Architecture and The Welfare State (Myebookshelf)

ARCHITECTURE AND THE
WELFARE STATE
In the decades following the Second World War, and partly in response to the Cold
War, governments across western Europe set out ambitious programmes for social
welfare and the redistribution of wealth that aimed to improve the everyday lives of
their citizens. Many of these welfare state programmes housing, schools, new towns,
cultural and leisure centres involved not just construction but a new approach to
architectural design, in which the welfare objectives of these state-funded programmes
were delineated and debated. The impact on architects and architectural design was
profound and far-reaching, with welfare state projects moving centre-stage in architectural discourse, not just in Europe but worldwide.
This is the rst book to explore the architecture of the welfare state in western
Europe from an international perspective. With chapters covering Austria, Belgium,
France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK, the book explores the
complex role played by architecture in the formation and development of the welfare
state in both theory and practice.
Themes include:
the role of the built environment in the welfare state as a political project
the colonial dimension of European welfare state architecture and its export to
Africa and Asia
the role of welfare state projects in promoting consumer culture and economic
growth
the picture of the collective produced by welfare state architecture
the role of architectural innovation in the welfare state
the role of the architect, as opposed to construction companies and others, in
determining what was built
the relationship between architectural and social theory
the role of internal institutional critique and the counterculture
Mark Swenarton is James Stirling Professor of Architecture at the University of

Liverpool, UK, and author of Homes t for Heroes (1981) and Building the New Jerusalem
(2008).
Tom Avermaete is Professor of Architecture at TU Delft and author of Another
Modern: The Post-War Architecture and Urbanism of Candilis-Josic-Woods (2005).
Dirk van den Heuvel is Head of the Jaap Bakema Study Centre at Het Nieuwe
Instituut, Rotterdam, Associate Professor at TU Delft and co-author of Team 10: In
Search of a Utopia of the Present (2005).
ARCHITECTURE AND
THE WELFARE STATE
Edited by Mark Swenarton, Tom Avermaete and

Dirk van den Heuvel
First edition published 2015

by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
2015 Mark Swenarton, Tom Avermaete and Dirk van den Heuvel
The right of Mark Swenarton, Tom Avermaete and Dirk van den Heuvel to be identied as authors of
the editorial material, and of the individual authors as authors of their contributions, has been asserted in
accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. The purchase of this copyright material confers the right on the purchasing
institution to photocopy pages which bear the photocopy icon and copyright line at the bottom of the
page. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,
or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used
only for identication and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Architecture and the welfare state / edited by Mark Swenarton, Tom Avermaete and Dirk van den
Heuvel. -- First edition.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Architecture and state--Europe, Western--History-20th century. 2. Architecture and society-Europe, Western--History-20th century. 3. Welfare state--Europe, Western--History-20th century.
I. Swenarton, Mark, editor of compilation. II. Avermaete, Tom, editor of compilation. III. Heuvel,
Dirk van den, 1968- editor of compilation. IV. Blau, Eve, author. From red superblock to green
megastructure.
NA100.A72 2014
720.103094--dc23
2014000473
ISBN: 978-0-415-72539-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-415-72540-8 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-76692-8 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN
CONTENTS
Introduction
Mark Swenarton, Tom Avermaete and Dirk van den Heuvel
PART I
Cultures and continuities

2
25
From Red Superblock to Green Megastructure:

Municipal Socialism as Model and Challenge
Eve Blau
27
The Welfare State in Flanders: De-Pillarization and the

Nebulous City
Hilde Heynen and Janina Gosseye
51
The Beginnings of High-Rise Social Housing in the Long 1940s:

The Case of the LCC and the Woodberry Down Estate
Simon Pepper
69
West Ham and the Welfare State 19451970: a Suitable

Case for Treatment?
Nicholas Bullock
93
PART II
Critiques and contradictions
111
113
Who Needs Needs? French Post-War Architecture and its Critics

ukasz Stanek
vi
Contents
The Open Society and Its Experiments: The Case of the

Netherlands and Piet Blom
Dirk van den Heuvel
133
Where the Motorways Meet: Architecture and Corporatism in

Sweden 1968
Helena Mattsson
155
The Mrkisches Viertel in West Berlin

Florian Urban
10 Alternatives to Welfare State: Self-Build and Do-It-Yourself

Caroline Maniaque-Benton
177
199
PART III
National and international
217
11 From Knoxville to Bidonville: ATBAT and the Architecture of

the French Welfare State
Tom Avermaete
219
12 High Density without High Rise: Housing Experiments of the

1950s by Patrick Hodgkinson
Mark Swenarton
237
13 Matteotti Village and Gallaratese 2: Design Criticism of the

Italian Welfare State
Luca Molinari
259
14 Exporting New Towns: The Welfare City in Africa

Michelle Provoost
15 From European Welfare State to Asian Capitalism:
The Transformation of British Public Housing in
Hong Kong and Singapore
Miles Glendinning
277
299
Appendix: Outcomes from the Liverpool Workshop 2012
321
Further Reading
324
Contributors
List of gures
Index
334
336
343
1
INTRODUCTION
Mark Swenarton, Tom Avermaete and
Dirk van den Heuvel
In recent years the architecture of the second half of the twentieth century has become
a prime area of interest for architectural historians. Most of their studies adopt the
classic format of the monograph, devoted to individual architects (for example, Ernst
May, James Stirling), to groups (Archigram, Team 10) or to offices (Candilis-JosicWoods, Atelier Montrouge, Van den Broek and Bakema),1 while others have tried
to theorize the eld as part of a revisionary, historiographical critique of the period.2
The list of publications is extensive and proof of a most fruitful practice in mining the
(recent) history of modern architecture. At the same time, within political sociology
there has emerged an enormous literature on the welfare state, with Gspa EspingAndersens The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (1990) triggering a plethora of
studies examining the post-war welfare state as an international phenomenon from an
economic, social and political viewpoint.3
Strangely, however, these twin developments have taken place virtually in complete
ignorance of each other. Little attention has been given to the varied ways in which
architecture and urban planning interacted with the different regimes of welfare
provision.4 The forementioned architectural histories have tended to analyze post-war
buildings and neighbourhoods as expressions of individual oeuvres or cultural currents,
rather then as exponents of complex welfare state arrangements. Only in Belgium and
Sweden has there been an emerging interest in the architectural production of the
welfare state per se, but largely from a national perspective.5 Conversely, to the extent
that the sociological studies have investigated welfare state intervention in the built
environment, they have done so as an abstract matter of decrees, programmes and
strategies, without reference to the physical realization of the welfare state in architecture and the built environment.
If the built environment was of little signicance to the welfare state, this situation
might be understandable. But the planning of the built environment from new
towns (Figure 1.1), to social housing, to schools and universities, hospitals and health
centres, to leisure and sports complexes, to arts centres was one of the key areas in
which the welfare state sought to achieve its ambitions of economic redistribution and
social welfare. This already vast area of intervention in the everyday environment of
the population becomes even greater when we consider that the post-war welfare state
also incorporated the reconstruction of national industries and energy production,
involving the construction of vast new infrastructures. Given the enormous role
that the built environment played in the welfare state, and the role that welfare state
ideology and commissions played in the architectural developments of the period, this
mutual indifference of the two disciplines appears extraordinary.
This book is a rst attempt to connect these two elds with each other from an
international perspective and to look at post-war architecture in western Europe in
terms of its role within the welfare state. The aim is to investigate the complex kinship
between the welfare state and the built environment, looking at the role of plans,
neighbourhoods and buildings within welfare programmes, as well as probing the
contribution made by planners, urban designers and architects to the implementation,
articulation and development of the welfare state in post-war western Europe. What
is offered is not a comprehensive account or synoptic overview, but rather an attempt
to explore the eld through a series of case studies some thematic, some based on
particular architects or projects written from different points of view by leading
architectural historians from Europe and the USA. Likewise, rather than attempting
an overview of this vast subject, this introduction aims to elucidate some of the key
themes and issues involved: conceptual, methodological and historical.
The book is the outcome of a transnational project extending over a number of
years. The rst steps were taken by Tom Avermaete and Dirk van den Heuvel of TU
Delft when they organized a session on Architecture and the Welfare State at the
European Architectural History Network (EAHN) 2010 conference in Guimaraes,
Portugal.6 Mark Swenarton was one of the speakers at that session and together the
three collaborated on a follow-up at the EAHN conference in Brussels in 2012.7
Meanwhile, Swenartons move to the University of Liverpool provided the opportunity for a rather different kind of event, again organized by the three editors an
invited international closed-doors symposium, called the Liverpool Workshop
which took place in September 2012. It is the papers presented there, substantially
revised in the light of the debates that took place at the symposium, which are
published here for the rst time.8
At the Liverpool Workshop intensive discussions took place on a wide range of
issues and these were summarized on behalf of the organizers by Adrian Forty as a
list of questions and issues for future research; for the benet of other scholars these
are reproduced in the Appendix.9 A specic obstacle identied at the symposium was
the lack of an international multilingual bibliography on the subject and so, as a step
towards this, a list of items for further reading is also provided.
Why now?
Our project investigating the relationship of architecture and the welfare state has
coincided with the period of crisis that seized the economies of the United States and
Europe in 2008. While the rationale for the project stems in part from the crisis, the
one is not reducible to the other. While the crisis of the neoliberal economic model
that had become dominant in the 1990s with the completion of the internal market of
Figure 1.1 Cumbernauld Development Corporation (Hugh Wilson-Dudley Leaker/Geoffrey Copcutt), Cumbernauld New Town, North Lanarkshire, the town centre photographed in 1967 (Architectural Press Archive/RIBA Library Photographs Collection).
Introduction
3
the EU gave a particular urgency to our research, the investigations into the post-war
discourse of modern architecture created a more sharply dened project than that of
the apparently neutral term of the post-war so widely adopted: namely that of architecture and the welfare state.10 It also made re-focusing on western Europe a matter
of course, while being aware of the possible criticism of maintaining a eurocentric
perspective.
But the economic crisis is not the only reason that the relationship of architecture
to the welfare state is relevant today. The built production of the welfare state constitutes a sizable portion of the cities of Europe that we inhabit today; if we are to
make the best use of this inheritance we need to understand both its objectives and
its historical formation. Moreover, the question of what parts of this inheritance to
retain and conserve, and what parts can be demolished and redeveloped, is one that
arises regularly in public debate in most European countries, with newspaper articles
and exhibitions regularly devoted to the question of the conservation (or otherwise)
of post-war buildings.11 The ultimately unsuccessful campaign to save Robin Hood
Gardens in London, the only major housing scheme built by Alison and Peter
Smithson (Figure 1.2), was one of the most high-prole of these. For many years the
Docomomo International conferences have provided an international professional
platform for these debates.12 Decisions about retention or demolition need to be
informed not just by an understanding of the individual building or buildings, which
can be provided by conservation bodies and listing agencies, but by an understanding
of the broader context within which they stood. If we are to assess their historical
importance, we need to understand that history.
To investigate the shifting role, or roles, of the architect in society and in the
process of planning and building constitutes a second motivation for revisiting the
architecture of the welfare state. For a number of years the claim of the architect to be
the leader of the building team has been under attack.13 Architects, it is said, may be
useful at the early stage of a project for gaining planning consents, but after that have
little to offer, with contractors taking over their role in the specication of constructional methods and materials and project managers taking over their role in directing
the project. This contrasts with the picture of the architect widely held in the heyday
of the welfare state. In those times, we are told, the architect was the heroic gure,
building the future, the form-giver who devised new forms of homes, of schools,
of hospitals, and of entire cities: the person at the forefront of innovation, tasked by
government to devise new ways of living for the population and with the authority
to drive through his or her (mostly his) vision. Recently, this historical role of the
architect has been subjected to reappraisal, notably at OMAs installation at the 2012
Venice Biennale, Public Works: Architecture by Civil Servants. But was the architect really
as powerful as it appeared? The claim is double-edged, because if so then the architect
also has to take responsibility for those things that went wrong. Perhaps the architect
was only the gurehead, and in reality, others politicians, managers, planners, the
building industry had more inuence. If so, it may be that the post-war golden
age of the architect is a myth and then, as now, it was the development process that
dictated the outcome. We need to know what the real roles of the various actors were,
what the space that they had for decision-making was, and what coalitions were built
between the parties involved in the planning processes.
Figure 1.2 Alison and Peter Smithson (Greater London Council), Robin Hood Gardens estate, London, 19651972, photographed by Sandra Lousada.
Introduction
5
Since the onset of the nancial crisis in 2008 it has become apparent that in Europe
we have been entering an era in which the large-scale provision of public services by
public bodies will be further reduced. To revisit the welfare state era accordingly is not
to look back in nostalgia but to learn from the consistent negotiations between capital,
labour and the state from which the western European welfare state emerged. The
resulting balance of power was not so much a clear-cut model as a precarious hybrid,
a balancing act, indeed. Whereas in the past in many countries the state undertook
to provide the necessities of life for example, education, health services, housing
more and more it seems today that these are either left to the market, with the state
withdrawing altogether, or are provided by private companies operating on its behalf.
In the Netherlands, since 1995, the national government has ceased providing credit
to housing corporations, turning them into de facto private companies. Likewise, in
the UK the academy schools programme, rst launched in 2000 and much extended
since, has devolved the states responsibility for secondary education to private
companies. The role of architecture and the built environment in the delivery of state
policy is becoming more complex and diffused, since a building provided by a private
company in this way no longer stands as the emblem or image of the state. What will
this mean for our cities and suburbs? It is hard to predict but by looking at the period
when almost all publicly funded buildings carried this meaning (whether implicitly or,
as with Viennas housing of the 1920s, explicitly), we can get a better understanding of
the role of buildings in carrying messages about the state and society in western Europe.
As European economies appear to stagnate and welfare provisions are under
pressure, it is parts of Asia, South America and Africa that lead the world in economic
performance. These countries (for example, China, India, South Korea) are now
enjoying the kind of boom that Europe experienced in the decades following the
Second World War, and face not dissimilar issues of rapid urbanization and modernization. Sociologists have pointed out that features of the European welfare state, not
least construction of new towns and state-funded housing, are now recurring in the
sunshine economies of China and south-east Asia.14 In other parts of the world popular
demand for basic welfare provision, especially education and healthcare, is fuelling
social unrest, for example, in Brazil in the widespread protests against the staging of
the 2014 football World Cup.15 To what extent is what happened in Europe, whether
in the nineteenth or the twentieth century, being repeated elsewhere? To what extent
is a model devised for European countries in that period applicable to other parts of
the world today?
Mapping the welfare state

This book focuses on the welfare state as a largely European invention that has known
its greatest development and proliferation in north-western Europe.16 The politics of
the Cold War and the rise of a new consumer culture (the so-called western way of
life) form part of this development, together with the concomitant phenomena of
decolonization and the emergence of the post-industrial society.
The sources of this western welfare state date back to the nineteenth century
when, as economist Karl Polyani has argued, a Great Transformation took place,
characterized by the development of industrial capitalism, rapid urbanization and
Introduction
economic growth, and intense population increase.17 These radical transformations

not only altered social, cultural, economic and political life. They also destabilized
the traditional forms of welfare provided by family networks, charity organizations,
feudal ties, guilds, municipalities and religious institutions. The result was a massive
pauperization which was strikingly portrayed in the engravings of Gustave Dor, the
photography of Thomas Annan, the political analyses of Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels, and the novels of Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo.
Increased productivity resulting from industrialization, however, provided the
resources necessary to cope collectively with the emerging social question. Towards
the end of the nineteenth century institutional initiatives started to emerge at
local, regional and national levels that engaged with these social needs politically
and demanded redistribution of some of these resources.18 Simultaneously the
counter-movement to Polyanis Great Transformation gave rise to a growing Labour
Movement which itself became an important driver of the move towards welfare
provision by the state.
Wars have often acted as the catalyst for the development of the welfare state
and its architecture.19 With the Second World War, welfare was, for the rst time,
presented as a goal of national and international policy. Two of the eight war aims
in the Atlantic Charter (1941) dealt with social welfare, specically securing, for all,
improved labor standards, economic advancement and social security (aim 5) and that
all men in all the lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want (aim
6).20 After the Second World War the need for reconstruction propelled economic
growth and provided once again resources for welfare state expansion, while rivalry
with the Communist block the Cold War provided the ideological imperative for
a non-revolutionary route to social improvement.
As noted above, in the past two decades a large and impressive sociological
literature has developed on the welfare state. Following Esping-Andersen, much of
the focus has been on the way in which the various western European countries
though all affected to greater or lesser degree by the fundamental transformations
differed in response. Investigations have focused on the remarkable diversity experienced with respect to the timing of welfare state consolidation, the variety of goals
(whether to provide a safety net for all or for specic groups, etc.), the diversity of
nancing mechanisms, various forms of public-private collaboration, and the variety
of administrative models and programme types (for example, enacted collectively or
individually). The magisterial Oxford Handbook of the Welfare State, extending to more
than 900 pages, with ve editors and 70-plus contributors from fteen countries, gives
a good overview of this eld.21
What is meant by the term welfare state in this literature? A useful starting point
is provided by Wil Arts and John Gelissen in a 2002 review article in the Journal of
European Social Policy. They state:
the general term welfare state is a label for a certain class of democratic industrial capitalist societies, characterized by certain properties (i.e. social citizenship
or the fact that more or less extensive welfare provisions are legally provided, or,
in still other words, the fact that the state plays a principal part in the welfare
mix alongside the market, civil society and the family).22
According to Ian Gough (2008), the emergence of welfare states is to be understood

in terms of what he calls the Five Is. First, industrialization, which creates both the
wealth to sustain, and the changes in social organization that create the opening for
the state to deliver items of social welfare. Second, interests, or what Marxists would
term classes: class cleavages, class organizations within civil society, their respective
powers, their economic and social mobilization, and later, their parliamentary representation.23 One might add that the balance of power between the classes is markedly
affected by wars and by the booms and slumps of the economic cycle, which is why
these events have played such a prominent role in the history of the welfare state.
Third, institutions, i.e. the organization of both civil society (the church, trade unions,
voluntary associations, etc.) and the state (central government, municipalities, etc.),
which determines the pattern in which welfare is provided, both outside and within
the remit of the state. These three Is are the primary determinants but the way they
operate is shaped by two further factors: ideas, i.e. the prevailing culture and ideology
of different countries (for example, Catholic social teaching in Germany and Italy);
and internationalism, both the fact that one country looks at and learns from another
and that international communities of experts develop who claim special understanding of, and therefore power over, a given area of policy and decision-making.24
While Esping-Andersen originally identied three variants of welfare capitalism,
the general view now is that within Europe four types can be distinguished.25 First, the
liberal type developed by the Anglophone countries (Britain and Ireland), based on
individualism, with pronounced social citizenship in some areas (notably the National
Health Service) and reliance on the market elsewhere. Second, the continental
type pioneered in Germany and prevalent in western European countries (France,
Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria), where the primary focus is on protecting the
income of the (male) industrial worker via social insurance schemes delivered through
employer/employee partnerships. Third, the social democratic type developed in the
Nordic countries (Sweden, followed by Norway, Denmark and Finland), in which
the state assumes responsibility for the welfare of all (women as much as men), on a
universal basis. Fourth, the southern type followed in Italy after 1945 and in Spain,
Portugal and Greece after the overthrow of the dictatorships in the 1970s, which is
based on the primacy of the male wage earner and offers only a weak safety net for
those outside the official labour market.26
In terms of periodization, it is generally considered that the 30-year period from
1945 to the 1970s what Jean Fourasti called Les Trente Glorieuses or the Glorious
Thirty was the golden age of the welfare state.27 The term welfare state was taken
from Britain, where the vision of social support extending from the cradle to the
grave was set out in the 1942 Beveridge Report, establishing a new European model
of welfare provision.28 In the immediate post-war years, governments across Europe
introduced extensive welfare systems as part of the settlement negotiated between
labour and capital at the end of the Second World War, while Keynesian economic
policies oiled the growth that made seemingly ever-higher consumer and welfare
spending possible. This came to an abrupt end with the economic crisis of the 1970s
and the neoliberal counter-revolution that followed.
In geographical terms, while the primary locus was western Europe, the process of
industrialization out of which the welfare state emerged had always involved a much
Figure 1.3 Candilis Josic Woods (Commissariat lnergie atomique (CEA) and Ministre de la construction), La Citadelle housing, Bagnols-sur-Cze, 1958 (Bibliothque
Kandinsky, Centre national dart et de culture Georges Pompidou).
Introduction
9
10
wider geographical reach. Industrialization in Britain, the pioneer industrial nation,

was accompanied by the involuntary de-industrialization of other countries (for
example, India, Ireland, Egypt), which were converted from manufacturers of goods
to a new role as suppliers of raw materials for, and consumers of the goods manufactured by, British industry.29 To this extent, the process that spawned the European
welfare state had global, and globally destructive, implications from the start. Colonial
or quasi-colonial economic relationships with other parts of the world were integral
to the process of wealth accumulation in western Europe and provided the resources
for the welfare state.
This colonial dimension fed directly into architecture and building programmes.
The experience gained in the colonies was re-deployed in the home countries, where
the devisers and designers of welfare facilities housing, or schools, or hospitals could
draw on what had been done overseas in colonies and protectorates, and architects
specializing in these typologies could operate equally at home and abroad. The homes
t for heroes programme in Britain of 19191921 the rst national programme of
state housing construction undertaken anywhere in the world derived parts of its
nancial and administrative structure from the (far smaller) housing programme that
Britain had been carrying out in the preceding years in Ireland.30 Architects from
Weimar Germany, eeing the Nazi regime in the 1930s, found an outlet for their talents
in the colonies (for example, Ernst May in Kenya, Otto Koenigsberger in India) while
prominent gures in the 1950s like Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew in Britain or the team
of Georges Candilis, Alexis Josic and Shadrach Woods in France could operate equally
on the colonial and domestic stage (Figure 1.3). In the same period international
development programmes such as those organized by the World Bank and the United
Nations provided an infrastructural basis for architects like Constantinos Doxiadis to
develop international practices exporting welfare state expertise on a global scale.
Pre-history of the welfare state

