the past years we have experienced an ever-increasing demand for publica-tions on housing and new brochures, as well as heavy and expensive coffee-table books on furniture and equipment for apartments, family homes, garden settlements, weekend cot-tages, and so on, which has not let up even during times of sagging construction activity; for
the number of new nuclear households being formed is still increasing, and there are still many intelligent people left who are trying to contract for a dwelling that is functionally effi-cient, of good quality, and built at low cost. These are the people who seek suggestions, in-structions, information, and guidance from such books on modern dwelling. It is also for these reasons that new books and new editions are being constantly published in this branch of lit-erature, chief among them texts popularizing the principles of civilized and healthy living.
Considering the profusion of this literature (for which Germany holds the record), it is prob-ably not an instructional publication that can provide the best service but rather a practical, well-conceived, and judiciously organized catalogue of rigorously selected mass-produced furniture and service equipment, to the extent that these items are available at reasonably low prices in the stores; or a catalogue based on knowledge of current production and distribution conditions; or perhaps a sample catalog of good-quality plans for small apartments, thor-oughly worked out to achieve lower operating and construction outlays.
Our book is not meant to be regarded as such a handbook on modern housing for the less af-fluent, nor as a practical manual for those who intend to furnish their small apartment, or oth-ers who plan to establish their own household. Nor is it meant as a manual for developoth-ers, builders, or architects who are gathering material on model layouts or furnishing solutions for small apartments. Instead, it is meant to second the work of CIRPAC and the International Congresses of Modern Architecture, who have made the question of the minimum dwelling the focus of modern architecture. In parallel with the work of CIRPAC, the book will discuss the following themes:
The objective conditions and actual difficulties that may be encountered in trying to solve the problem of and to postulate policies for the design and planning of popular dwellings (e.g., production conditions; social structure of the population of cities and villages;
population dynamics; demographic profiles of the housing shortage; hygienic conditions of popular settlements; functional aspects of housing, work, transportation, and supply in resi-dential agglomerations; the relationship of wages to rent, speculation, social, and political legislation, etc.).
The social content of contemporary housing (e.g., the patriarchal family, its household, and its disintegration).
The principles guiding functional architectural solutions, which adhere to the prin-ciple of a dwelling minimum. In contrast to the usual small apartment floor plan types (e.g., apartments with a live-in kitchen, apartments with a small kitchen, apartments with a living room and a nook for cooking), which happen merely to be conventional adaptations of geois floor plans, and which represent merely a quantitative change of the traditional bour-geois or farmer’s dwelling, shoehorned into a small area and designed without first having established functionally valid norms for the dimensions of a dwelling area for an average household, this calls for a new postulate: for each adult man or woman, a minimal but adequate independent, habitable room. Just as particular types of a small apartments, such as those with a live-in kitchen, a small kitchen, or a living room with a cooking nook, are not simply commensurate variants and alternatives — each corresponds to a different lifestyle and a different social content, and each represents a manifestation of a different cultural level and a different socially determined world — so too, at a given stage, an apartment without a kitchen suggests a dwelling where each adult individual is provided with a separate dwelling cubicle, which may be considered the most developed and most progressive form of modern dwelling: one that transcends the framework of the traditional household type, one that is in effect the specific dwelling form intended for the working intelligentsia and the proletariat, and one that represents in embryonic form a new conception in the culture of dwelling.
The same applies to the discussions about low-, medium-, or high-rise buildings, as we dis-cover that these are not really separate housing categories: the freestanding family house, the duplex, the row house, and the medium-size rental apartment house with stairwells or bal-conies, not to mention the large apartment house, are actually only different variants of ac-cepted models of contemporary architecture, each determined by its own particular economic attributes. Thus, it is not a matter of just mechanically citing dimensions and numbers of sto-ries: instead, what is important is which of these housing types either does or does not allow for, or promote, the concept of collective dwelling, by allowing the individual dwelling cell to be complemented by a scheme of central collective facilities and by incorporating all the re-quired economic and cultural institutions in a single coordinated housing complex.
Site plans must be judged on the basis of similar criteria. Whether we are considering a closed or open block, or row housing, all must be combined in an organic fashion with the plan of a linear city, as recommended by Miliutin in his proposals for socialist settlements.
Finally, we shall critically examine a new type of housing: the collective dwelling. We in-tend to elucidate various and hitherto controversial solutions of this new type, and to sketch out the course of its future development under new social conditions: this is meant expressly as an answer to the various “ideal proposals, to be realized in the future” that are referred to in the questionnaires of CIRPAC.
At a time when the world is divided, when there exist side by side two types of economies, two civilizations, two societies, two cultures, and therefore also two architectures and two dwelling cultures — one decaying, even though it may have a modernistic surface appearance;
the other progressive, advancing, and victorious — the author will not be satisfied by compar-ing in a neutral manner the various achievements of contemporary architecture but will pass his own judgment on the various individual systems of housing, site planning, and urbanism.
We shall make a distinction between atavistic and decadent figurations, hidden behind the fa-cade of modernistic outward appearances, and shall examine all those figurations from which it may be possible to extract certain useful and cohesive principles for the establishment of fu-ture patterns, so that nothing would go to waste that is of value in modern culfu-ture, that is healthy and perfect — in short, the best of the best. In addition, the book attempts to sketch out a prognosis of emerging as well as future stages of development, arising from actual reality and emerging in embryonic form from the most progressive manifestations of the present.
This will also include presenting the reader with examples of emerging new forms of housing and the city, new lifestyles, and the anticipation of new social relationships. However, it is not the intent of this book to make idle prophecies; instead, it is more important to read the story of tomorrow between the lines of today’s realities.
The real intent is to observe and notice not only how problems are posed but also how they can be solved, not just seeing them as an accumulating mass of common obstacles but pri-marily focusing on how they may be overcome. To show not only how the housing crisis has worsened but, most important, where to look for a way out. This is a matter not simply of di-agnosis but of prognosis based on such a didi-agnosis. If you will, it is not merely a matter of es-tablishing a creative working hypothesis for architecture, or of presenting the labors of a venturesome will, but it is above all a search for a methodical solution, based on the dialecti-cal-materialist understanding of the developmental process and the course of its future de-velopment: it is a matter of guideposts, staked out ahead.
Furthermore, it is not our intention to present the reader with this or that “ideal proposition”
Furthermore, it is not our intention to present the reader with this or that “ideal proposition”