While the thirty years after 1945 is considered the classic period of the welfare state
in Europe, this does not mean that story begins in 1945. On the contrary, its origins
lie in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and what we might term the
proto-welfare state of the inter-war years.
The rst steps towards general provision of welfare by the state are considered to
be the insurance schemes protecting industrial workers against sickness, industrial
accidents and old age introduced by Bismarck in Germany in the 1880s. Over the
following decade neighbouring countries followed Germanys lead in whole or part:
Austria in the 1880s, then Belgium, Denmark, the UK, Italy, France, Norway, Spain,
the Netherlands and Switzerland in the 1890s.31 The connection between statesubsidised welfare and construction was established in 1869, when Liverpool became
the rst city in Europe to provide social housing, and over the years that followed
other municipalities followed suit, notably the London County Council following its
creation in 1889.32 In the Netherlands the advent of the welfare state is commonly
identied with the so-called Woningwet (Housing Act), enacted in 1901 and implemented the following year, which was one of the rst examples of the integration of
spatial planning, house construction and welfare provision. The act compelled local
Introduction
councils to start developing comprehensive zoning plans, while the state made credit
available for low-cost housing construction. The regulation of slum clearance was also
included, along with the introduction of building permits for all construction work,
whether public or private.33
While by 1914 social insurance measures were in place in most advanced European
countries, the First World War brought the problem of housing to the forefront. The
problem was that while the war brought house construction to a virtual standstill,
demand, generated by household formation and demographic movements consequent
on the war (and peace), soared. In Berlin, for example, there had been nearly 28,000
vacant dwellings in 1914 but by the end of the war these had all been taken up and
after 1918 the authorities stopped recording vacant dwellings and instead started
recording households seeking accommodation, which by 1922 had reached 195,000.34
Moreover, with the general expectation that at some future point conditions would
return to normal and construction costs would come down, there was no realistic
prospect in the meantime that the market would provide, and hence unless the state
intervened in some way, nothing would be built and the housing crisis would simply
intensify. This was the conclusion reached in most European countries in the 1920s,
with the result that many governments became involved in the large-scale provision of
social housing. The proportion of housing production represented by social housing
varied widely in different countries but in many cases was substantial: 82 per cent in
Austria (19141928), 42 per cent in Germany (19271929), 36 per cent in Britain
(19191929) and 29 per cent in the Netherlands (19211929).35 In major cities the
gures could be as high or higher: for example, reportedly 76 per cent in the ve
largest towns in Norway (19141928) and 61 per cent in Copenhagen (19101929).36
These housing programmes of the 1920s had major implications for architects. The
Tudor Walters Report of 1918, the bible of the new municipal housing in Britain
(largely written by Raymond Unwin), recommended that every housing scheme
should be designed by an architect.37 In mainland Europe, modernist architects
inspired by the dream of building a new society set about building new Siedlungen
(housing settlements) in Berlin, Frankfurt, Karlsruhe, etc. (Figure 1.4). Some of them
came together in 1928 at La Sarraz in Switzerland for the inaugural meeting of the
Congrs Internationaux dArchitecture Moderne (CIAM) and the following year gathered at
the CIAM 2 conference on existenzminimum (minimum-income) housing held in the
office of Frankfurt city planner Ernst May. But even while the architects were meeting
in Frankfurt an event took place across the Atlantic that would bring the housing
programmes to a standstill. The Wall Street crash of October 1929 brought chaos to
the European economies, prompting the rise of rightwing parties (nowhere more so
than in the central European economies dependent on U.S. nance) and major cuts
in welfare spending, including housing. As Karel Teige told the delegates at the next
CIAM conference, held in Brussels in 1930, the restoration of private house-building
and the free market are the dominant tendencies in nearly every country, and by 1933
the housing programmes in Germany, Austria, Britain and France had been axed.38
But the economic catastrophe that brought about the demise of these welfare
programmes also had counter-effects. In 1933 in the USA, Franklin D. Roosevelt
launched the New Deal to counter the effects of the Great Depression.39 In Europe,
just as the proto-welfare states bequeathed by the post-1918 settlement were being
11

12
Figure 1.4 City of Frankfurt am Main (Ernst May/Carl Rudloff ), Bruchfeldstrasse estate (Zickzackhausen), Frankfurt, 1927 (Bryan & Norman Westwood/RIBA Library
Photographs Collection).
Introduction
dismantled, a new type of welfare state was emerging, containing many of the features
of the future (post-1945) welfare state. In 1932 the social democrats came to power
in Sweden and, determined to avoid the dictates of free-market political economy
in responding to the slump, demanded that the state become an active player in the
economy and in the creation of social welfare. Anticipating the ideas that Keynes
would make famous in General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in 1936, they
set about creating a new kind of society, Folkhemmet (The Peoples Home), in which
the citizen would be protected by the state and consumption would be the motor of
the economy, thereby foreshadowing the ideas that were to be pursued much more
widely after 1945.40
The built environment and the welfare state

During the Trente Glorieuses of 19451975, the built environment was a preferred
locus of economic redistribution for the majority of welfare states.
Along with social insurance, pensions, healthcare and education, housing was
considered as one of the main pillars of the welfare state.41 As with the other three
pillars, with housing, welfare states attempted to achieve de-commodication and
thus to provide families with access to housing, independent of the income they
acquired through the labour market. This implied that the state would become a main
actor in the delivery of housing accommodation, ranging from providing subsidies
for individual families in some welfare state regimes to the commissioning of social
housing through corporations and local authorities in others, but always with the aim
of making good-quality housing widely available to the population.42 In some cases
this new housing was located within or on the edge of existing cities but it was also
provided in new towns (essentially, state-funded garden cities), which played a key
role in the planning and construction of the new national infrastructure that lay at the
heart of the mixed economy system of the welfare state.
Figure 1.5 Jean Prouv with construction company CIMT, youth club for the Mille Clubs programme,
1966 (LArchitecture dAujordhui, 1967).
13
14
Welfare state intervention in the built environment was not limited to housing
but also included buildings for health, education and leisure. In 1966 in France, for
instance, the French Minister of Youth and Sports, Franois Missoffe, launched the
Mille Clubs programme that produced more than a thousand youth clubs across France
as the complement to the mass housing programmes (Figure 1.5). It would soon be
followed in 1969 by other initiatives such as the Mille Piscines (Thousand Swimming
Pools) and Mille Tennis (Thousand Tennis Clubs), that together would further extend
the reach of the welfare state into everyday life.43
In many welfare state regimes experts of the built environment not only
architects but also politicians, economist and sociologists played a central role in
these spatial policies. They not only devised the policies, organized the competitions
and launched the building programmes, but also interacted with the major business
interests, including construction companies, materials manufacturers and property
developers. In France, as Bruno Vayssire has shown, the concrete companies that had
been developing roads and infrastructure during the Second World War were instrumental in propelling the construction methods for mass housing in the immediate
post-war period.44 This predominance of the building industry would soon be
reected in the joint competitions for architecture offices and construction rms that
the government organized.
Within welfare state regimes architects and urban planners acquired new roles,
and architects were asked to articulate progressive denitions of modern living.45 Not
only did the welfare state become embedded in the education and formation of the
profession in the UK, for example, at the Architectural Association in the 1950s all
students designed a housing project as part of their studies46 but governments, which
often had no clear image of what the concrete inll of the welfare state would be,
looked to architects and urban planners to provide the concepts and deliver the forms
in which everyday welfare would be provided. Thus in the Mille Clubs programme
the French government invited architects to produce not just the designs but also the
brief.47 To this extent, architects were not just designing, but also devising, the services
delivered by the welfare state.
Critiques and crisis of the welfare state

The 1970s are considered the point when the welfare state project went into crisis and,
just when the goal of a more equitable society seemed within reach, the welfare state
system started to unravel. In the early 1970s, three decades of economic expansion
abruptly came to an end with the rst oil crisis and the arrival of stagation.48 While
the unions were pushing aggressively for even more radical redistribution, the economic
crises of the decade brought to light the limits of the welfare state and the affluent
society. These limits were not only economic; there was also a shift in terms of values
and ideology. Ideas of progress and enlightened democracy had been compromised
by the geopolitics of the USA and NATO, with the Vietnam War a critical chapter
triggering massive public protests. The environmental pollution caused by unlimited
industrialization and consumption made people aware that the western way of life was
exhausting natural resources and damaging the environment beyond regeneration.49
Such political and economic developments were paralleled by the rise of youth culture
Introduction
Figure 1.6 Giancarlo De Carlo talking to the students/protesters occupying the Milan Triennale, 1968,
photographed by Cesare Colombo.
and counterculture, of which the student revolts of May 1968 would remain the most
memorable moment, with a lasting impact into the 1970s (Figure 1.6).50
A further element of the critique of the welfare state and its planning system was
represented by the local actions that emerged at this time against the demolition of
inner cities and historic districts as part of modernization, slum clearance policies
and functionalist planning. Jane Jacobs and The Death and Life of Great American Cities
(1961) represents a milestone here of course, but there are also examples of activist
communities such as the radical West Berlin district of Kreuzberg or the squatters of
Copenhagens Christiania.51 Likewise, in Amsterdam in the late 1960s and early 1970s
the demolition required for the construction of the underground railway led to erce
and aggressive occupations by its citizens, with the Provo movement declaring its
own republic (Oranje Vrijstaat or Orange Free State) and, in the 1980s, the anarchist
squatting movement turning parts of the city into practically autonomous enclaves.52
But although the student revolts, the environmental movement and local urban
pressure groups continued some sort of a progressive political project of grass-roots
democratization and in some cases even utopianism, albeit in a fundamentally different
way from the post-war, modernizing welfare state, by the end of the 1970s the rise of
conservative postmodernism and anti-utopianism evidenced a major shift in cultural
values and ideology. The costly and cumbersome bureaucracy of the welfare state, the
result of a combination of Fordism and Keynesian politics designed to secure optimal
redistribution of welfare for all, came under increasing attack. In Britain the Winter
of Discontent of 197879 saw the country paralyzed by a wave of public sector strikes
against which the Labour government appeared powerless, precipitating the election
victory in May 1979 of a new Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, pledged to rolling
15
16
back the welfare state. The following year Ronald Reagan was elected President of the
USA, marking a denitive breakthrough of neoliberal politics in the western world,
with the welfare state and its institutions now depicted as a patronizing nanny state
curbing individual freedom and responsibility.
While in hindsight the 1970s can be seen as marking the end of the ideological
hegemony of the welfare state project (even though it was ercely contested at
the time), the criticisms being made of the welfare state were not wholly new. In
particular the Fordist rationale behind the planning of the economy and the subsequent territorial distribution of functions throughout the various countries the
new industries, the new infrastructure and new towns were attacked by certain
intellectuals from the start, including Sartre, Heidegger, the Situationists, etc. Henri
Lefebvres work is a prime example from the eld of sociology, a profound critique
of the technocratic impulse and the depersonalized anonymity of the planning system
which he produced even while working within the system itself.53 Within architecture
we see the same sort of auto-critique: it was Aldo van Eyck who as early as 1947
at the CIAM reunion congress in Bergamo criticized rationalism and functionalism
as a mechanistic conception of progress unt for the reconstruction of the European
cities in the aftermath of the Second World War.54
The welfare state was not a homogeneous phenomenon. Rather than attempt a
synthetic overview, the research presented here proceeds by way of in-depth case
studies that cover a wide range of issues, building types and countries. The studies
highlight the singularities of the different national contexts at different dates, allowing
both a broader, and a more nuanced, portrait of the architecture of the welfare state to
emerge and providing clues for further enquiry. The chapters are grouped into three
broad sections: cultures and continuities; critiques and contradictions; and national
and international.

The rst study in the rst section focuses on one of the most celebrated episodes of
the proto-welfare state era, the housing programme of Red Vienna of the 1920s,
and explores its afterlife in the architectural culture of the post-war period. Eve Blau
shows how, based on the theories of Austro-Marxism, the housing superblocks of
Red Vienna created a new urban typology in which the barriers between public and
private, city and home, were eliminated, creating a new picture of the collective and
a new kind of integrated (socialized) urban space. In the very different political conditions that prevailed in Austria after 1945, the example of the superblocks was excluded
from the welfare state agenda, but from the 1960s a new generation of Viennese
architects took a renewed interest in their form and history, eventually giving birth in
Vienna to a new type of superblock, the green megastructure.
As noted before, one of the major innovations represented by the welfare state was
the transfer to the state of functions formerly undertaken by unofficial or voluntary
organisations such as churches, trade unions, etc. As Hilde Heynen and Janina Gosseye
show, in Belgium the process had a particularly pronounced character because Belgian
society was split into strongly differentiated sectors or pillars along denominational
lines (Catholic, trade union, etc.) and the provision of housing and other welfare
Introduction
facilities was shaped accordingly. But from the 1960s a programmatic differentiation of
another sort, namely linguistic, between Flemish and French-speaking, took over and
in this process architectural projects played a key role. But while the political objectives changed, the impact on the urban landscape remained remarkably consistent,
reinforcing the creation of urban sprawl the nebulous city which is so marked a
feature of Belgium today.
The notion that the welfare state was the creation of the post-war period inevitably turns the Second World War into something of a watershed: but how much of
a break did it really represent? Simon Pepper addresses this question in his study of
one of the key episodes of architectural innovation in the welfare state, the adoption
of the high-rise model for social housing in Britain. Against the accepted view that
high-rise was an innovation brought to Britain by modernist architects after 1945,
Pepper shows that from the mid-1930s the London County Council (LCC) was
working on high-rise schemes which were intended to address the perceived failings
of the housing output of the 1920s and 1930s. Pepper shows how the famous LCC
high-rise schemes of the 1950s were the product of architectural, political and administrative developments that had extended throughout what he calls the long 1940s.
Continuity, in other words, as well as caesura was inherent in the story.
Continuities of another sort are explored by Nicholas Bullock. Taking a single
borough in east London, West Ham, that was one of the most deprived in the capital,
he shows how over the thirty years after 1945 the welfare state changed from being
seen as the saviour of the population to becoming its oppressor. Behind the headlines
of the collapse of the Ronan Point tower block in 1968 was a much more complex
picture, in which local politicians were losing touch with their roots, the problems
facing the local state were becoming far more demanding and the simple meeting of
material needs offered by the welfare state was no longer deemed sufficient by an
increasingly sophisticated consumer society. Bullock shows thereby how the success
of the welfare state in this borough contained within itself the seeds of its own failure.

Critiques of, and contradictions within, the welfare state constitute the focus of the
second section of the book. Nowhere was the internal institutional critique of the
welfare state more developed, and more rmly embedded in the state apparatus,
than in France, where almost from the start of the great housing programmes of the
1950s the government created sociological research institutes to investigate the results.
ukasz Staneks study focuses on this new group of experts generated by the autocritique of the welfare state, showing how a whole generation of French sociologists
including Chombart de Lauwe and Henri Lefebvre rst came to prominence through
these studies of state housing. They developed concepts of needs that went far
beyond those envisaged by administrators or architects, not least Lefebvres concept,
extending Marx, of le droit la ville (the right to the city) and Chombarts theory of
spatial organization as the mapping of a priori cultural concepts.
Social theory of a quite different sort gures in the chapter by Dirk van den
Heuvel, which focuses on one of the most prominent international networks of the
Trente Glorieuses, Team 10. Van den Heuvel shows how the concept of the Open
17
18
Society with its inclusiveness and egalitarianism, as promoted by the philosopher Karl
Popper, informed the thinking of this group. Despite the contradictions involved, Jaap
Bakema, Aldo van Eyck and Alison and Peter Smithson sought to develop a parallel
concept of openness in their housing and city plans of the 1950s and 1960s, resulting
in radical forms of publicness in which the relationship between public and private,
collective and individual, was re-dened. One of the most spectacular of these was the
Kasbah housing development in Hengelo designed in 1969 by van Eycks protg, Piet
Blom, which was built under a special welfare state programme allowing for experimental housing. With its vast covered open space at the heart of the project, it was to
be a radical agent for a new sociability that was eventually smothered in the suburban
context of its realization.
The welfare state was predicated on high levels of consumption, for both economic
and ideological reasons. What scope did this allow to the architect? Helena Mattsson
examines one of the most famous Swedish new towns of the 1960s, Skrholmen, and
reveals how it was conceived and organized around shopping. Mattsson shows how
Swedens corporatist version of the welfare state gave the leading economic interests
chambers of commerce, road associations, retail bodies, etc. a direct role in the
formation of state policy, whereas architects were unrepresented. In the design of the
new town of Skrholmen accordingly it was the major business interests and the building
industry that made the main decisions, with the architects largely left on the side.
The agency or otherwise of the architect is also explored in Florian Urbans study
of the Mrkisches Viertel in West Berlin. In the 1950s and 1960s West Germany
undertook a major programme of building large housing schemes on the edge of
its cities. In 1968 almost overnight one of these, the Mrkisches Viertel, became a
cause clbre, depicted in the popular press as the worst kind of nightmare estate. But
as Urban shows, this was not the result of decisions that the architects had made
very little attention was given to matters that were under their control but rather
stemmed from issues of location, and public transport and local politics. While the
Mrkisches Viertel was portrayed as a symbol of the failure of the welfare state, it was
not so much the design as the wider process of production which was under attack.
The process of production associated with the welfare state, with its monolithic
nature, bureaucratic structures and statutory requirements, created a role for architects
that many found deeply unpalatable. To architects of this view, how much better, it
seemed, to sidestep the entire welfare state and instead to do it yourself . As Caroline
Maniaque-Benton shows, this was the thinking of a number of architects in France
who saw in the counterculture of the USA a model for making architecture free
from the constraints of state-funded industrialized production. Inspired by American
counterparts, publications such as the Catalogue des ressources provided both the vision
and the practical know-how to enable French architects to bypass the welfare state and
create their own version of the California countercultural dream.

The relationship between national and international, and the role of international
exchange and expertise, forms the focus of the nal section of the book. Tom
Avermaetes study of the ABTAT group of architects around Le Corbusier shows
Introduction
that they too were inuenced by the USA, in this case by the total approach to
development and construction developed by the Tennessee Valley Authority, whose
works they went to visit in 1945. But this group, which included Georges Candilis
and Michel Ecochard, was also profoundly involved in an international relationship of
another sort, namely that between France and her colonies and protectorates in North
Africa, where many of them were working in the 1950s. Avermaete shows how ideas
and practices developed in the colonial context of North Africa both drew on, and
fed into, the debates about the design of housing and new towns in France that were
to be a dening feature of Les Trente Glorieuses.
The relationship between the indigenous and the imported is also a theme in Mark
Swenartons study of innovation in welfare state architecture. Here the focus is on
the housing designs of the young Patrick Hodgkinson of the mid-1950s and the role
they played in the development in Britain of an alternative to high-rise. Like many of
his contemporaries, Hodgkinson was strongly attracted to the housing designs of Le
Corbusier, but he was also deeply attached to what he saw as the indigenous English
tradition, notably of building cities that were high-density but low-rise. Swenarton
shows how in his student work at the Architectural Association, and later working
with Leslie Martin, Hodgkinson sought to combine these two elements, transforming
the Unit dhabitation from a skyscraper to a groundscraper, thereby creating an inuential new type of urbanism that was neither modern nor traditional.
Questions of national identity form a sub-text in Luca Molinaris study of architectural ideology in Italy in the late 1960s. The focus is on two canonic projects,
Giancarlo De Carlos Matteotti village and Aldo Rossis Gallaratese 2. Molinari shows
how, confronted by what was regarded by Italian architectural culture as the impoverished housing production of the Italian welfare state, De Carlo and Rossi sought
radically different means of restoring authenticity to the agency of architecture and,
thereby, to the housing production of the welfare state: in the one case by engaging
the populace directly in the design process, in the other by creating a monument in
the city. The failure of both projects, Molinari argues, illustrates the impotence of
Italian architectural culture when confronted with the realities of rapid urbanization
and the demands of the welfare state.
The nal two chapters of the book engage explicitly with the colonial and postcolonial dimensions of the welfare state, exploring the complex relationship between
welfare states and colonial regimes in terms of both policies and architecture and
problematizing the oppressive character of architectural and urban projects in both
territories. Michelle Provoosts study focuses on the architectural ideologies at play
in the design of new towns in West Africa, both before and after independence from
Britain. In the 1940s and 1950s Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew worked on welfare state
projects both in Britain and in Britains colonies, especially the new town of Tema in
the Gold Coast (Ghana), where their approach was notable for the attention it paid
to the cultures and customs of the population. But following independence, they
were replaced at Tema by Constantinos Doxiadis, whose designs focused on universal,
rather than indigenous, requirements. Provoost argues that whatever the preferences of educated architectural opinion, at Tema it was the top-down approach of
Doxiadis rather than the bottom-up approach of Fry Drew that proved the more
popular and successful.
19
20
With the last chapter we move to south-east Asia, where as noted above some of
the features of European welfare states are re-emerging in the very different context of
the sunrise economies of twenty-rst-century capitalism. Miles Glendinning focuses
on two of the little tiger economies of south-east Asia, Singapore and Hong Kong,
and explores the international exchanges, largely stemming from British colonial rule,
that have shaped their housing policies and production. Glendinning shows how the
promotion of economic efficiency has led the governments of these Asian states to
adopt social housing programmes that draw on European experience but without any
of the ideology of the welfare state. Will this be the story of the twenty-rst century:
welfare state building without the welfare state?
Notes
1 C. Quiring, W. Voigt, P. C. Schmal and E. Herrel, Ernst May 18861970, Mnchen:
Prestel, 2011; A. Vidler, James Frazer Stirling: Notes from the Archive, London: Yale UP, 2010;
M. Crinson, Stirling and Gowan, Architecture from Austerity to Affluence, London, Yale UP,
2012; S. Sadler, Archigram: Architecture without Architecture, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
2005; H. Steiner, Beyond Archigram: The Structure of Circulation, London: Routledge, 2008;
M. Risselada and D. van den Heuvel, (eds.), Team 10: In Search of a Utopia of the Present
(19531981), Rotterdam: NAi, 2005; T. Avermaete, Another modern: the post-war architecture
and urbanism of Candilis-Josic-Woods, Rotterdam: NAi, 2005; C. Blain, Latelier de montrouge,
Paris: Actes Sud, 2008; H. Ibelings, Van den Broek en Bakema 19481988: Architectuur en
stedenbouw: de functie van de form, Rotterdam: NAi, 2000. Thanks are due to Adrian Forty,
Hilde Heynen and Ed Taverne for helpful comments on an earlier draft of the introduction.
2 S. Williams Goldhagen and R. Legault (eds.), Anxious Modernisms. Experimentation in Postwar
Architectural Culture, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2001; D. Rouillard, Superarchitecture,
Paris: Villette, 2004; R. Martin, The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media and Corporate
Space, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005; F. Scott, Architecture or Techno-Utopia: Politics after
Modernism, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2007; M. Crinson and C. Zimmerman (eds.),
Neo-Avant-Garde and Postmodern: Postwar Architecture in Britain and Beyond, London: Yale UP,
2010.
3 G. Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990.
For the current state of the art, see F. G., Castles, S. Liebfried, J. Lewis,, H. Obinger, C.
Pierson The Oxford Handbook of the Welfare State, Oxford: Oxford UP 2010.
4 The exception that proves the rule is the chapter New Brutalism and the architecture of
the Welfare State: England 194959, covering the Independent Group, the Smithsons
and Stirling, in K. Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History, London: Thames &
Hudson, 1980, pp. 262268. Recently architectural history and theory have moved towards
greater engagement with interdisciplinary debates but even here little attention has been
paid to the welfare state. See C. Greig Crysler, S. Cairns and H. Heynen, The Sage Handbook
of Architectural Theory, London: Sage, 2012.
5 K. van Herck and T. Avermaete (eds.), Wonen in Welvaart: woningbouw en wooncultuur
in Vlaanderen, 19481973, Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2006; M. Ryckewaert, Building
the Economic Backbone of the Belgian Welfare State: Infrastructure, Planning and Architecture
19451973, Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2011; H. Mattsson and S.-O. Wallenstein, Swedish
Modernism: Architecture, Consumption and the Welfare State, London: Black Dog, 2010. For a
discussion of culture and the welfare state in the Netherlands, see K. Schuyt and E. Taverne,
Dutch Culture in a European Perspective: 1950, Prosperity and Welfare, Assen: Uitgeverij Van
Gorcum, 2004 (Dutch original: 2000).
6 See T. Avermaete and D. van den Heuvel (eds.), The European Welfare State Project:
Ideals, Politics, Cities and Buildings, themed issue of Footprint, 9 (2011).
7 H. Heynen and J. Gosseye (eds.), Proceedings of the Second International Conference of the
Architectural History Network, Brussels: Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie van Belgi voor
Wetenschappen en Kunsten, 2012, 543567.
Introduction
8 In addition to the contributors to this book, participants in the symposium included Jos
Antnio Bandeirinha (University of Coimbra), Adrian Forty (University College London),
Elain Harwood (English Heritage), Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen (Yale University) and Laurent
Stalder (ETH Zurich). Wolfgang Voigt (German Architecture Museum) was prevented by
illness from attending.
9 Thanks also to Hilde Heynen for her contribution to this.
10 See also T. Avermaete and D. van den Heuvel, Obama, Please Tax Me! Architecture and
the Politics of Redistribution, in Footprint 9, Autumn 2011, 13.
11 For example, the English Heritage exhibition Brutal and Beautiful: Saving the Twentieth
Century held in the Quadriga Gallery, London in 2013.
12 See A. Powers (ed.), Robin Hood Gardens: Re-Visions, London: Twentieth Century Society,
2010; D. van den Heuvel, M. Mesman, W. Quist, B. Lemmens (eds.), The Challenge of
Change. Dealing with the Legacy of the Modern Movement, Proceedings of the 10th International
Docomomo Conference, Amsterdam: IOS Press, 2008.
13 R. Morton and A. Ross, Construction UK: Introduction to the Industry, Second Edition, Oxford:
Blackwell, 2008, p. 94.
14 See, for example, I. Peng and J. Wong, East Asia, in Castles et al., Oxford Handbook,
656670; J. Doling, Housing Policies and the Little Tigers: How Do They Compare with
Other Industrialised Countries?, Housing Studies, 1999, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 229250.
15 A placard at the protests reads We want schools and hospitals, not FIFA standards (www.itv.
com/news/update/2013-06-21/brazil-we-want-schools-and-hospitals-not-fifa-standards).
See also http://edition.cnn.com/2013/06/28/world/americas/brazil-protests-favelas
16 We follow here the denition of the welfare state as offered by amongst others P. Flora,
(ed.), Growth to Limits. The Western European Welfare States since World War II, Berlin: De
Gruyter, 1986, vol. 1, xii.
17 This notion of Great Transformation is coined in K. Polyani, The Great Transformation
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1957).
18 See for instance G. Rimlinger, Welfare Policy and Industrialization in Europe, America and
Russia (New York: Wiley, 1971) and J. Alber, Some Causes and Consequences of Social Security
Expenditure Development in Western Europe, 19491977, San Domenico, Italy: European
University Institute, 1982.
19 I. Gough, European Welfare States: Explanations and Lessons for Developing Countries,
in A. A. Dani and A. de Haan (eds.), Inclusive States: Social Policy and Structural Inequalities,
Washington DC: World Bank 2008, 62; C. Pierson and M. Leimgruber, Intellectual
Roots, in Castles et al., Oxford Handbook, 38. See also M. Swenarton, Homes Fit for Heroes:
the Politics and Architecture of Early State Housing in Britain, London: Heinemann Educational
Books, 1981, and J.-L. Cohen, Architecture in Uniform: Designing and Building for World War
II, London: Yale UP, 2011.
20 F.-X. Kaufmann, Die Entstehung sozialer Grundrechte und sie wohlfahrtsstaatliche Entwicklung,
Paderborn: Schningh, 2003; Castles et al., Oxford Handbook, 7.
21 Castles et al., Oxford Handbook.
22 W. Arts and J. Gelissen, Three worlds of welfare capitalism or more? A state-of-the-art
report, Journal of European Social Policy 12 (2), 2002, 139. See also Esping-Andersen, The
Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism.
23 Gough, European Welfare States, p. 48.
24 Gough, European Welfare States, pp. 4354.
25 Ibid., p. 40. Castles et al, Oxford Handbook, pp. 586642.
26 See M. Kautto, The Nordic Countries; B. Palier, Continental Western Europe; M.
Ferrera, The South European Countries; and F. G. Castles, The English-Speaking
Countries, in Castles et al., Oxford Handbook, pp. 586642.
27 Gough, European Welfare States, p. 53; J. Fourasti, Les trente glorieuses: ou, La Rvolution
invisible de 1946 a 1975 (Paris: Fayard, 1979). For the golden age and its collapse in
the crisis of the 1970s, see E. Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century
19141991, London: Michael Joseph, 1994, pp. 257286.
28 I. Gough and G. Therborn, The Global Future of Welfare States, in Castles et al., Oxford
Handbook, p. 705.
21
22
29 E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution 17891848 (New York: Mentor Books, 1962), pp.
198199 and 216217.
30 M. Fraser, John Bulls Other Homes: State Housing and British Policy in Ireland, 18831922
(Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1996), p. 299.
31 D. Thomson, Europe since Napoleon, Harmondsworth: Penguin 1966, pp. 358359.
32 J. N. Tarn, Five Per Cent Philanthropy: An Account of Housing in Urban Areas between 1840 and
1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1973), p. 62; S. Beattie, A Revolution in London Housing:
LCC Housing Architects and Their Work 18931914 (London: Greater London Council/
Architectural Press, 1980).
33 N. L. Prak, Het Nederlandse woonhuis van 1800 tot 1940 (Delft: Delft UP, 1991); N. de
Vreeze, Woningbouw, Inspiratie & Ambities. Kwalitatieve grondslagen van de sociale woningbouw in
Nederland (Almere: Nationale Woningraad, 1993).
34 M. Swenarton, Building the New Jerusalem: Architecture, Housing and Politics 19001930,
Garston: IHS-BRE 2008, pp. 8586.
35 International Labour Office, Housing Policy in Europe, Geneva: International Labour Office,
1930, pp. 4445.
36 C. Bauer, Modern Housing, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1934, pp. 299301. Bauers
gures should be treated with caution.
37 Swenarton, Homes t for Heroes, pp. 100101.
38 Swenarton, Building the New Jerusalem, p. 92.
39 W. A. Chafe (ed.), The Achievement of American Liberalism: The New Deal and Its Legacies,
New York: Columbia UP, 2003.
40 Y. Hirdman, The Happy 30s: A Short Story of Social Engineering and Gender Order
in Sweden, in Mattsson and Wallenstein, Swedish Modernism, pp. 6667; and in the same
volume H. Mattsson and S.-O. Wallenstein, Introduction, p. 16. See also Hobsbawm, Age
of Extremes, p. 107.
41 For an introduction to the role of housing in welfare state regimes see J. Allen, J.
Barlow, J. Leal, T. Maloutas and L. Padovani, Housing and Welfare in Southern Europe
(London: Blackwell, 2004); J. Kemeny, Comparative housing and welfare: theorising the
relationship, Journal of Housing and the Built Environment, vol. 16, no. 1 (2001), pp. 5370;
and P. Malpass, Housing and the Welfare State (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
42 Some researchers in the eld of housing policy have argued that, despite the initial promise
represented by the rapid expansion of social housing after the Second World War, it has
more recently emerged as a distinctively weak pillar of public welfare provision the
wobbly pillar under the welfare state, as Torgersens (1987) widely quoted metaphor has
it. See U. Torgersen, Housing: the wobbly pillar under the welfare state, in B. Turner, J.
Kemeny and L. Lundqvist (eds.), Between State and Market: Housing in the Post-industrial Era,
Gvle: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1987, pp. 116126.
43 On these various leisure programs see: M. Falcoz and P. Chifflet, La construction publique
des quipements sportifs. Aspects historique, politique, spatial, Les Annales de la recherche
urbaine, 79 (1998), pp. 1421.
44 B. Vayssire, Reconstruction-Dconstruction, Paris: Picard, 1988.
45 K. Schuyt and E. Taverne, Dutch Culture in a European Perspective: 1950, Prosperity and
Welfare, Assen: Uitgeverij Van Gorcum, 2004.
46 See Chapter 12.
47 T. Avermaete, A thousand youth clubs: architecture, mass leisure and the rejuvenation of
post-war France, Journal of Architecture, vol. 18, no. 5 (October 2013), 632646.
48 See P. Rosanvallon, La Crise de ltat-providence, Paris: Seuil, 1992; R. Coopey and
N. Woodward (eds.), Britain in the 1970s: The Troubled Economy, Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 1996; Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes, 403418.
49 The Club of Rome report, The Limits to Growth (1972), was a key document, with Rachel
Carsons Silent Spring (1962) being an early predecessor.
50 See also J.-L. Violeau, Les architectes et Mai 1968, Paris: Recherches, 2005; F. Turner, From
Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital
Utopianism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
51 J. Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, New York: Random House, 1961.
In parallel in Europe there was the move in the 1960s to empower tenants within the
Introduction
production process: see N. J. Habraken, De Dragers en de Mensen, Het einde van de massa
Woningbouw, Amsterdam: Scheltema & Holkema, 1961 (English version: N. J. Habraken,
Supports: An Alternative to Mass Housing, London: Architectural Press, 1972) and J. Turner,
The ts and mists of peoples housing, RIBA Journal, vol. 18, no. 2 (February 1974),
1421. See also C. Klemek, The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal, Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2011.
52 In the end, armed force broke this resistance. See V. Mamadouh, De stad in eigen hand.
Provos, kabouters en krakers als stedelijke sociale beweging, Amsterdam: SUA, 1992.
53 See Chapter 6.
54 V. Ligtelijn and F. Strauven (eds.), Aldo van Eyck, Writings. Volume 2: Collected Articles and
Other Writings 19471998, Amsterdam: SUN Publishers, 2008, pp. 3242.
23
This page intentionally left blank
PART I
Figure 2.0 Karl Ehn, Karl Marx Hof, View of forecourt, 192730 (Georg Mittenecker, 2012).
2
FROM RED SUPERBLOCK TO GREEN
MEGASTRUCTURE: MUNICIPAL
SOCIALISM AS MODEL AND
CHALLENGE
Eve Blau
The structure and provisions of the Austrian Welfare State were shaped under extraordinary circumstances in the context of a radical programme of municipal socialism
known as Red Vienna in the period between 19191934.1 The urban and sociospatial focus of that programme and the role assigned to architecture and urban
design in realizing it remained a reference, challenge, and standard against which
the postwar Austrian social welfare programme was measured and, especially in the
decades following the Second World War, found wanting. Red Vienna was not only
the measure but also the model for postwar Austrian social welfare, a model that had to
be rescaled to the postwar political and economic conditions of the Second Republic
through a process described by officials as Austrication. In the immediate postwar
decades Austrication involved abandonment of the vital connection between social
programme and urban architectural form that had been forged in interwar Vienna.
That connection was only re-established in the 1970s by a generation of architects
educated after the war whose anti-functionalist polemics, architectural actions,
and calls for a return to urbanity in the late 1960s inaugurated a new episode of
typological innovation and urban engagement in Austrian housing design, and led
ultimately to the (at least partial) rediscovery of the architectural instrumentality and
urban spatial politics of Red Vienna.
The Austrian experience provides both an unusually long historical lens for
examining the relationship between architecture and the welfare state, and a unique
perspective on how that relationship was impacted by the very different political
conditions and geographies which prevailed not only within Austria but also in
Europe in the inter-war and post-war periods. One of the determining conditions
of Austrias nascent welfare system in Red Vienna was Viennas inter-war status as a
state (Bundesland) of the federal Republic of Austria. According to a constitutional
amendment, ratied in 1921, Vienna, in addition to being the capital of the newly
established Republic of Austria, became a federal state of the Republic. This gave
the municipality unprecedented constitutional independence: Vienna could legislate
as both a city and a state; it also had access to federal funds and could levy taxes as a
28
Eve Blau
municipality and state all of which gave Vienna extraordinary political and nancial
resources and made it possible for the city to govern and nance its programme.
At the same time, however, Red Vienna was also under constant siege from
political opposition within Austria. Throughout the period during which the Social
Democrats governed Vienna, 19191934, the municipality was a socialist enclave
in a country ruled by a rabidly anti-socialist, conservative, and clerical Christian
Social political majority. The Social Democratic policies and architecture of Red
Vienna therefore took shape not only within the context of a socialist programme
of municipal reforms, but also in the midst of highly charged, and often violent,
political conict between right and left.2 Austria itself was also embattled during that
period: the new republic was economically and politically isolated after the dissolution
of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Precluded from political union or Anschluss with
Social Democratic Germany by the terms of the Treaty of St. Germain in 1919, and
surrounded by the hostile successor states of the former Empire which erected high
tariff barriers, the rump state was also cut off from essential supplies of food, coal and
raw materials as well as markets for its own industrial products.
The Austrication of Viennas social welfare programmes after the Second World
War involved not only a systemic scaling up from municipal to federal policies and
programmes, but also a fundamental ideological, political, and economic reorientation
and adjustment to conditions that were radically different from those that had prevailed
in the inter-war period. In May 1955, when the Allied occupation ended, Austria was
granted full independence as a free, sovereign and democratic state, and in October
of that year Austria declared its permanent neutrality. The Second Republic was
governed almost continuously from 1955 to the late 1970s by a coalition government
formed of the two largest federal parties: the Austrian Peoples Party (VP) and the
Social Democratic Party (SP), with important political posts split evenly between
the parties.3 Vienna was once again, as in the pre-war period, administered by the
Social Democrats. Interestingly, the city also retained its dual constitutional status as
municipality and federal state, as well as its position as the nations capital. Vienna was,
and continues to be, the seat of the municipal, state, and federal governments. But the
Central European context in which Red Vienna and Austrian welfare systems rst
took shape had ceased to exist with the binary division of Cold War Europe. Austria,
newly part of western Europe, saw itself as strategically positioned on the border
between East and West: a bastion of western democracy, which was still actively
engaged in trade with its Warsaw Pact neighbours.
Culturally, however, Austria was resolutely oriented toward the West. In architecture this had long been the case. Since the late nineteenth century, Viennese
architects, most notably Adolf Loos, had (as Richard Neutra put it) an unrequited
love for Anglo-American culture.4 In Viennese architectural culture, ever since Loos
launched his attack on the hide-bound conservatism of Viennese culture and society
(of which the historicist architecture of the Ringstrasse was emblematic) in the 1890s,
the West and in particular Anglo-American modern culture, portrayed as technologically advanced and embodying democratic values and practices, had gured as
the critical Other [Das Andere] of Austrian (eastern) cultural backwardness.5 In the
1950s and 1960s the compulsion toward westernization of Austrian culture took on
new internationalist perspectives and points of reference, cultural as well as social. In
From Red Superblock to Green Megastructure
architecture these ranged from the Situationists to Archigram, the Metabolists, and
Team 10.
Red Vienna: municipal socialism as model

The birth of the Austrian welfare state coincided with that of Austria itself. With the
defeat of the central powers in the First World War, the empire of Austria-Hungary
dissolved into the new national states of Central Europe including the residual
Republic of Austria ratied by the Treaty of St. Germain in 1919. Vienna, the
capital, emerged from the war diminished and on the edge of economic collapse and
famine. No longer the seat of a vast empire but, instead, of a small cluster of rural
and alpine provinces, Vienna was still a metropolis of almost two million inhabitants,
a number now equal to one-third of the population of the country. Even before
the end of the war, uncontrollable ination had made Austrias currency essentially
worthless; by 1922 the Austrian Krone had dropped to 1/140th of 1 per cent of its
pre-war value. It was in this period of crisis and chaos that the Social Democrats (the
only political party without ties to the old regime, and therefore able to control the
mass of unemployed workers agitating for revolution) came to power in Austria. Very
soon, however, the Social Democrats began to lose ground in the country as a whole
and in 1920 retreated to their stronghold, Vienna, the home not only of Austrias
administrative, intellectual, cultural, and business elites, but also of its major industries
and urban proletariat.6
In 1919, when the rst socialist mayor of Vienna was elected, the Social Democrats
determined to make Red Vienna a model of municipal socialism, a new society
within the connes of the old that would pregure the Socialist state. Robert
Danneberg, president of the new Provincial Assembly of Vienna, declared:
Capitalism cannot be abolished from the Town Hall. Yet it is within the power
of great cities to perform useful installments of socialist work in the midst of
capitalist society. A socialist majority in a municipality can show what creative
force resides in Socialism. Its fruitful labors not only benet the inhabitants of
the city, but raise the prestige of Socialism elsewhere.7
The Socialist reshaping of Vienna was achieved over the next fourteen years through
a broad set of social, cultural and pedagogical institutions including health and welfare
services and clinics, childcare facilities and kindergartens, schools, sports facilities
including swimming pools and soccer stadia, organized competitions, libraries,
theatres, cinemas, clubs, exhibitions, public lectures, etc. The theory underlying this
project (formulated before the war by a group of Marxist thinkers and leaders of the
Austrian socialist movement, including Max Adler, Otto Bauer, and Karl Renner),
known as Austro-Marxism, was committed to nding a third way between
Bolshevism (the USSR) and Reformism (Weimar Germany), realizing a genuinely
democratic socialism through radical cultural and social change, rather than revolutionary violence. The process was to be one of hineinwachsen, slow growth from
within, by creating institutions that would prepare the working class culturally and
intellectually for its historical role.8
29
30
Eve Blau
It was the Austro-Marxists broad concept of culture as encompassing all aspects

of everyday life that led the Social Democratic municipality of Red Vienna to put
special emphasis on the development of a new Wohnkultur, a new form of socialized
urban living in Vienna. The new socialist Wohnkultur was conceived in terms of the
city and urban life. This was in part because the city was the full extent of Red Vienna
itself, but it also had ideological roots. The Austro-Marxists understood the housing
question in Vienna as a problem of planning that involved not only the provision of
private dwelling space, but also public space in the city. Austro-Marxist theory held
that the city was not only the proper home of the proletariat, but was also the social
environment in which working-class consciousness would develop. In addition to
these political benets, the city offered positive cultural and social advantages to the
proletariat. The city was a stimulant to body and intellect, the locus of the creative
energy and the technological and social progress that were shaping the modern world.9
The centerpiece of the Social Democrats programme was the construction of
400 buildings, designed by more than 190 architects. The building programme (land
purchase and construction) was nanced out of tax revenues, in particular by the new
Housing Construction Tax (Wohnbausteuer), which was sharply graded to put the
burden on the rich and was written off as non-recoverable cost to the municipality,
i.e. the capital cost did not have to be covered by the rents. Rents were minimal (3.5
per cent of a semi-skilled workers income) to keep wages low and make Austrian
products competitive, and were intended only to cover maintenance and repair costs.10
The Gemeindebauten were to be the social condensers of Red Vienna. They
mixed housing and institutions, and were distributed throughout the city (Figure
2.1). By February 1934, when the programme came to a violent end, 200,000 people
one-tenth of the citys population had been rehoused, and Vienna had been
provided with a vast new infrastructure of social services and cultural institutions. In
the brief period from 1923, when large-scale building operations began, and 1934,
when the Austro-Fascist putsch of Engelbert Dollfuss and the Heimwehr brought the
programme to a bloody end, the broad institutional network of Red Vienna had
conferred new political, social and economic status on Viennas working class. But it
was the building programme that gave them political control over the space of the city.
What was the relationship between the social policy of Red Vienna and the architectural forms and spaces it produced? Typologically the Viennese Gemeindebauten
differed radically from the modernist housing typology: the ex-urban Siedlungen
(settlements) composed of parallel Zeilenbauten (34 storey slab blocks), oriented
towards sun and grass and away from the street, which were favoured by CIAM and
built in Weimar Germany during these years.11 The Gemeindebauten, by contrast, were
urban apartment blocks inserted into the existing fabric of Vienna.
But the Gemeindebauten were signicantly larger than traditional Viennese apartment
houses; they often occupied an entire city block, and sometimes several. Most had large
courtyards with landscaped gardens, play areas, wading pools, and the new social and
cultural facilities (kindergartens, clinics, libraries, laundries, theatres, etc.) provided by
the city. The new buildings appeared to be traditional Central European urban perimeter
blocks, monumentalized and provided with large garden courtyards. Subsequently, they
have been criticized by architectural historians, Manfredo Tafuri most notably, for being
interiorized isolated enclaves pridefully counterposed to the urban context.12
Figure 2.1 Das Neue Wien/Vienna of Today, 1931. From Das Neue Wien: Ein Album mit Plan, 1932 (Stadt Wien/Wiener Stadt- und Landesbibliothek, Vienna).

31
32
Eve Blau
Figure 2.2 Bebelhof, Karl Ehn, 19251926, ground oor plan and street view. From Wohnhausanlage
der Gemeinde Wien im XII. Bezirk, 1926 (Stadt Wien/Wiener Stadt- und Landesbibliothek,
Vienna).
But that is not how the buildings acted, nor how they operated urbanistically.
Unlike traditional Viennese apartment buildings, the Gemeindebauten even those that
stay within the grid such as the Bebelhof by Karl Ehn (1925) opened the interior of
the block (traditionally private space) to the street (Figure 2.2). In doing so, they both
turned the traditional urban perimeter block of the Central European city inside out,
and created a series of hybrid spaces that are part public, part private; both part of the
public domain of the city and part of the private and semi-private space of the new
buildings. The new buildings blur the distinction not only between building front and
back, but also between socialist housing block and bourgeois city.
The Gemeindebauten also challenged traditional concepts of boundary and type.
Part dwelling space, part institutional space, part commercial space (shops were located
along the street fronts), they were multi-functional, multiple-use structures that
operated as both housing and urban infrastructural nodes in the vast network of social
and cultural institutions inserted by the municipality into the existing fabric of the city.
Typological hybridity translates into functional indeterminacy inside the buildings,
where the dwelling spaces were largely undifferentiated in terms of use. Compared to
the Taylorized dwelling spaces and built in furniture of the Weimar Siedlungen favoured
by CIAM, the Viennese apartments offered their multinational working-class residents
a high degree of agency to furnish and inhabit the spaces as they wished.
The most famous buildings of Red Vienna, the so-called superblocks that occupy
several city blocks, such as the Karl Marx Hof by Karl Ehn, the showpiece of Red
Vienna, actually transform the underlying organization of space in the city (Figures 2.0
and 2.3). Carefully inserted onto the fabric of Vienna they both preserve the existing
urban structure and superimpose their own distinctive scale and organization on it.
By binding together buildings, streets, courtyards, and public squares, they merge and
weave together a variety of urban functions to create a spatial fabric that has neither
xed character nor set use: one that transforms the city plan from an undifferentiated
grid of public streets and private blocks into an interlocking network of communal
spaces which blur the boundary between public and private space, socialist housing
block and bourgeois city, insider and outsider. The superblocks operate strategically in
terms of scale. The spaces dened by the intersection of multi-block superblock and
existing urban grid have their own distinctive scale, which is different from that of either
city or superblock alone. Although they are megastructures, the scale of the spaces
dened by their intersection with the city is intimate, idiosyncratic, and particular to
these buildings. The spatial ambiguities, contradictions and multiple codings that result
from the intersection of a socialist building programme and bourgeois city were what
Otto Wagner in a different context called the counterpoint of the architecture, the
social agency of the built work that allows construction of meaning by its users.
The Karl Marx Hof and most of the other superblocks were designed by students
of Otto Wagner, including Heinrich Schmid and Hermann Aichinger, who designed
the Rabenhof and Am Fuchsenfeld (Figure 2.4). They perform an urban operation
with far-reaching signicance for the organization and use of space in the city.13 They
not only appropriate an enormous amount of what would normally have been private
space in the city (the interiors of the city blocks) for public use, but by bridging over
streets and city blocks, they unravel the planning principles that had enabled the
speculative development of the capitalist city in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
33
34
Eve Blau
Figure 2.3 Karl Marx Hof, plan and view of forecourt, Karl Ehn, 19271930 (Wiener Stadt- und
Landesarchiv, Fotoarchiv Gerlach, FC1: C2961).
centuries. The superblocks created spaces that were both open and closed; that were
available for circulation and public use but also enclosed within the built-up circumference of the city block; that overlapped with the existing urban grid but undermined
the logic of its order. They accomplished this by replacing the existing analytical
structure of streets, blocks and open squares with synthetic multi-purpose, multi-use
spaces that blurred the boundary between public and private. They did this without
destroying the existing scale and fabric of the city, and without changing either the
development plan (Generalregulierungsplan) or the building codes in effect at the time.14
What is important about this operation in the context of this book is that the appropriation of urban space for social uses was achieved by architectural means, through
the urban operations of the architecture itself. We have no evidence that the multiple
codings and contradictions that resulted from the intersection of city and building
plan were programmatic. They were neither referenced in the specications prepared
Figure 2.4 Plans: Rabenhof (left), Am Fuchsenfeld (right), Heinrich Schmid and Hermann Aichinger architects, (19241928). From Die Wohnhausanlage der Gemeinde
Wien auf dem Gelnde der ehemaligen Krimskykaserne im III. Bezirk, etc., 1928: 4; Das Neue Wien, 1927, 3: 84 (Stadt Wien/Wiener Stadt- und Landesbibliothek,
Vienna).

35
36
Eve Blau
by city building officials, nor alluded to in the statements of politicians, nor for that
matter were they noted in any way in the surviving papers of the architects (most of
whom were not socialists) who designed them. They seem to have followed from the
Social Democrats decision to build according to their own standards standards that
no private or speculative builder could achieve and according to the municipalitys
own programmatic requirements while remaining safely within the legal parameters
of the building code and existing development plan.15 In other words, the urban
instrumentality of the buildings in terms of reallocating space in the city followed
from the citys decision to build against the code without violating or changing it.
The result was a contradiction-lled and politically-charged condition in which the
old and new orders coexisted and dialectically constructed the New (socialist) Vienna
within, and in dialogue with, the Old (bourgeois) Vienna. The political signicance
of this operation was conveyed in the masthead of an article in the socialist journal Die
Unzufriedene (The Discontent) in 1930, which depicted the large blocks built along
the Margaretengrtel (part of the monumental ring road encircling the inner districts)
as the Ringstrasse of the Proletariat (Die Ringstrasse des Proletariats).
Typological experiments
In addition to the superblocks, there were other typological experiments carried
out by architects involved in the building programme and proposed as alternatives and critical counter-types to the red Hof perimeter block. Two of the
most interesting were Adolf Looss and Oskar Strnads designs in the early 1920s
for proletarian Terrassenhuser, high-rise apartment blocks with stepped garden
terraces (Figure 2.5). They were developed in connection with an unrealized idea
for a Generalarchitekturplan (general architectural plan) proposed by the Viennese
political economist, philosopher of science, and socialist Otto Neurath in 1923.
The Terrassenhaus and Generalarchitekturplan projects warrant consideration because,
although they remained unrealized, it was these projects which excited the imagination of the 1960s generation and led to the rediscovery of the urban spatial politics
of Red Vienna itself in the 1970s.16
Neuraths Generalarchitekturplan exists only as a text by Neurath published in the
Arbeiter Zeitung (the official organ of the Social Democratic party) in October 1923.
A three-dimensional architectonic plan, it would comprehend the city in its totality
as an economic and cultural entity, rather than as a Sittesque composition of discrete
squares, views, and prospects. It would be concerned with three-dimensional spatial
relationships and the architectonic unity of each district, which would mix housing
typologies as well as urban social and economic functions. The spirit of modern
architecture manifest in such a plan, Neurath asserted, is the spirit of mass organization [Grossorganisation], which is the spirit that lives in the labour movement.17
Neuraths plan was intended to answer a fundamental question:
How can the extension of a great city like Vienna be systematically carried out
in a unied spirit and according to an overarching plan, while still allowing each
architect to express his own personality and artistic vision, since only if such
freedom exists can something vigorous and powerful be achieved?18
Figure 2.5 Adolf Loos, Terrassenhaus Project Elevations, dated December 1923 (top); Oskar Strnad,
Terrassenhaus Project, 1923 (bottom) (Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna. Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York/Bildrecht, Vienna (top); Das Kunstblatt, 1924: 110 (bottom)).
37
38
Eve Blau
Looss and Strnads terraced housing projects were intended to show how typological
innovation, artistic freedom, and a new architectonic conception of the modern
democratic city might be combined in an urban architectural design project. Strnads
scheme consisted of several structures: a large elliptical apartment block with stepped
terraces facing inward onto a central park, a tree-lined alle, a number of small houses
distributed throughout the park, and row houses outside the ellipse. As such, it was a
clear demonstration of the synthesis of high- and low-rise building types and urban
spatial congurations that the general architecture plan was intended to promote.19
Looss scheme carried forward the investigation of stepped terrace housing forms
and roof gardens that he had begun before the war. By 1923 both the Terrassenhaus
type and the idea of the roof garden were hardly new. Henri Sauvages apartment
building with stepped terraces on the rue Vavin in Paris (1912) was well known, as
were Le Corbusiers immeuble villas and maison Citrohan projects, which had been
exhibited at the Salon dAutomne in Paris in 1922.20 But for Loos it was a type that
had particular signicance for urban proletarian living: the fate of the proletarians
child seems particularly harsh to me. The child, locked up by its parents, should
have the prisonlike at opened up by the communal terrace, which allows for neighbourly supervision.21 A site-specic design on the Inzersdorferstrasse in Viennas
district X, Looss Terrassenhaus adapted the stepped prole and volumetric Raumplan
organization he had employed in some of his prewar houses to multi-storey proletarian living, with two-storey apartments that opened out onto communal terraces.
At ground level were workshops and communal facilities. Neither Looss nor Strnads
projects were realized; they were both deemed too expensive by the city housing
authorities.
Post-war welfare state: Austrification

It took some time before post-war Vienna and the Second Republic were able to
pick up the threads of the dialogue between bourgeois and social democratic city
initiated in Red Vienna and to engage its dialectics. Architecturally, Red Vienna was
highly problematic in the post-war context. In terms of aesthetics as well as typology,
the buildings were considered retrograde.22 Even before Tafuris critique, Leonardo
Benevolo in the 1950s declared the Viennese Hfe to be of greater sociological than
architectural interest.23 They seemed to lack just those features that for CIAM had
distinguished the German and Dutch inter-war housing: a unied planning concept,
advanced building techniques, Taylorized living environments and modernist formal
aesthetics. In addition, Cold War dynamics and especially Austrias shared border with
the Iron Curtain made it difficult to celebrate the socio-political agenda and achievements of Red Vienna or even its historical signicance as the site of the rst armed
resistance to Fascism by a European party of the Left.24
There were signicant differences in terms of political and social objectives
between Red Vienna and the post-war welfare state. Its purpose was not that of Red
Vienna, to turn the city into a model of municipal socialism that would pregure the
coming socialist society; part of a slow revolution toward state socialism. Rather it
aimed to re-congure capitalism into a more sustainable and successful version from
which both capital and labour would benet. In the case of Austria, its goal was also to
embed the post-war Republic in the new socio-economic nexus of western Europe,
against the perceived threat represented by the eastern bloc just over the border.
Austrication, which began with the termination of the Allied occupation in
1955, involved legal codication of Viennas social welfare system according to the
Allegmeine Sozialversicherungsgesetz (ASVG, General Social Insurance Law). In the
rst post-war decade, reconstruction was the priority, with the emphasis placed on
technical infrastructure: roads, bridges, hydraulic engineering and transportation, in
particular the construction of an underground rail system. Housing, though secondary,
was also part of the reconstruction effort; in 1954 Vienna celebrated the completion
of 100,000 new dwellings. Fast-track production was the catchword.
The rst large-scale post-war housing project undertaken in Vienna clearly shows a
marked shift away from the urban and architectural ideas that informed the buildings
of Red Vienna. Per Albin Hansson estate (19471951, 19541955, by Franz Schuster,
Friedrich Pangratz, Stephan Simony, Max Fellerer and Eugen Wrle), named after the
Swedish prime minister in gratitude for Swedish Aid funding, is a clear declaration of
ideological and formal distance from Red Vienna (Figure 2.6). It combines pre-war
CIAM site planning models (parallel rows of Zeilenbauten in ex-urban Siedlungen) with
National Socialist Heimatstil (national vernacular style) modernism (brick bearing
construction, small windows, steeply pitched hipped roofs) to create a curiously
unsatisfactory hybrid.25
Figure 2.6 Friedrich Pangratz, Franz Schuster, Stephan Simony, Max Fellerer and Eugen Wrle, Per
Albin Hansson Siedlung (Oesterreichische Nationalbibliothek).
39
40
Eve Blau
In the late 1950s the reorientation of urban spatial policy away from Red Vienna,
and in alignment with peripheral models of city expansion, gained momentum. Under
the direction of Roland Rainer in the late 1950s and 1960s, the Vienna City Planning
office promulgated this CIAM-based model of suburban expansion.26 For Rainer,
suburban expansion was a way of strengthening the autonomy of the old Viennese
suburbs as areas with their own distinctive character. New building in these areas,
Rainer insisted, was to be modern, but also (like that of the suburbs themselves) highdensity low-rise construction. Although to Rainers dismay most suburban projects of
the 1950s disregarded his directive, his ideas did resonate with a younger generation of
architects who were eager to connect Vienna to international modernism. The prime
example of a work motivated by both impulses is Carl Aubck, Carl Rssler, and
Adolf Hochs Vorgartenstrasse housing project (19591962), a settlement of mediumrise modernist slabs in Viennas outlying district XX.27
During this period, federal and municipal planning and housing agencies were
mired in bureaucracy, resistant to new ideas, and set on enforcing restrictive norms.
In the early 1960s these included a limited amount of prefabrication: industrially
produced large panel wall components (based on the French Camus system),
but no effort was put into developing the system further. One of these projects,
Grossfeldsiedlung (19661973) in Favoriten, a mix of high rise towers and slabs, is
architecturally impoverished, but because of the high level of social infrastructure and
amenities, was from the beginning valued by tenants.28
In the 1960s Austrias priority, especially in Vienna, was economic growth: creation
of jobs, attracting business and manufacturing, providing credits, improving workforce
potential through advanced training and childcare facilities, among other measures. With
regard to housing construction, a new system of nancing was adopted. Federal allocation
of long-term low-interest bearing loans, through which it was possible to nance up
to 90 per cent of building costs, gave enormous impetus to development by non-prot
cooperative housing construction societies. Rents based on redemption costs were higher
than those in communal housing (built directly by the municipality) but affordable, and
reected the general economic improvement in the country. Gradually, communal housing
construction was phased out in favor of cooperative housing development. The annual
rate of production in Vienna in the late 1960s was approximately 14,000 apartments.29
By the mid-1960s, in Vienna as elsewhere, a new generation of architects was emerging,
among them Hans Hollein, Walter Pichler, Raimund Abraham, and Wolf Prix, who had
all been educated in Vienna after the war and then spent time abroad (Pichler in Paris,
the others in the United States and the UK). Associated with Gnther Feuersteins antiacademic clubseminar at the Technical University, in which the anti-functionalist critique
of modern architecture took shape in Vienna during these years, this group constituted an
avant-gardist movement that gained traction in the slipstream of the international student
movement and groups such as the Vienna Actionists, Superstudio, and Archigram (Peter
Cook called them The Austrian Phenomenon in Experimental Architecture, 1970). They
declared that the Austrian welfare state was producing building and especially housing that
was devoid of architecture and called for a return to urbanity in Austrian modernism.30
Following Archigram, this new generation comprising Hollein, Pichler, Gnther
Domenig and Elfried Huth, and the collectives Werkgruppe Graz (Eugen Gross,
Friedrich Gross-Rannsbach, Hermann Pichler and Werner Hollomey), Znd-up
(Timo Huber, Bertram Mayer, Michael Phringer, Hermann Simbck) and Missing
Link (Otto Kapnger, Adolf Krischanitz, Angela Hareiter) embraced megastructure
as one of the few remaining arenas for place-based social interaction in late-industrial
society and a way out of the cul-de-sac of bureaucratic functionalism. Megastructure
emerged (along with mat building) in European architectural circles in 1959 at the
meeting of CIAM in Otterlo at which Kenzo Tange presented Kiyonori Kikutakes
Marine City project along with his own Tokyo City Hall and Kagawa Prefectural
Office.31 However, the term megastructure and arguably the determining typological
features of megastructure itself were rst dened within the Japanese Metabolist
Movement a few years later by Fumihiko Maki in 1964. According to Maki, megastructure designated a particular kind of hybrid urban-architectural construction (not
just a large building) consisting of a massive supporting frame in which the functions of
a city or part of a city could be housed.32 One of the essential ideas of megastructure
was the interplay of two separate, but interdependent components: a structural form
(designed by the architect), and various habitable containers, conceived as individual
transient elements (that were beyond the control of the architect). In other words,
megastructure was informed by a conception of the role of architecture in the welfare
state as mediating between individual and collective identities by creating a structural framework within which transitional zones between public and private space and
spheres of activity could enhance collective behaviour.
The attraction of megastructure as an idea in the 1960s was compelling: it seemed
to offer a way of resolving conicts between planning and spontaneity, between the
urban and architectural, between large- and small-scale design, and static and kinetic
elements. Most of all, it offered a way of integrating elements of urbanism (building
and street) into a unied architectonic composition; a way of reclaiming the city
from planning and for architecture and design. In architectural discourses of the time
megastructure was part of an expanded notion of architecture in its full complexity
and multiple relationships and connections physical, social, political at the instrumental scale of the city. The ludic aspect of English megastructure and especially of
Archigram was embraced by Hollein, Prix, the Znd-up group and Pichler. They
saw their work as combining an indigenous Austrian avant-garde, identied with
Frederick Kiesler and his Endless House project (19581959), with elements of Pop
Art, and the kinetic and nomadic, as well as the techno-fetishistic electronic and
pneumatic elements of Archigrams repertory to create a manifesto architecture of
which Holleins Everything is Architecture (1968) became the key text.33
It is not without signicance that the radicalization of architectural culture in
Vienna and other Austrian cities with important architecture schools (Graz in
particular) in the 1970s coincided with a period of liberal reforms in Austrian
social policy under Bruno Kreisky, leader of the Austrian Socialist Party (SP) and
Chancellor from 19701983. During that period, funds for housing construction
were allocated in ways that allowed for the reengagement of municipal planning and
housing policies with architectural ideas.34 Ironically, the rst megastructural housing
project built in Vienna was not the work of the architectural avant-garde. This was
the Wohnpark Alt-Erlaa (19681985), designed by Harry Glck, an architect with
a large and successful commercial practice and connections to the SP (Figure 2.7).
The project was built and managed by the city-owned cooperative GESIBA.35
41
Eve Blau
42
Figure 2.7 Harry Glck, Kurt Hlaweniczka and Requat & Reinthaller & Partner, Wohnpark Alt-Erlaa, Vienna, 19681985, photographed by Jouri Kanters.
A true megastructure, or group of megastructures, Wohnpark Alt-Erlaa is

composed of enormous ziggurat-like infrastructural objects (the forms recall some of
the great Public Works Administration dams of New Deal America). What do these
objects have to do with the interwar superblocks? First of all Alt-Erlaa has the scale
and wealth of facilities of the red superblocks: more than 3,000 apartments, a school,
kindergarten, medical centre, sports and leisure facilities (including sauna and rooftop
swimming pools), a shopping centre, and underground station. Even the superblocks
garden courtyards are gathered into terraced gardens that climb the buildings facades.
Heralded at the time as red superblocks turned green (garden) megastructures,
Glcks terraced ziggurats actually have important (although largely unrecognized)
roots in inter-war housing models developed in Red Vienna. In particular, they draw
on Looss and Strnads Terrassenhaus projects of the early 1920s, with which Glck
re-engaged in 1971 when (working with the housing association Junge Generation)
he built a Terrassenhaus with stepped back prole and large garden terraces on the
Inzersdorferstrasse, close to the original site of Looss project.36 Glcks megastructures with their rich supply of leisure facilities (in addition to the rooftop swimming
pools and saunas, there were tennis courts, and other sport facilities, mini golf, party
rooms, and shops) can be understood as refashioning the proletarian Wohnkultur,
which informed the interwar projects, for postwar consumer culture. Both Alt-Erlaa
and Inzersdorferstrasse reveal the potential of the megastructure to generate collective
space in an ex-urban setting. But they also reveal the fundamentally anti-urban
character of the type, substituting privatized social space for the public political space
of the street. In Vienna, as elsewhere, megastructure, with its compulsion to design
at the scale of the city but with an architectural level of detail and control, was soon
abandoned by architects because it entailed a scale of organization that was too large
and complex to be contained by an architectural object.
But the impulse toward high-density development and urban complexity that
informed the megastructural turn did issue in typological innovation in Vienna. Am
Schpfwerk (19671980) a model project for the city of Vienna (2,151 dwellings)
designed by Victor Hufnagl and Wolfgang and Traude Windbrechtinger et al., builds
on and merges Red Viennas courtyard typologies with Looss and Strnads proletarian
Terrassenhaus counter-types into a vast complex of high-, low-, and medium-rise
building forms. Am Schpfwerk offered a range of different dwelling types as well as
spatial and formal complexity and urban ambition that had been absent from housing
and urban design in Vienna since the 1920s.37
In general, appreciation of Viennas historical fabric and distinctive spatial morphologies increased over the course of the 1970s. The architecture and urban project of
Red Vienna in particular became both reference and critical focus. Interest in Red
Viennas architecture was spurred by the revisionist trend in architectural history
during those years. But it was also motivated by the revival of interest in the theory
and politics of Austro-Marxism, as Euro-communist and socialist groups (particularly
after 1968) renewed their efforts to nd a third way between orthodox MarxistLeninism and reformist socialism. To leftist political groups in Europe particularly
in Germany, Austria, and Italy Austro-Marxism seemed to provide a possible model
for a new democratic and pluralist, non-Soviet left in Europe. During this period,
new institutions in Austria became centres for research on Austrian Social Democracy
43
44
Eve Blau
and the history of the First Republic, including the Institute for Contemporary
History at Vienna University and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for the History of
the Working-Class Movement at Linz. Detailed research on the building programme
also began at this time with the groundbreaking work of Renate Schweitzer (later
Banik-Schweitzer), who together with other historians at the Wiener Stadt- und
Landesarchiv (Vienna city and state archive) and Ludwig Bolzmann Institute fr
Stadtgeschichtsforschung (Institute for Urban History) undertook a monumental study
of the socio-spatial history of Vienna.38 Parallel to this effort, architectural historian
Manfredo Tafuri began his analysis of the experience of Red Vienna as part of a larger
research project examining the architecture of social democracy which was carried out
under his direction at the Institute of Architectural History at the University of Venice
in the 1970s. Architects and planners in Vienna (most notably Friedrich Achleitner,
Hermann Czech, Otto Kapnger and Adolf Krischanitz and Wilhelm Kainrath), who
also engaged in historical research during these years, were primarily concerned with
the signicance of the building programme of Red Vienna for current practice: how
to come to terms with the contradictory political legacy of the programme, and to
establish meaningful connection to the traditions of building and urban thought that
informed it without either wholesale rejection or replication of its forms?
In this context, the Wohnen Morgen housing complex (19741979), a commission
awarded to Wilhelm Holzbauer in a national competition, embodies both the promise
and conict of that moment (Figure 2.8). A reinterpretation of the late-nineteenthcentury urban grid (the regulation plan), and of the courtyards of Red Vienna, but also
of the modernist slab, row-house and Terrassenhaus types developed in Vienna and
elsewhere in the 1920s and 1930s, it directly engages the existing (capitalist) urban fabric
and the social democratic and modernist housing typologies that sought to unravel it.
The result is a proliferation of transitional spaces, part public, part private, that afford
inhabitants of the buildings remarkable variety and exibility of use. Wohnen Morgen
entails a fundamentally civic conception of urban space, the character of which is
to provide a clear organizational structure at the same time as maximum options for
using and experiencing it. The principle of freedom and exibility extends to the
interiors that incorporate the socio-spatial dynamics, multiple coding, and complexity
of both the Loosian volumetric Raumplan and the red Gemeindebauten.39 Wohnen
Morgen, which resonates with the complex historical dialectics, urban ambition, scale
and architectural values of the best of Viennas red superblocks of the 1920s (without
copying their forms), marks the high point of the experimental moment in urban
housing design and the collaborative project between architecture and the welfare
state in postwar Vienna. It also reveals the critical signicance of the municipal origins
of the Austrian welfare state and its architecture. Even after Austrication, the social
welfare programmes in Austria retained their municipal focus and urban focus. Social
housing programmes in particular were run by municipalities which administered and
adjusted federal policies to the particularities of each urban context.40
The project also reveals the extent to which Viennese architectural culture is
saturated with its own history and the accumulated knowledge of the urban architectural practices that shaped it. The building programme of Red Vienna had drawn
on that legacy, assimilating and turning to its own purposes the urban morphologies,
traditions of building, as well as the plans and visionary projects developed in that
45
Figure 2.8 Wilhelm Holzbauer, Wohnen Morgen housing complex, Vienna, 19741979 (copyright
Architekturzentrum Wien).
46
Eve Blau
context over time. The post-war welfare state, shaped in its image, continued the
process and practice of appropriation; aspiring to impose itself on the city as a unitary
structure by blurring the boundary between architecture and urbanism.
Today, Austria still has an extensive social housing programme, although the institutional structures put in place by the welfare state are gradually being replaced by
neoliberal instruments and private development initiatives.41 But the persistence of
both continuity and innovation that characterize the Vienna housing model suggests
answers to the questions posed by this book: what did the welfare state do for architecture, and what did architecture do for the welfare state? With regard to the latter,
the words of Charles A. Gulick written just after the First World War about the
building programme of Red Vienna, are particularly resonant:
Probably more than anything else, the city houses [Gemeindebauten] made the
Vienna worker realize that he was not a propertyless stranger in a society that
was not his the stone witnesses of a ten-year building policy reminded the
men and women of Vienna of the peaceful forces of democracy which created
through the people and for the people.42
The architecture produced by the welfare state gave the values and social policies of
the welfare state itself physical form and visibility. The welfare state in turn provided
opportunities for architects. But more than that, by removing the construction of
housing, schools, hospitals, and other social institutional structures from the market, it
made it possible for designers and planners to experiment and to innovate.
The long history of the relationship between architecture and Social Democratic
welfare policy in Austria reveals another element a function of the urban focus and
politically-charged context of Vienna in which that policy was shaped that is, the
role of practice. Welfare state architecture was inherently strategic; it had explicit
social and political objectives and ambitions it was an instrument of policy. The
connection of politics and social action with architecture and urban form was direct.
The urban architectural strategies developed over time were embedded in the fabric of
the city, where they were legible to subsequent generations of practitioners (architects
and planning officials) and available for application to conditions and contexts that
may have had little to do with the original context in which they were developed.
In this way the strategies of the 1920s for socializing the spaces of the bourgeois
city by interpolating superblocks into the old city fabric informed the strategies of
architects in the 1960s for generating new urban fabric on ex-urban sites, and both
those previous episodes inform the efforts of planning officials and architects today
to deal with current issues of immigration, diversity, preservation and postindustrial
decay. This process and Viennas long experience of architecture aligned with Social
Democratic purpose help us to understand the signicance of urban architectural
practice as not only a matter of intervening in the city, but also of reading the city
as a project, in terms of the production and proliferation of architectural knowledge
produced in a particular place over time. Since Red Vienna, each subsequent generation has engaged and sought solutions to the social issues of its time, and in doing so
has engaged with the historical fabric of the city and with its embedded practices and
urban architectural solutions to the problems of earlier moments.
Notes
1 The rst welfare provisions in Austria were introduced in the last decades of the AustroHungarian Empire; they included poverty relief and a limited amount of housing. See
F. Czeike, Liberale, Christlichsoziale und Sozialdemokratische Kommunalpolitik (18611934):
Dargestellt am Beispiel der Gemeinde Wien. Vienna: Verlag fr Geschichte und Politik, 1962,
6182. An indispensable critical assessment of the political and sociocultural project of Red
Vienna is A. Rabinbach, The Crisis of Austrian Socialism: From Red Vienna to Civil War,
19271934, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.
2 E. Blau, The Architecture of Red Vienna, 3236. See also Rabinbach, Crisis of Austrian
Socialism, 21; M. Seliger and K. Ucakar, Wien: Politische Geschichte, 2 vols. Vienna: Jugend
und Volk, 1985, 2: 992993, 9991000, 10231026; M. Seliger, Sozialdemokratie und
Kommunalpolitik in Wien: Zu einigen Aspekten sozialdemokratischer Politik in der Vor- und
Zwischenkriegszeit, Wiener Schriften, Heft 49, Vienna: Jugend und Volk, 1980, 6264.
3 With the exception of the period 19661970, when the VP gained a majority in
Parliament, which it lost in 1970.
4 R. Neutra, Auftrag fr Morgen, Hamburg: Claassen Verlag, 1962, 179.
5 A. Loos, Das Andere. Ein Blatt zur Einfhrung abendlndischen Kultur in sterreich. Vienna,
1903.
6 The classic political and economic history of inter-war Austria is C. A. Gulick, Austria from
Habsburg to Hitler, 2 vols, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1948.
7 R. Danneberg, Vienna under Socialist Rule, trans. H. J. Stenning, London: Labour Party,
1928, 52. See Gulick, Austria, 2: 1367.
8 Rabinbach, Crisis of Austrian Socialism, 30. See also F. Czeike, Wirtschafts- und Sozialpolitik der
Gemeinde Wien in der Ersten Republik (19191934), Wiener Schriften, Heft 6, 11, Vienna:
Jugend und Volk, 1958, 1959; R. Schweitzer, Der staatlich gefrderte, der kommunale und
gemeinntzige Wohnungs- and Siedlungsbau in Oesterreich bis 1945, 2 vols., PhD diss.,
Technische Universitt Wien, 1972.
9 For detailed accounts of the municipal programme, see Blau, Red Vienna, 2047; H.
Gruber, Red Vienna: Experiment in Working-Class Culture, 19191934, New York: Oxford
University Press, 1991; Czeike, Wirtschafts- und Sozialpolitik. The municipality itself
produced its own account of the municipal programmes: Das Neue Wien, 4 vols., Vienna:
Gemeinde Wien, 19261928. For a selection of Austro-Marxist texts, see T. Bottomore and
P. Goode, eds., Austro-Marxism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978.
10 Blau, Red Vienna, 136151.
11 For the Weimar Siedlungen, see M. Tafuri and F. Dal Co, Modern Architecture, trans. R. E.
Wolf, New York: Electa/Rizzoli, 1986, 186187; C. Quiring, W. Voigt, P. C. Schmal, E.
Herrell, eds., Ernst May 18861970, Munich/London: Prestel, 2011; H. Klotz, ed., Ernst
May und das neue Frankfurt 19251930, Berlin: Ernst und Sohn, 1986; M. T., Sozialpolitik
and the City in Weimar Germany, in The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-gardes and
Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s, trans. P. dAcierno and R. Connolly, Cambridge,
Mass.: The MIT Press, 1987, 197223.
12 Tafuri and Dal Co, Modern Architecture, 193.
13 For a detailed account of the building programme and the role of the Wagner School, see
Blau, Red Vienna, 238249.
14 In the period of economic crisis in the immediate post-war years, the municipality acquired
large tracts of unbuilt land remaining from the last major modernization programme in
Vienna in the 1890s, when large scale infrastructure systems: municipal railway, tramlines,
sewage, drinking water, electricity, gas, were put in place; the rivers were canalized and
a new ring road (the Grtelstrasse) was built on the site of the outer city walls. For the
late nineteenth century urban modernization programme carried out by the Christian
Socialist administration under mayor Karl Lueger see, P. Kortz, Wien am Anfang des XX.
Jahrhunderts, 2 vols., Vienna: Verlag von Gerlach und Wiedling, 19051906; F. Czeike and
R. Banik-Schweitzer, eds., Historischer Atlas der Stadt Wien, Vienna: Jugend und Volk, 1981.
15 Quotation is from Gemeinderats-Sitzung (City Council Meeting), 21 September 1923, in
Stenographische Protokolle (B29/15): 2492. For discussion of the Generalregulierungsplan,
see Blau, Red Vienna, 7478.
47
48
Eve Blau
16 For the Terrassenhaus projects, see Blau, Red Vienna, 299303.

17 O. Neurath, Neu-Wiens Gesamtarchitektureine Aufgabe des Proletariats, ArbeiterZeitung, 28 October 1923, 5. Neuraths proposal owes a considerable debt to Otto
Wagners theoretical project: Die Grostadt. Eine Studie ber diese, Vienna 1911. Reprinted
in O. A. Graf, Otto Wagner. Das Werk des Architekten., 3 vols., Schriften des Instituts fr
Kunstgeschichte, Akademie der bildenden Knste, Wien., Vienna, Cologne, Graz: Bhlau
Verlag, 1985, II: 640647. It was published in English in 1912 as The Development of
a Great City, by Otto Wagner: Together with an Appreciation of the Author by A. D.
Hamlin, Architectural Record, 31 (New York, 1912), 485500.
18 O. Neurath, Wie sollen die neuen 25,000 Wohnungen gebaut werden? Arbeiter-Zeitung,
24 October 1923, 6.
19 Strnads project was published in Das Kunstblatt (1924): 110. It seems curiously reminiscent
of John Nashs 1811 design for Regents Park in London.
20 For the pre-war history of the Terrassenhaus, see R. Pommer and C. F. Otto, Weissenhof,
1927 and the Modern Movement in Architecture, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991,
113115. For Le Corbusiers immeuble villas and maison Citrohan exhibited along with
the Ville Contemporaine at the Salon dAutomne, see Le Corbusier, Urbanisme (Paris: Cres,
1925) translated by F. Etchells as The City of Tomorrow, London: J. Rodker, 1929.
21 A. Loos, Das Grand Hotel Babylon, Die Neue Wirtschaft, 20 December 1923, 1011.
22 As, for example, in the analysis of Red Vienna by Marxist architectural historian, M. Tafuri,
ed., Vienna Rossa: la politica residenziale nella Vienna socialista, 19191933, Milan: Electa,
1980.
23 L. Benevolo, History of Modern Architecture, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971, 2:
549.
24 See A. Rabinbach, ed., The Austrian Socialist Experiment: Social Democracy and AustroMarxism, 19181934, Boulder: Westview Press, 1985, 3.
25 For Heimatstil in the Viennese context, see Blau, Red Vienna, 355356.
26 See R. Rainer, Das Werk Des Architekten 19272003: Vom Sessel zum Stadtraum: geplant
errichtet verndert vernichtet, Vienna: Springer, 2003.
27 For Carl Aubck, see M. Kuzmany, Carl Aubck, Architekt, 19241993: Gestalten der
modernen Welt, Salzburg: Verlag Anton Pustet, 2009.
28 See G. Kaiser and M. Platzer, eds., Architecture in Austria in the 20th and 21st Centuries.
Architecturzentrum Wien, Basel, Boston, Berlin: Birkhuser, 2006.
29 R. Schweitzer, Kommunale Wohnungspolitik, Summa (November 1976): 2530.
30 I. Marte, ed., The Austrian Phenomenon: Konzeptionen Experimente Wien Graz 19581973,
Vienna: Architekturzentrum Wien, 2004; Kaiser and Platzer, Architecture in Austria,
192209.
31 See E. Mumford, The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 19281960, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 2000, 258265; Z. Lin, Kengo Tange and the Metabolist Movement: Urban Utopias of
Modern Japan, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2010, 78.
32 See R. Banham, Appendix: Maki on Megastructure, Megastructure: Urban Futures of the
Recent Past, New York: Harper and Row, 1976, 217218.
33 See D. Bogner and P. Noever, eds., Frederick J. Kiesler: Endless Space, Los Angeles:
MAK-Center for Art and Architecture, 2001; H. Hollein, Alles ist Architektur, Bau, 23.
Jg, Heft 1/2, Vienna 1968; P. Cook, Experimental Architecture, New York: Universe Books,
1970.
34 Schweitzer, Kommunaler Wohnungspolitik, 29.
35 K. Freisitzer and H. Glck, Sozialer Wohnbau: Entstehung-Zustand-Alternativen, Vienna:
Molden Edition, 1979, 75102.
36 Ibid.
37 For Am Schpfwerk, see Kaiser and Platzer, Architecture in Austria, 312.
38 Czeike and Banik-Schweitzer, eds., Historischer Atlas der Stadt Wien. For publications of the
Boltzmann and other institutions, see R. John Rath, Writings on Contemporary Austrian
History, 19181934 in Rabinbach, ed., The Austrian Socialist Experiment.
39 For Loos and the Raumplan, a three dimensional, volumetric rather than two dimensional
planimetric development of architectural space, see M. Risselada, ed., Raumplan Versus Plan
Libre, Rotterdam: 010, 2008.
40 W. Frster, ed., Housing in Vienna: Innovative, Social and Ecological, Vienna: Architekturzentrum
Wien, 2008.
41 The Vienna Model, an exhibition that traveled through the United States in 20132014
showcasing recent housing built in Vienna, attests to the combination of continuity and
innovation that characterize that self-referential model.
42 C. A. Gulick, Austria from Habsburg to Hitler, 1: 504.
49
Figure 3.0 Catholic housing as seen by socialists (above) and socialist housing as seen by Catholics (below),
Renaat Braem, 1953 (Archives dArchitecture Moderne, Brussels).
3
THE WELFARE STATE IN FLANDERS:
DE-PILLARIZATION AND THE
NEBULOUS CITY
The Belgian welfare state came about, as most others in western Europe, as a political
project at the end of the Second World War. The Social Pact that was signed in April
1944 between representatives of the labour movement, leaders of the employers
organizations and a few high-ranking civil servants, provided the basis for what in
subsequent years became a well-elaborated system of social insurance, covering health
care, unemployment, old age pensions, child benet and the annual vacation.1 In
Belgium the political basis for the grandiose new social contract came forth from the
experience of the war, from which rich as well as poor had suffered, giving rise to
the belief that social justice on an impartial basis should be guaranteed by the State.2
In most European countries this resulted in strong legislation which offered social
security to the majority of the population and which was administered through a new
bureaucracy. This was paralleled by the establishment of planning institutions aimed
at facilitating the redistribution of wealth, knowledge and political power. Hence all
of western Europe saw the rise of heavily subsidized housing estates and social infrastructure, such as health facilities, cultural or community centres and sports facilities.
The way in which these amenities were planned, nanced and managed varied considerably among the different nation-states. In some countries, such as the Netherlands
or Sweden, planning was centralized and the distribution of amenities was carefully
administered by national institutions. In other countries, such as Belgium, a more
decentralized policy prevailed, which enabled local initiatives taken by municipalities
or cooperatives, helped by subsidies from the central state.
The emergence of the welfare state in Belgium was bound up with political evolutions based on a logic of pillarization.3 Belgium was one of those European states
that were characterized by this peculiar arrangement of political ideologies and social
structures.4 The term pillarization refers to a situation in which different ideological
sections of society in the Belgian case Catholics, Socialists and Liberals (the latter
smaller and less important) organize themselves as pillars: tightly-knit wholes of
affiliated and interconnected organizations that serve their members with respect to
housing, health care, employment issues and other areas of life.5 The deployment of
52
the social welfare state system in post-war Belgium was thus initially largely organized
along ideological lines. Social security was, for instance, distributed through unions
and mutualiteiten (health insurance organizations) that bore clear ideological connotations. The built environment also bore the imprint of pillarization, especially with
respect to a lot of what was built in the 1950s and early 1960s.
This chapter discusses how the Belgian-built environment developed as a result
of welfare state policies. For reasons that will become obvious later on, the focus
is mainly on Flanders6; the northern, Flemish-speaking region of the country. The
paper will show how the effects of pillarization on housing and socio-cultural facilities
gradually diminished, giving way to a spatial structure of the territory more inuenced
by linguistic differences. Meanwhile, public investments were also increasingly fuelled
by socio-economic considerations aiming at the even development of all regions. Thus
new road infrastructures made the whole territory accessible, stimulating a growth
pattern that ultimately resulted in a landscape of sprawl the so-called nebulous city.
Housing in the post-war period

Pillarization certainly played an important role in the realm of the family and home
cultures. In Belgium, education in home culture was taken up by many different
socio-cultural organizations, which were part of (or integrated in) the different pillars
and, as a result, gave ideologically coloured advice. In the 1920s and 1930s notable
differences of opinion could be detected among these socio-cultural organizations regarding themes such as the adequacy of apartment living (desirable or not?),
the parlour (separate from the kitchen or not?), the chimney (place for the cross,
according to Catholic organizations) and the kitchen (a small working kitchen or a
large living kitchen?).7 Such differentiation became less pronounced throughout the
post-war decades, even though each organization still focused on specic themes and
methods to mediate between the experts and their members.8 The overall effect of this
differentiated mediation was that the impact of the inhabitants became much stronger.
Since organizations were competing with one another to attract members, their
offerings in terms of services and advice responded quite quickly to feedback from
the members. The modernist ideas that their experts tried to convey to the members
were thus rather easily modied when it became clear that the response of users and
inhabitants was not very positive.
A telling example of this was the attempt at education in home culture made
by the Catholic Association of Farming Women in the 1960s and 1970s.9 This
association, the Flemish (Dutch-speaking) section of which had many more members
than the Francophone one, regularly published books with model homes aimed at
a large audience, and also supported a well-organised Dienst Wonen (Home Service).
Published from 1953 onwards, the books were remarkably successful and became
manuals widely read by a variety of prospective homebuilders (not just farmers). The
association promoted so-called exemplary dwellings or show houses, inhabited by
members of the association and open for visitors at regular intervals. While the early
publications and exemplary dwellings of the 1950s and early 1960s clearly favoured
modernist design ideas, later ones were far less strict in obeying modernist prescriptions. Thus in the late 1960s the association supported a hybrid type of dwelling
The Welfare State in Flanders
that was modern in oor plan and equipment but traditional in appearance. This
development was due to the fact that the organization was client-oriented rather than
committed to modernism as such10 which was a major difference compared to what
happened in some other European countries (for example, the Dutch correct living
from the 1940s onwards11).
In contrast to education in home culture, where the differences between the
different socio-cultural organisations diminished in the post-war period, when it came
to building typology radically different views were held by the Christian Democrats
(or Catholics) and the Socialists (later Social Democrats). Single-family houses owned
by their inhabitants were denitely preferred by the Christian Democrats while the
Socialists supported rented apartments that gave their occupants more freedom to
engage in social or political organizations (since they did not have to spend time
cultivating the garden or undertaking maintenance). Shortly after the Second World
War, the coalition government (which consisted primarily of Christian Democrats
and Socialists) introduced two housing acts which conrmed these divergent logics:
the De Taeye Act of 1948, a Catholic housing act stimulating private enterprise, and
the Brunfaut Act of 1949, a socialist one promoting public housing. The De Taeye
Act encouraged small-scale private initiative by offering subsidies to private builders
and by setting up a mortgage system that allowed builders to borrow up to 90 per cent
of the value of the property. It was benecial not only to individual homebuilders but
also to Catholic related organizations, which initiated the building of large estates of
one-family homes that they could sell cheaply thanks to the De Taeye subsidies. The
Brunfaut Act on the other hand was most relied upon by socialist inspired housing
corporations which used it to fund the collective infrastructure needed for large social
housing estates with apartment blocks rather than one-family houses (Figure 3.0).12
The De Taeye Act in particular has had a major inuence on residential patterns
in Belgium, particularly in the northern (Flemish-speaking) region of the country.13
In all there were about 100,000 beneciaries during the rst ve years (19481953),
an average of 20,000 new dwellings per year. Many of these dwellings were not built
as part of a larger scheme but as a one-off enterprise initiated by the owner/inhabitant who commissioned an architect to design the house and a contractor to build
it. A signicant portion of new homes was built in new low-rise neighbourhoods
that combined the benets of the Brunfaut and the De Taeye measures relying
on the former to receive subsidies for infrastructure (road and services) and on the
latter for lowering the threshold for prospective buyers of a modest one family home.
Structured neighbourhoods with high and middle-rise public housing were also built
and some rather good ones, like those designed by Renaat Braem in Antwerp
but quantitatively they never formed a major component in the construction of new
homes. The Belgian need for housing was met largely through the De Taeye Act.
Because of the dominance of the Christian Democratic parties within Belgian
post-war policies, the Belgian welfare state favoured the family as a unit, leading to a
spatial pattern with a multitude of single-family homes on individual plots, inhabited
by families of owner-occupiers. As in other predominantly Catholic countries such
as Italy, the idea of the citizen as a home-owner prevailed (in Italys case as a reaction
to the communist vision of the collectivization of the property, resulting in one of
the highest percentages of house-owners in Europe today).14 It is no coincidence that
53
54
both Belgium and Italy have their own terminology for the particular spatial condition
that post-war housing development created; the nevelstad in Belgium, or, in Italian
the citt diffusa the nebulous city. Such an approach differs signicantly from the
one taken in other parts of western Europe. In the Netherlands for example, public
housing was seen as one of the major instruments of urban planning, resulting in a
much higher percentage of collectively built neighbourhoods and also in far more
compact cities.15 In France and the UK, public housing was a major ingredient of the
grands ensembles or the new towns, that were closely linked with welfare state policies
and that were used to stem the tendencies towards urban sprawl.16 In Sweden, the
role of the state was also paramount in matters of housing, not, however, directed
at families, but rather at individuals (since Swedish citizens were supposed to obtain
greater individual autonomy through greater dependency on the state, bypassing the
mediating role of the family).17
Post-war spatial planning: a nebulous city with an economic

backbone?
It was only in 1962, more than a decade after the De Taeye and Brunfaut Acts had
been introduced, that the rst urban planning law was instituted in Belgium. The
relationship between housing policy and urban planning in the country was thus, up
until the mid-1960s, largely non-existent. Although some intellectuals such as the
Dutch architect Carel Weeber have defended the Belgian laissez-faire approach the
Belgian wild living (het wilde wonen) as he called it as a valid alternative to the stern
rigidity of (for instance) Dutch housing developments,18 most scholars who have
studied the Belgian post-war urbanization process have criticized its unregulated and
disorderly nature. One of the rst critiques of the countrys (lack of) spatial planning
policy was produced in 1968 by Belgian modernist Renaat Braem, the well-known
pamphlet The Ugliest Country in the World (Het Lelijkste Land ter Wereld), which
described the Belgian urban landscape as a patchwork sewn together by a madman.19
Later authors who have studied this process from a greater distance have often joined
Braem in his critique and described Belgian post-war urbanization as the outcome of
an accidental conuence of autonomous factors and actors20 with little or no fundamental consideration of the countrys spatial future.21
In a recent publication on Belgiums post-war spatial development, Building
the Economic Backbone of the Belgian Welfare State,22 architectural historian Michael
Ryckewaert suggests that although there was no official spatial planning policy in
the country up until the early 1960s, a sort of implicit urbanism can nonetheless be
identied. Ryckewaert contends that even though the various models proposed in the
context of CIAM (Congrs Internationaux dArchitecture Moderne) conceived the city as a
set of distinct urban functions dwelling, work, leisure and transport the work and
transport components, and the spatial concepts that these two components adhere
to, are seldom studied as the deliberate result of urban planning. By researching the
spatial concepts behind these two components which automatically implies taking
their economic and political rationality into account as an integral part of the spatial
decision-making process Ryckewaert discovered that large infrastructure developments were often used as instruments to kick-start the urbanization process in the
countrys dispersed geographical regions. He pinpoints the highway, canal and railway
networks, along with industrial zones, as the main structuring elements of the Belgian
territory. Ryckewaerts thesis recalls an earlier suggestion made by the architectural
historians Geert Bekaert and Francis Strauven in their seminal book Building in
Belgium 19451970 (1971) who argued that:
It is not the architect and his constructions that shape our environment, but
the road-builder, who in a completely novel manner decides how our milieu
is structured. The importance of public works is no longer predominantly
indebted to the buildings that this ministry builds, but to the communication
models it realizes and the new environment that springs from these models.
In the period under investigation [19451970], roads have become the most
important constructions.23
One of the most sweeping infrastructure programmes launched was the 1954 Road Fund
Act. It provided the institutional framework for the modernization of the Belgian road
network. Thanks to this Road Fund Act, the Belgian sections of the Trans European
Highway network were completed, which satised the need to develop industrial and
touristic corridors and which transformed Brussels into the highway hub (or traffic
bottleneck) that it is today.24 Besides the Road Fund Act, also the Antwerp Ten Year Plan
(19561965) and the Canal Act of 1957 had a major impact on the modernization of the
Belgian transport infrastructure.25 Both programmes contributed to the improvement of
the Belgian waterways. The main goal of the Antwerp Ten Year Plan, for instance, was
to enable the port of Antwerp to compete with Rotterdam in the Netherlands, which
had been reconstructed and modernized between 1947 and 1955 and extended by 2000
hectares, making Antwerp outdated in comparison.26 These extensive infrastructure
programmes not only generated much-needed employment opportunities for workers in
the post-war era, but also instigated urban development in different regions and led to a
boom in the construction industry. They also greatly facilitated the sprawl of individually
built houses, supported by the nancing of the De Taeye Act.
Post-war development of leisure infrastructure

Housing, work and transport were not the only welfare-state building programmes
that contributed to the Belgian post-war building boom. The fourth component
that CIAM listed as an essential zone of the functional city made its contribution,
namely, leisure. In the 1950s, the socio-economic struggle impelled further profound
transformations to the countrys social security system and labour law. In 1953 and
1954 both the socialist and the Catholic workers unions launched a campaign to
reduce working hours and in 1955 the 45-hour week was enacted, making Saturday
afternoons work-free.27 In 1956 the Act Troclet expanded the existing legislation on
paid holidays by doubling leave entitlement from six days to twelve. By 1960 more
than 90 per cent of employees in Belgium enjoyed a two-day work-free weekend,
without any corresponding reduction in pay.
These changes had a major effect on the built environment. Like many other
western European welfare states at this time, the Belgian government took it upon
55
56
itself to provide its citizens with the necessary leisure infrastructure that would
enable them to spend their free time in an appropriate manner. From the early
1950s the government began funding and constructing a variety of facilities such as
swimming pools, sports centres, holiday camps and cultural centres. In the 25-year
period between 1955 (when the 45-hour week was enacted) and 1980, nearly 500
cultural centres, swimming pools and sports centres were developed in Flanders
alone.28 The development of leisure infrastructure in Flanders started slowly in the
mid-1950s and gradually increased throughout the 1960s. A peak in construction
was reached by the early- to mid-1970s at the peak of the economic crisis when
43 sports centres, 16 swimming pools and ve cultural centres opened their doors in
one single year (1976). Most of these were designed by local architects and were not
remarkable in terms of their architecture, although there were exceptions, notably
the cultural centre of Hasselt, the swimming pool of Genk and the cultural centre of
Houthalen-Helchteren, all designed by the well-known architect Isia Isgour.29 This
major programme for building leisure facilities was designed to full the ambition of
creating a society that was more egalitarian, not just in terms of material wealth, but
also in access to the socially acceptable leisure pursuits of culture and sport.30
When it came to leisure infrastructure, the entanglement between the pillars and
the welfare state was initially quite important. Before the state had begun to subsidize
this type of building, the pillars had already been providing for leisure and sports; the
rst holiday camps for children, for instance, were established by political parties or
unions, not by the state. In the 1950s and early 1960s, the effects of this were still
felt, as ideological differences still had an impact on the conception of leisure infrastructure. The Catholic pillar had long strived to have its own sports facilities and
organizations, out of a concern that the intermingling of the different ideological
outlooks on the sports elds or in swimming pools would contaminate the religious
awareness and the family orientation of their members.31
The earliest efforts were directed towards the construction of holiday camps for
children. During the inter-war period and after the Second World War, particularly
from the mid-1950s, pillarized health services, unions and labour groups began
opening holiday camps. Socialist organizations generally favoured modern architecture whereas their Catholic counterparts predominantly opted for historicizing
styles. This was not a coincidence, since modern architecture celebrated principles
such as sobriety, rationality and functionality, which were in line with the equality,
openness and social justice aimed for by socialist organizations. For Catholics, on
the other hand, historicizing styles corroborated the reverence for tradition that they
valued so highly.
A particularly interesting example of a childrens holiday camp is at Oostduinkerke,
where between 1933 and 1957 the Socialist Health Services developed a vacation
colony, comprising three large separate buildings. These offered affordable vacations
for workers children and were designed according to the principles of the modernist
architectural idiom. They were intended to create an ideal environment for the child,
where particular emphasis was placed on both personal choice and a sense of collectivity. Home Emile Vandervelde II probably the most striking of the three was
constructed in 1954. Designed by architect Lucien Engels for 700 children and 200
adults, this holiday home housed all its functions in three triple-limbed star-shaped
pavilions that resembled three giant stranded starsh (Figure 3.1). It explicitly addressed
not just the physical but also the mental well-being of the children. Home Emile
Vandervelde II was regarded as a place where they could come to rejuvenate, physically as well as mentally, but also as a place where their personalities would develop:
a place that would appeal to their sense of collectivity and a place where the children
would discover basic socialist principles. The whole vacation camp was seeped in
colour, for instance in the facade of the buildings brightly coloured panels alternated
with the windows and created a colourful rhythmic sequence. The same playful colour
elements can be found in the furniture purpose-designed by Engels for the home.
Whereas the years between the 1930s and the 1960s were the heyday for childrens
holiday camps, later new vacation possibilities arose, not only for children, but for
the whole family. After 1936, when annual paid vacation had become a social right,
a rapid development took place in the eld of what later came to be called social
tourism.32 As in many European countries, social organizations provided for workers
holidays by building new infrastructure. The Belgian situation, however, was again
rather specic due to the role of pillarized organizations and their preference for
specic formal languages.
An interesting example of this new type of holiday camp is in HouthalenHelchteren, a small village in the southern province of Limburg, where in 1964 the
Christian Health Services (Christelijke Mutualiteiten) constructed a holiday park
named Hengelhoef. Unlike the socialist project in Oostduinkerke, which comprised
a small number of large building slabs, Hengelhoef was conceived as a holiday village
which offered family vacations and comprised a large number of small residential
pavilions or bungalows, each of which could house between one and four families
(Figure 3.2). In addition there was a large two storey-building (the main building)
containing administrative offices, collective spaces and rooms for guests.
Figure 3.1 Home Emile Vandervelde II (Amsab-Institute of Social History, Ghent, copyright Debaere).
57
58
Figure 3.2 A view of Hengelhoefs residential pavilions. These pavilions encircle a large open green area
where different recreational facilities are located and delineate the forest edge. Photographed in July 1964
(KADOC, Documentation and Research centre for Religion, Culture and Society, Leuven).
Hengelhoef was promoted as a holiday domain for family vacations, which would
allow workers to escape the industrial centres where they spent most of their time
and enjoy a healthy retreat in pure nature with their wives and children. After all,
the Christian Democratic pillar considered the family the core-unit or standard
dimension which was to be incorporated in all aspects of life, including vacation.
This can be seen in the spatial conguration of Hengelhoef. The exibility that can
be found in the design of the bungalows met one of the primary requirements of
organizing family vacations; since they ensured that every family:
regardless of its size or the age of the children, has a room at its disposal where
they can be together and feel united. During the vacation period, the family can
use this space in such a manner that it becomes a transplant of their own home
in the holiday institution.33
None of the bungalow units had a kitchen (Figure 3.3). This was deliberate, to allow
the housewife, like other members of the family, to relax and enjoy a carefree holiday.
This was in line with the aspiration of the General Christian Workers Union (Algemeen
Christelijk Werknemersverbond, or ACW) to ensure that family events arise in which
mothers, free of care for their family, can enjoy a couple of peaceful days during which
they can relive their honeymoon weeks.34 A striking feature of the pavilions is the size
of the porch or veranda in front of each unit. When the double doors were opened
completely, these porches practically became a part of the living space, drawing nature
Figure 3.3 Spatial layout of the two different pavilion types in Hengelhoef: type A (the rectangular plan)
and type B (square plan) (private collection Hengelhoef, Houthalen Helchteren).
into the bungalow unit and luring the holidaymakers outside, where they could
enjoy the serenity of nature or participate in one of the organised outdoor activities
(Figure 3.4).
Towards de-pillarization: swimming pools and cultural centres

From the late 1950s the tensions between the different socio-political pillars, which
had for so long dominated Belgian political history, started to abate, in parallel with
an increasingly dominant discourse that stressed the need to democratize culture
in all its facets and make it accessible to everyone, regardless of social status, age or
pillar-affiliation. Given the cost of building sports and cultural facilities, and given
that both sides of the ideological spectrum agreed that this infrastructure was needed,
it was agreed that municipal and provincial bodies should step in. De-pillarization
and promotion of healthy leisure, however, were not the only decisive factors in
the rapid expansion of state-subsidized social infrastructure. As noted earlier, the
tendency towards de-pillarization in Belgium was accompanied by a re-alignment of
society along linguistic (and territorial) lines.35 The growing disparities between the
59
60
Figure 3.4 Two families sitting in front of their bungalow unit, enjoying the serenity of nature
(KADOC, Documentation and Research Centre for Religion, Culture and Society, Leuven).
French and the Flemish language communities after the end of the Second World War
acquired an institutional character in the 1960s. In 1963 the country was split into
four language areas (Flemish, French, bilingual and German) and in 1965 the Ministry
of Education and Culture was split in two, with one Ministry for Flemish Culture and
another for French Culture. The construction of a large number of leisure centres in
Flanders was not only a means of democratizing access to leisure but also a way of
affirming both the validity of this newly founded ministry of Flemish culture36 and
the authority of the Flemish language community.
Of course, this shift from a pillarized to a pluralistic leisure culture divided
along language/territorial lines did not happen overnight. One of the rst public
swimming pools constructed after the introduction of the ve-day week in 1955
was the indoor pool of Leuven, which opened in 1958. Not only the narrative
concerning the erection of this pool but also its architectural features and the use of
the building were indicative of the difficult transition from a pillarized to a pluralistic
outlook. In 1954, following the election of the Social Democrat Franois Tielemans
as mayor, the town of Leuven decided to construct a municipal swimming pool and
commissioned Maxime Brunfaut, a well-known architect from Brussels, to design
it. The choice of Brunfaut was not coincidental; he was the youngest in a family
of architects who from the early twentieth century were well known as protagonists
of socialist modernism (his father Fernand was an architect turned politician who
gave his name to the Brunfaut Act). The decision was attacked in the media by the
Catholic party, who criticised the mayor for selecting a French-speaking architect
from Brussels as if none of the local architects were good enough.37 The socialists
Figure 3.5 Front page of the 1958 socialist election bulletin of Leuven (City Archives, Leuven).
on the other hand took the credit for providing the town with a city pool. When
it opened in 1958, the Social Democratic party used the image of the swimming
pool in its electoral campaign, with the slogan We keep the promises we make, vote
socialist! (Figure 3.5).38
Even though in its origin the building bore a socialist connotation, no distinction
based on ideological alliance was made in its use once it was opened. Local schools,
for instance, took their students swimming in this pool almost immediately after it
had opened regardless of their status as state or Catholic schools.39 The Leuven
swimming pool is typical of the transitional period, in which the overt impact of
the pillars on practically all aspects of life diminished and society became more or
less de-pillarized. While a clearly identied pillar (or more accurately a political
party) claimed the credit for building the pool (and hence expected to be rewarded
for it in the elections), the construction was completely nanced with public
money and the subsequent municipal authorities of different colours made sure
that it began to function as a public institution. It gradually came to be seen as
a municipal rather than a socialist facility, and it certainly was used in a pluralist
61
62
way, contributing over the years to the mitigation of tensions between people from
different pillars.
The 1960s and 1970s saw continuing construction of swimming pools, sports halls
and recreational domains, i.e. state-funded and state-maintained parklands containing
passive and active leisure facilities such as ponds, botanical gardens, playgrounds, petting
zoos, etc. From the mid-1960s a new type of cultural infrastructure emerged, which was
designed to create spaces where everyone regardless of social status or pillar-affiliation
could get a taste of high culture (theatre performances, art exhibitions, concerts, etc.)
while simultaneously providing room to accommodate bottom-up initiatives such as art
classes for children, meeting areas for local clubs, rehearsal spaces for amateur theatre,
etc. This infrastructure was thus ascribed both an educational function (promoting high
culture through an own programme) and a supportive function (offering spaces to
organize grassroots events). This new typology was termed a cultural centre.
Following the opening of the rst cultural centres in the late 1960s and early 1970s,
a decree was issued in 1974 to safeguard the pluralistic character of all the (new) types
of social infrastructure which had been developed over the past few decades. This
political agreement stated that all government institutions, all institutions erected by
the government and every organization or person that permanently has at its disposal
a governmental infrastructure, should abstain from any form of discrimination,
exclusion or limitation based on ideological or philosophical grounds.40 These
principles came to the fore during the realization of the cultural centre of Hasselt,
which opened its doors in 1972 (Figure 3.6). In contrast with the swimming pool
of Leuven, which was initially hailed as a socialist achievement, this cultural infrastructure was never tied to an ideological belief or political (pillarized) party. It was
from the start propagated as a centre for encounter; a centre which was open to all,
a centre which was to effect the democratization of culture. In the December 1972
issue of the local newspaper de Hasselaar, the then president of the Cultural Board of
Hasselt, expressed these ambitions as follows:
It is our explicit wish that this cultural centre will not turn into a temple of
Culture ... it should rather become an open house, where we all feel at home
and where we can make culture together, each according to their own disposition, with their own capabilities and widely accessible to all who for one
reason or another are deprived [of culture].41
These leisure facilities, of which almost 500 were built across Flanders, also
contributed to its sprawl-like character. Cultural centres were sometimes built in
secondary or tertiary cities, but also in smaller municipalities, and most often on
the fringes of dense urban centres. Sports facilities, likewise, were situated on easily
accessible sites where the land came cheap hence usually not within densely
populated neighbourhoods, nor in their immediate vicinity, but rather along newly
built bypass roads or somewhere in the geographical middle of a larger set of
villages. The nebulous city pattern of Flanders was thereby reinforced. The overall
map of these facilities (Figure 3.7), however, reveals that the distribution of the new
facilities across the territory was far from even. There are several reasons for this,
but among them the growth of political tension along linguistic lines is certainly
Figure 3.6 Photo of the cultural centre of Hasselt, shortly after opening in 1972 (private collection, cultural centre,
Hasselt).
Figure 3.7 Leisure infrastructure built in Flanders between 1958 and 1985 (Janina Gosseye).
important.42 Hence there was a concentration of Flemish facilities in the immediate

surroundings of the Brussels agglomeration (which, as a bilingual territory, was
geographically surrounded by a monolingual Flemish region). The democratization
and pluralism that were called for in the construction of such facilities, suggesting
a gradual elimination of class and ideological differences, also harboured an agenda
that emphasised linguistic differences. Indeed, the split of the Ministry of Culture
into a Flemish and a French one helped create a situation in which, especially on the
Flemish side, culture became understood as Flemish culture. Hence the increasing
tensions between the two linguistic communities were also manifested in the built
environment.
63
64
Perhaps the clearest example of this tendency is the Cultural Centre of Dilbeek, a
relatively small municipality in the shadow of Brussels. Dilbeek increasingly perceived
itself as under threat because it was geographically the last monolingual Flemish
municipality before the Brussels agglomeration.43 Announced in 1967, its plan to
construct a cultural centre was in line with the strategy of Frans Van Mechelen, the
Minister of Flemish Culture, to establish a belt of emeralds around the capital, i.e.
a string of cultural centres that would defend the Flemish hinterland from (further)
Frenchication. The architect of the Dilbeek project, Alfons Hoppenbrouwers,
evidently understood this. The accommodation planned was ambitious, including
a 500-seat theatre, a library with more than 20,000 books, a reception hall that
could seat up to 350 people and a spacious exhibition gallery. Located on the edge
of a valley, the design of the building follows the natural topography, with a strong
east-west orientation. The curved shape of the building seems to embrace the valley,
whilst turning its hunched back to the urban prospect in front. The facades reinforce
this sense, as the front, facing Brussels, has only a few windows while the back facade,
facing Flanders in the west, is almost completely glazed and provides a magnicent
view over the valley. The architect himself was apparently clear about this, stating that
the cultural centre of Dilbeek embraces the Pajottenland [Flemish hinterland] whilst
turning its back to the French capital.44
The belt of emeralds strategy initially consisted mainly of cultural centres but
from the early 1970s around the time when sports became the responsibility of the
Ministry of Flemish Culture it was extended to sports infrastructure. In April 1972
the magazine Sport started to publish a series of articles on the planning of sports infrastructure in the periphery of Brussels written by Sigfried van Nuffel, a geographer/
planner associated with Mens en Ruimte (Man and Space), a research group linked
to the architectural office Planning. According to van Nuffel:
The presence of a well-developed sports infrastructure is one of the elements
able to reduce the magnetism of the capital on the Flemish agglomeration.
The sports plan which is currently presented is therefore in essence a Flemish
plan.45
The realisation of Flemish leisure infrastructure in the Brussels periphery was designed
not only to counter the movement of French migrants to the borders of the capital
city by creating a series of Dutch-speaking cultural centres, but also to reduce the
magnetism that the socio-cultural infrastructure of the capital exerted on the Flemish
population residing in its borders. Beyond discouraging the inux of Walloon (Frenchspeaking) residents in the Flemish periphery, the belt of emeralds strategy strove to
inhibit the Frenchication of the Flemish population. Not only cultural centres but
also swimming pools, sports halls and recreational complexes were developed around
the Belgian capital as part of this. For instance, in the same year that Dilbeek inaugurated its cultural centre, the Brussels municipality opened a public swimming pool and
a sports hall. Rather than developing Brussels as the centre of cultural activities, the
focus shifted to peripheral municipalities, where several larger nodes were created,
such as that at Dilbeek, that cluster together an array of leisure infrastructure. Other
places in the Brussels periphery such as Itterbeek and Strombeek-Bever followed suit.
As architect Paul Vermeulen put it in 2000: The right-minded Fleming did not live
in the city, but beleaguered [sic] it with culture from the outlying elds.46
Conclusion
The formation of the welfare state in Belgium occurred in parallel with two important
social/political developments: de-pillarization and the bifurcation of the Flemish and
Francophone communities. The complex political balance between the Catholic
and Socialist pillars that still dominated political life in the early post-war years led
to the formulation of two housing acts, which together encouraged the building of
residential neighbourhoods all over the territory. This gave rise to a distinctive form of
dispersed residential settlement, almost evenly spread across urban, suburban and rural
contexts, and helping to create what is now known as the nebulous city.
From the 1960s onwards, this was accompanied and reinforced by a Flemish cultural
policy that encouraged the construction of sports and leisure infrastructure in all
municipalities, giving precedence not to the existing urban centres but rather to quasirural municipalities that were perceived as lacking facilities and services. This policy
resulted not as might be expected in an evenly distributed grid of amenities, but
rather in a constellation where densities are uneven. These densities reect on the one
hand conscious political choices promoted from the top (especially with respect to the
reinforcing of Flemish identity in the belt around Brussels) and on the other hand the
enthusiasm of local authorities which had to take the initiative in securing the central
subsidies for their municipality. Regardless of this unevenness in distribution, however,
the map also shows how the dispersed sports and leisure infrastructure reinforced the
Flemish nebulous city that had been initiated by residential developments.
Notes
1 P. Pasture, The April 1944 Social Pact in Belgium and its Signicance for the Post-War
Welfare State, Journal of Contemporary History, 1993, 4, 696714.
2 J. Dryzek and R. E. Goodin, Risk-Sharing and Social Justice: The Motivational
Foundations of the Post-War Welfare State, British Journal of Political Science, 1986, 1,
134.
3 M. Hooghe, Ontzuiling in de Lage Landen, Ons Erfdeel, 2008, 2, 419.
4 S. Hellemans, Strijd om de Moderniteit, Leuven: Universitaire Pers, 1990.
5 R. Vanderstraeten, Cultural Values and Social Differentiation: The Catholic Pillar and Its
Education System in Belgium and the Netherlands, Compare: A Journal of Comparative and
International Education, 2002, 2, 133.
6 The term Flanders has throughout the course of time covered an altering geographical
area; after the federalization of the country it became the name of the constituent governing
institution of the federal Belgian state. However, within the context of this chapter, we use
the term Flanders not as a reference to the governing institution, but simply to refer to
the geographical region (in the north of the country) that (today) coincides with the federal
Belgian states Flemish Region but excludes the bilingual Capital Region.
7 S. De Caigny, Bouwen aan een nieuwe thuis. Wooncultuur in Vlaanderen tijdens het interbellum (unpublished doctoral dissertation), Leuven: Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, 2007.
8 E. De Vos, Hoe zouden we graag wonen? Woonvertogen en -praktijken in de
jaren 19601970 in Vlaanderen (unpublished doctoral dissertation), Leuven: Katholieke
Universiteit Leuven, 2008.
9 De Vos, Hoe zouden we graag wonen?, pp. 93100.
65
66
10 E. De Vos and H. Heynen, Shaping Popular Taste: the Belgian Farmers Association and
the Fermette during the 1960s-1970s, Home Cultures, 2007, 3, 237259.
11 W. Van Moorsel, Contact en controle: het vrouwbeeld van de Stichting Goed Wonen, Amsterdam:
SUA, 1992.
12 K. Theunis, The quest for a Belgian housing project, 19651975: approaches between designers
and authorities in the practice of private housing (unpublished doctoral dissertation), Leuven:
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, 2008; F. Strauven, Renaat Braem: de dialectische avonturen van
een Vlaams functionalist, Brussel: Archief voor Moderne Architectuur, 1983.
13 K. Theunis, De Wet De Taeye. De individuele woning als bouwsteen van de
welvaartsstaat, in K. Van Herck and T. Avermaete (eds.), Wonen in welvaart. Woningbouw en
wooncultuur in Vlaanderen, 19481973, Antwerp: VAi/CVAa, 2006, pp. 6777. Comparable
output gures for the Brunfaut Act are not available as it nanced infrastructure rather than
houses per se.
14 D. Andrews and A. Caldera Snchez, The Evolution of Homeownership Rates in Selected
OECD Countries: Demographic and Public Policy Inuences, OECD Journal: Economic
Studies, 2011, 1, Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/eco_studies-2011-5kg0vswqpmg2,
accessed 08 August 2013.
15 K. Schuyt and E. Taverne (eds.) Nedelandse Cultuur in Europese Context: 1950: Welvaart in
Zwart-Wit. Den Haag: Sudu Uitgevers.
16 K. Cupers, Designing Social Life: The Urbanism of the Grands Ensembles, Positions,
2010, 1, 94121; P. Hall, And That was the Future: The Planners World, Futures, 1989
(21) 5, 498507.
17 H. Berggren and L. Trgrdh, Pippi Longstoking. The Autonomous Child and the
Moral Logic of the Swedish Welfare State, in H. Mattsson and S.-O. Wallenstein, Swedish
Modernism. Architecture, Consumption and the Welfare State, London: Black Dog Publishing,
2010, pp. 5065.
18 C. Weeber, Het Wilde Wonen, Rotterdam: Uitgeverij 010, 1998. For a comprehensive
comparison between the post-war housing developments in Belgium and the Netherlands
consult: H. Heynen, Belgium and the Netherlands: Two Different Ways of Coping with
the Housing Crisis, 194570, Home Cultures, 2010, 2, 159177.
19 R. Braem, Het Lelijkste Land ter Wereld, Leuven: Davidsfonds, 1968.
20 F. Strauven, Het Lelijkste Land? in R. Gobybn and F. Vanhaecke (eds.), De Fifties in Belgi,
Brussels: ASLK, 1988, pp. 268281.
21 M. Smets, Een tijd van vanzelfsprekendheid in F. Vanhaecke (ed.), 19511991. Een
Tijdsbeeld, Brussel: Paleis voor Schone Kunsten, 1991, pp. 189195.
22 M. Ryckewaert, Building the Economic Backbone of the Belgian Welfare State. Infrastructure,
Planning and Architecture 19451973, Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2011.
23 G. Bekaert and F. Strauven, Bouwen in Belgi 19451970, Brussels: Nationale Confederatie
van het Bouwbedrijf, 1971, p. 15.
24 For more information regarding the construction of the road network around Brussels in
the post-war period, see Ryckewaert, Building the Economic Backbone, pp. 177195.
25 M. Ryckewaert and K. Theunis, Het Lelijkste Land, de Mythe Voorbij. Stedenbouw en
Verstedelijking in Belgi sinds 1945, Stadsgeschiedenis, 2006, 2, pp. 148168.
26 A comprehensive account on the postwar history of the port of Antwerp can be read in:
Ryckewaert, Building the Economic Backbone, pp. 8096.
27 The role that (workers) unions played in the development of the Belgian welfare state,
particularly with regards to the development of leisure infrastructure, is explored in the
essays: J. Gosseye and H. Heynen, Designing the Belgian Welfare State 1950s to 1970s:
Social Reform, Leisure and Ideological Adherence, Journal of Architecture, 2010, 5, pp.
557585 and J. Gosseye and H. Heynen, Campsites as Utopias? A Socio-spatial Reading
of the Belgian Postwar Holiday Camp, 1950s1970s, International Journal for History Culture
and Modernity, 2013, 1, Available at http://history-culture-modernity.org/index.php/
HCM/article/view/228/290, accessed 04 August 2013.
28 From the 1960s, the nancing of this infrastructure was different for the three regions of
Belgium: Flemish-speaking Flanders, French-speaking Wallonia, and the bilingual (French
and Flemish-speaking) capital region of Brussels. Thus far, research has only been carried
out for Flanders.
29 J. Gosseye a.o., Architectuur voor vrijetijdscultuur. Culturele centra, zwembaden & recreatiedomeinen, Tielt: Lannoo Campus, 2011; S. Van de Voorde a.o., Isia Isgour 19131967,
Antwerp: CVAa, 2008.
30 C. Grafe, Peoples Palaces. Architecture, Culture and Democracy in Two European Post-war Cultural
Centres (unpublished doctoral dissertation), Delft: TUDelft, 2010, pp. 2125.
31 Symptomatic in this respect is an article which can be found in the March 1973 issue of the
Catholic sports magazine Sporta, entitled Gemengd zwemmen, which loosely translates
as Mixed Swimming. This short text recounts a confusion that occurred in the Dutch
town Arnhem, when the subject mixed swimming was brought up during the municipal
council and one of the aldermen (who was confused about the subject matter) asked when
we talk about mixed swimming, we talk about the use of one swimming pool by Catholics
and Protestants together, right? This one-liner not only perfectly represents the pillarized
climate of the Netherlands in that period, but the fact that such a seemingly insignicant
newsash (from the Netherlands moreover) was published in a Belgian, catholic periodical
also eloquently reects the pillarized atmosphere in Belgium in this period, in which
members of the catholic pillar indeed worried about swimming alongside socialists. Source:
Author unknown, Gemengd zwemmen, Sporta, 1973, 3, 12.
32 The earliest denition of social tourism by W. Hunzicker, outlined in his 1951 publication
Social Tourism: Its Nature and Problems, describes social tourism as the relationships and
phenomena in the eld of tourism resulting from participation in travel by economically
weak or otherwise disadvantaged elements in society. In a later publication which appeared
in the Revue de Tourisme in 1957, Hunzicker added a comment regarding the nature of social
tourism provision, dening the concept as a particular type of tourism characterised by the
participation of people with a low income, providing them with special services, recognised
as such. For more information, see L. Minnaert, R. Maitland and G. Miller, What is social
tourism?, Current Issues in Tourism, 2011, 5, 403415.
33 B. Reggers, Vakantiebehoeften en wensen: een onderzoek bij de verlofgangers van het
vakantiedorp Hengelhoef (unpublished thesis), Heverlee: Centrale Hogeschool voor
Christelijke Arbeiders, 1965.
34 Author unknown, De arbeidersvakantie in het raam van de vrije tijd (A.C.W. 16th conference
in Brussels, 1952), p. 5.
35 B. J. De Clercq, De evolutie van de verzuiling in Nederland en Belgi, Ons Erfdeel, 1967,
2, 26.
36 S. Hellemans, De Culturele Centra in Vlaanderen. Tussen overheid, zuilen en cultuur, in
M. De Kepper (ed.) Culturele Centra. Op Zoek naar een Proel, Brussels: FEVECC, 1993,
pp. 424.
37 Author unknown, Een Kaakslag, Loven Boven, Verkiezingsblad van de C.V.P. voor de stad
Leuven, 1958, 2, 1.
38 Author unknown, Een Grote Dag voor Leuven, De Volkswil, Maandblad voor de Belgische
Socialistische Partij, Afdeling Leuven, 1958, 2, 1.
39 Interview with Roger Geets, retired school teacher of a state elementary school in
Wijgmaal. Interview held on 06 October 2008 in Wijgmaal (Belgium); Interview with
Monique Van Damme, resident of Leuven, who between 1955 and 1961 attended the
Catholic high school for girls, Sancta Maria in Leuven. Interview held on 25 March in
Leuven (Belgium).
40 Decree of 28 January 1974: Culture Pact. Published in Belgisch Staatsblad/Le Moniteur
Belge on 31 May 1974.
41 G. Ottenbourgs, Nu het cultureel centrum er is..., de Hasselaar, 1972, 76, 6.
42 J. Gosseye, Leisure Politics. The Construction of Social Infrastructure and Flemish
Cultural Identity in Belgium, 1950s to 1970s, The Journal of Urban History, 2012 (38) 2,
271293.
43 Werkgroep Westrand Brussel, Preadviesbundel Ontmoetingscentrum Dilbeek, Brussels, 1967,
p.3.
44 Interview with Martine Plas (executive secretary of the cultural centre Westrand since
1977), 8 January 2009.
45 S. Van Nuffel, Planning van de sportinfrastructuur in de federaties rond Brussel, Sport,
Tijdschrift van de Lichamelijke Opvoeding, de Sport en het Openluchtleven, 1972, 2, 95102.
46 P. Vermeulen, Cultural Centres, A Journey through the Nebular City, Archis, 2000, 10,
1222.
67
Figure 4.0 Needwood House, Woodberry Down Estate, 1949, photographed by John Maltby (RIBA Library
Photographs Collection).
4
THE BEGINNINGS OF HIGH-RISE
SOCIAL HOUSING IN THE LONG 1940s:
THE CASE OF THE LCC AND THE
WOODBERRY DOWN ESTATE
Simon Pepper
Multi-storey social housing has been debated in Britain from the earliest days of
state-subsidised housing provision, often bitterly polarizing opinion amongst housing
designers and providers, but never winning solid support from its tenants. Indeed, the
national preference for 2-storey houses with gardens however small distinguishes
Britain (particularly England and Wales) from other European countries. High-rise
housing is an incendiary topic, posing still inadequately answered questions about
the complex of reasons for its adoption and the many different contexts for these
decisions.1 This chapter examines the process by which the London County Council,
Britains biggest house-building authority and Labour-controlled throughout this
period, adopted high-rise social housing in the critical years before, during, and
shortly following the Second World War what we might term the long 1940s.
Here, high-rise housing refers to dwellings in blocks requiring lift access, i.e. blocks
higher than the four-, ve- and sometimes even 6-storey walk-up tenements built
in the inner areas of London, Liverpool and a handful of other English cities from
late Victorian times to the 1930s, as well as the walk-up tenement tradition which
was well established in Scotland. Only one genuine high-rise social housing scheme
had been completed in Britain before the Second World War. This was the Quarry
Hill estate in Leeds, rising to eight oors in some parts of a sloping site, with all of its
ats reached by lifts, but built in special circumstances by a local authority otherwise
strongly opposed to tenements.2 In contrast, by the mid-1950s high-rise schemes of
ten or more oors could be seen rising from the edges as well as the centres of towns
all over Britain. Blocks more than twice as high would be built in the 1960s, and are
now seen as one of the most damaging legacies of twentieth-century architecture and
planning. From this arose my initial interest in the processes at work in the pre-war
adoption of walk-ups against the strong prejudices and informed views of most
housing professionals, politicians and those housed in the ats.3 This chapter focuses
on the decisions taken by the London County Council (LCC) during the Second
World War to embark upon yet higher ats, hitherto regarded as even more objectionable. Recent years have seen valuable research on the wider context of post-war
70
Simon Pepper
social housing and on the inner workings of the LCC.4 This background allows me
to concentrate on the ideas and processes which over many years shaped the design
of a single social housing scheme. An important element of the analysis and argument
underlying this chapter is that the fateful moves into high-rise housing involved many
different groups, inuences and transitional projects, representing something more like
policy drift than a clear-cut decision.
Woodberry Down
Our starting point is the chain of decisions which, beginning in the late 1930s,
eventually delivered the LCCs rst high-rise blocks on the Woodberry Down estate.
As well as a small number of houses and much larger numbers of 3- and 5-storey blocks
of ats, four 8-storey slab blocks were built on the estate. The rst of these, Needwood
House, opened in July 1949 (Figure 4.0). Designed as steel framed structures faced
with brickwork, all the 8-storey blocks were redesigned after the war in monolithic
concrete strikingly different in appearance to the municipal neo-Georgian of most
pre-war LCC blocks.5 The high ats were reached by enclosed staircases and lift
lobbies, instead of the open access balconies most commonly used before the war.
Described as luxury ats in the LCC press release announcing their opening, the high
blocks boasted central heating and hot water as well as higher rents.6 The Woodberry
Down housing estate covered 45 acres (18.2 hectares) and from an early stage was
conceived as a neighbourhood unit with a community centre, schools, public library
and health clinic (the rst to be built under the National Health Service).7 Efforts
would be made to preserve many of the trees and descriptions drew attention to
the planned promenade along the New River, which looped around the site and
separated it from two large reservoirs. Although the completed estate won no design
prizes, it has been recognized as the most interesting development built by the LCC
between 1945 and 1950 (Figure 4.1).8 For the purposes of this chapter, the importance of the scheme is the link it provides between pre- and post-war thinking in social
housing design inside the largest and most inuential of Britains local authorities.
In September 1935 when news broke of the LCCs plans to introduce into the
area from 12,000 to 15,000 people (many of them ex-slum dwellers) opposition was
organized and funded by Stoke Newington council, egged on by the local newspapers.9
Accusations of political motives (the import of Labour voters into a Conservative-held
borough) and, later in the war, of a bombing threat posed by the landmark skyscrapers
which by then formed part of the scheme, all featured in a long-running opposition
campaign presenting a suburban, almost rural, community submerged beneath a series
of barracks.10 The low density of the area was of course central to the LCC case at
the public inquiry in November 1936, when it was argued that 1,200 people in 185
properties (many multi-occupied) occupied enough space for 1,600 dwellings housing
four times that number (but rather less than the inaccurate gures which had rst
dismayed Stoke Newingtons residents). Much of the land had been under negotiation
with the Ecclesiastical Commissioners when the story broke, and when the Church
clinched the sale and withdrew its objections to the Compulsory Purchase Order
the other objectors found themselves defending patches of property on a site already
largely in County Council hands. The LCC Architect, E. P. Wheeler, explained that
Figure 4.1 LCC Housing at Woodberry Down, Stoke Newington. Frontispiece to LCC, Post-War Housing Schemes, 1949. Perspective by James William Oatley, ARIBA,
LCC Architects Department, seconded to the Director of Housing and Valuers Woodberry Down team (London Metropolitan Archive).
The Beginnings of High-Rise Social Housing

71
72
Simon Pepper
the layout was tentative in the nature of a diagram showing that the site is capable
of development for housing purposes. It is not a considered plan in any sense 11 His
diagram of 1936 had of course maximised the housing gain by using only 5-storey
walk-up tenements laid out on a strict north-south grid, the so-called zeilenbau
technique, already used by the LCC at the Kings Mead estate and currently employed
in the early stages of a much larger scheme at the White City (Figure 4.2).12 There
was indeed something of a repetitive barrack-like quality to these immense projects,
particularly when viewed from the air. Over the next 20 years, air views of the White
City would be repeatedly used by the LCC and others to reinforce the same point.
Partly in response to these criticisms, the scheme was modied in 1938 using
a variety of types. For the rst time on an LCC estate, the design mixed 2-storey
terraced houses with 3-storey at-over-maisonette blocks and 4- and 5-storey blocks
of standard LCC ats.13 Photographs of a model dated 1939 show that the housing
now formed a series of courtyards, open at one end, staggered, and stepping down
from the 5-storeys anking main roads to the 3- and 2-storey wings at the edges
(Figure 4.3). Further development stopped with the outbreak of war, but was revived
in 1941 in tandem with a number of other reconstruction projects directed by the
LCCs recently appointed chief architect, John Forshaw.14
The most important of these wartime projects was the County of London Plan
(1943) which at different times employed almost 50 of the LCCs reduced staff,
directed by Forshaw, working with his former Liverpool University teacher (now
Figure 4.2 LCC Housing at the White City, air view from Forshaw and Abercrombie, County of
London Plan, Macmillan for the LCC, London, 1943, plate XXVII following p. 76 (English Heritage:
Aerolms Collection).
Figure 4.3 Woodberry Down, model of the revised LCC proposal 19381939 (London Metropolitan
Archive).
Professor of Planning at University College London), Patrick Abercrombie. Another

Liverpool-trained architect-planner, Wesley Dougill, was recruited to lead the New
Plan Research and Survey team, the main design group.15 All were keen to explore
the practical implications of housing ideas that were taking shape in the plan, and in
particular what was beginning to be known as mixed development. Mixed development seemed to offer a way out of a mindset which pigeonholed social housing
either as high density walk-up tenements for inner city or slum clearance sites or as
low-density suburban 2-storey cottages with gardens: with virtually nothing between
them.16 The 1938 re-design of Woodberry Down can be seen as an early reconnaissance into the possibilities in between. By the eve of the Second World War, this
middle way was being explored in a number of quarters.
Mixed development
One of the key thinkers was the housing consultant, Elizabeth Denby. For many
years secretary to the Kensington Housing Association (later Trust), Denby had
left this post in 1935 to tour modern European housing schemes, supported by a
Leverhulme Fellowship.17 In 1936 she was invited to lecture the RIBA on Rehousing
from the Slum-Dwellers Point of View.18 Her lecture caused a stir by criticizing
both tenement ats and cottage estates, describing them as a choice between two
impractical and unnecessary extremes on one hand deeply unpopular walk-up
ats, on the other the remote and unsociable life of those exiled to poorly-serviced
peripheral cottage estates. The LCC housing chairman Lewis Silkin crossed swords
with her in his speech of thanks, but ended by reminding his audience that she had
just been co-opted onto his committee. There was clearly a direct line of communication here for her ideas. The Leverhulme study appeared two years later as Europe
Rehoused (1938) introducing the latest schemes in Sweden, Germany, Austria, Italy
and France, including a number which had clearly inuenced her advocacy of mixed
development.19 For Britains future she urged high ats, with common service and
common amenities for the childless, the unmarried, for anyone who wanted to
live in that way freeing space for all other urban functions. This did not mean, she
insisted, other housing sprawled at
73
74
Simon Pepper
twelve cold and draughty, detached or semi-detached cottages to the acre, in

estates banished to the periphery of the town, far from friends and work
[but] traditional English squares and terrace cottages with small gardens at
thirty and forty to the acre in the centre of the town.20
Two new ideas are combined here: not just high ats but also high-density low-rise
houses. In the margin of my copy an astonished reader has noted: Flats and cottages!.
In 1939 she further developed the idea with an alternative scheme for the Woodberry
Down site. It appeared at the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition, mounted alongside
her design for a modern terraced house, the so-called All-Europe House.21 Denbys
Alternative scheme (drawn with the help of the architect, Godfrey Samuel) featured
11-storey south-facing slab blocks on the north of the Seven Sisters Road, with
the area to the south laid out as 2-storey terraces with small gardens backing onto
communal greens.22
Denby never claimed to have invented mixed development. Others were on
Europes roads in the mid-1930s, including in 1935 Lewis Silkin and colleagues from
the LCC who visited many of the same places as Denby, and the previous year a
delegation of the Department of Health for Scotland which unusually for a public
sector group was mainly concerned with the aesthetic aspects of housing.23 Like
Silkins party, the Scots found against skyscrapers, but were impressed by what they
saw in Vienna of the aesthetic value of mixing the heights of different buildings in
the same scheme concluding that for
aesthetic and social reasons there is much to be said in favour of building
schemes which contain a mixture of different types of housing accommodation
for example, tenements built in mass formation, small blocks of two-storey
ats, and terraced and two-in-a-block cottages. It might well be tried in
Scotland in some of our future schemes.24
The Scottish Office civil servants may have been rst to combine both social and
aesthetic arguments for mixed development.
Academia quickly seized upon the mixed approach. Max Locks group at the
Architectural Association School of Architecture in 1939 proposed a mixture of
housing types following a survey of residents wishes in an area slated for slum clearance
by the LCC. Unsurprisingly, most responses favoured houses and the students nal
designs mixed terraced houses, ats-over-maisonettes and blocks of ats to reconcile
these preferences with site economy and, one suspects, a wish for some higher
elements in their designs.25 Journalists also pressed for something different. Reporting
the 1939 opening of the massive White City LCC estate, The Architects Journal asked
why all 5-storey blocks? Why the soulless mechanism of the layout? Why
not, with this golden opportunity of unhampered space, some really high blocks
(with lifts instead of dreary ights of stairs) making way for terraced houses for
the larger families?26
Quite how high the AJ meant by really high blocks is uncertain. The French had
already built to 16 oors at Chtenay and Drancy and 10-storey steel framed blocks
were energetically promoted by the Council for Research in Housing Construction, a
body representing the steel industry.27 In Liverpool and Stepney, 10-storey blocks had
been proposed more than once between the wars. In the 1920s the LCC had planned
an ambitious 9-storey housing scheme combining private and public sector ats,
offices and shops at St Pancras only to draw back from full implementation.28 Private
mansion blocks with lifts, central heating and hot water, concierge services and
sometimes even in-house catering often rose to ten oors in central London, fully
exploiting the height limits of the London Building Acts in force since the 1890s.29
High ats on this scale featured in neither of the two pre-war schemes for Woodberry
Down. However, they would feature prominently in the County of London Plan and
in the modied proposals for the estate which emerged during the war, causing a
great deal of friction within the LCC (thereby sowing the seeds for the controversial
decision taken just after the war to remove responsibility for housing design from the
Architects Department).
Wartime planning and internal conflict

This friction stemmed directly from the timetables of two early government-inspired
reconstruction initiatives. 1941 found the LCC embarking on the development plan
for the County of London and responding to instructions also emanating from Lord
Reiths Ministry of Town and Country Planning to prepare plans for a housing drive
in the 12 months immediately following the war. With one project setting out to plan
development over many decades, and the other focused on a short term emergency
house-building, it was almost inevitable that the two would clash.
Discussion of the LCC post-war housing strategy was launched at a leaders meeting
early in August 1941 attended by committee chairmen and their chief officers. A
paper by Thomas Dawson (housing chairman) formed the basis for discussion. The
immediate background was the Blitz, which from September 1940 to May 1941 had
devastated large areas of the city, particularly in the East End dockland boroughs.30
Dawson assumed that the council would probably have to provide the bulk of
new housing for those below the middle class resulting in redevelopment areas on a
scale not hitherto contemplated. Although prefabs, reconditioning, new technologies,
even what appeared to be high-density low-rise housing were all discussed in the
memorandum, Dawson saw the majority of post-war replacement housing in atted
blocks calling for much wider variations in architectural aspect and lay-out than has
hitherto been necessary. He went on: This has not mattered much when Council
dwellings have formed only a small proportion of the buildings in any given area.
It will result in appalling monotony in some widely bombed areas if rebuilding
continues on the old lines. Dawson concluded by recommending that the Architects
Department should during the war, prepare as far as possible new designs, lay-outs,
and specications of block dwelling estates giving effect to the above mentioned need
for variety. A follow-on leaders meeting on 23 September gave Forshaw authority
from LCC Leader Charles Latham, Thomas Dawson (housing) and Lewis Silkin
(planning) to develop new ideas for Woodberry Down and another smaller site in
Stepney.31
75
76
Simon Pepper
Further meetings of officers chaired rst by the clerk to the council and later by an
up-and-coming assistant clerk, T. G. Randall, developed this policy from September
to November 1941.32 Speed of housing delivery trumped almost every other consideration. Many of the officers recommendations were uncontroversial, but policy
steadily hardened in favour of the exclusive use of standard pre-war designs. For any
post-war site these would be either for cottages or ats but not both. This applied
with particular force to sites already owned by the council, the biggest of which was
Woodberry Down. Randalls sub-committee hoped to persuade the leadership to
withdraw their approval for this experimental scheme in favour of tried and tested
solutions promising rapid delivery. However, some basic misunderstandings persisted.
Lawrence Oliver, the LCC deputy clerk, scrawled over one draft of Randalls report:
Was this really a serious proposal? What is meant here by mixed development?
Mixed architecture & height, or mixed class? LHO. Only when the report was almost
nalized in November did Randalls sub-committee learn that the County Planning
team contemplated much higher blocks of 8 to 10-storey ats, and that Forshaw
hoped to include a number of them in the latest scheme for mixed development at
Woodberry Down.33
The County of London Plan would be published in July 1943, but its bones were
also shaped in the second half of 1941, after Forshaw (previously deputy to Frederick
Hiorns) was appointed architect to the LCC and took over project coordination.34
The nal themes were mostly to be found in a preliminary report presented to the
LCC leadership just before Christmas 1941.35 Covering an area now seen as inner
London, the plan proposed three residential density zones of 200, 136 and 100 persons
Figure 4.4 Diagram of Proposed London Population Housing Densities, County of London Plan,
1943, p. 115 (London Metropolitan Archive).
per acre to minimize further displacement of Londons population.36 Housing in the

inner 200 persons per acre zone would all be in ats (mostly in blocks of 7 to 10
storeys); in the 136 ppa zone two-thirds of people would live in ats, while in the
outer 100 ppa zone some 45 per cent would be in ats (generally no higher than
three storeys).37 Some very high buildings would be allowed, even in smart suburban
areas.38 The published report of 1943 would contain birds-eye views showing large
areas of an East End middle density zone with 10-storey slab blocks overlooking
areas of terraced housing and 3-storey ats and maisonettes, shops, schools, and open
spaces (Figure 4.5).39 Watercolours by William Walcot gave street-level views of a
central 10-storey atted zone and a 136 ppa. mixed development area.40 Somewhat
bolder (and thus even more effectively reproduced) renderings by Peter Shepheard
would illustrate Abercrombies Greater London Plan 1944. Even without this
visual material at a meeting on 20 November 1941 the Town Planning Committee
Chairman, John Silkin, approved the proposed density bands, the use of high-rise
in central areas and of increased height limits elsewhere in the LCC area.41 Shortly
before this date, Randalls sub-committee learned for the rst time of the proposal to
introduce a number of higher blocks at Woodberry Down and the post-war housing
Figure 4.5 Reconstruction in Shoreditch and Bethnal Green, County of London Plan, 1943, facing
p. 102. This scheme shows redevelopment at 136 persons per acre using terraced houses and two,
three, four and ten storey blocks of ats, a similar mix to that proposed for Woodberry Down (London
Metropolitan Archive).
77
78
Simon Pepper
report of 17 November was again modied. In addition to the worryingly experimental Woodberry Down scheme, and concerns about the eligibility for subsidy
of the low-rise houses in it, a new complication was noted: Practical problems of
construction requiring time for their solution would also arise if, as we understand,
much higher tenements than the Council has hitherto constructed are contemplated as part
of the plan.42 These remarks accompanied the rm recommendation from Randalls
sub-committee that Woodberry Down be planned as an all-tenement estate, on the
lines sketched out rst in 1936. Any experiments, Randall argued, should be conned
to the smaller area of Stepney, the future LCC Ocean Estate.
Matters would be decided at another council leaders conference on 10 December
1941. The rough notes of the meeting in Charles Lathams room conrm that
once again it was support from the Latham, Dawson and other senior members
that swung the day in favour of the architects continued design development at
Woodberry Down. Even the valuer (whose staff had argued strongly for the exclusive
use of pre-war types in Randalls meetings) admitted that he would not like 4 or 5
[storey] 1934-[19]36 [type blocks] over the whole site and it was left to Randall to
suggest, unsuccessfully, that the early stages should comprise standard blocks, with
elaborate blocks afterward.43 The LCC architects experiment was again approved.
The quid pro quo was agreement that Woodberry Down and the Ocean estate
excepted all post-war schemes would use pre-war designs.44
Figure 4.6 Artists impression of mixed development at West Ham Park, from Patrick Abercrombie,
Greater London Plan 1944 (HMSO, London, 1945). William Walcots beautiful watercolours for the
County of London Plan did not reproduce well. Peter Shepheard (later Sir Peter Shepheard PRIBA and
also a ne artist) used a bolder 1940s technique for Abercrombies second London wartime plan (London
Metropolitan Archive).
Inter-departmental skirmishing would continue throughout the war on the

layout details for Woodberry Down, the planning of the 8-storey blocks, their access
arrangements (whether by internal stairs and lifts or by the cheaper outside balconies),
heating, costs and rents. During 1943 the layout coalesced around another zeilenbau
grid, but one that now mixed 8-, 5-, 3- and 2-storey blocks and opened up attractive
views across the reservoirs to the south. Announcements early in 1944 drew attention
to the open belt of land about 50 feet wide, suitably laid out along the borders of
the New River and explained that the eight-storey ats were in the nature of an
experiment, and it is hoped that the Council [i.e. Stoke Newington] will like them.45
The Council did not like them. A motion describing the high blocks as unsuitable
passed after a debate in which Miss D. M. Burt (a future Mayor) called them little
better than barracks forcing their occupants to live like oranges in boxes placed on
top of each other.46 Local council opposition would continue until Labour won
control after the war and brought a different pressure on the LCC to get on with the
promised building.
Inside the LCC the chief critic of the high-rise proposal was now the valuer,
Herbert Westwood, the County Councils chief officer responsible for all aspects of
procurement and housing administration except for design. Westwood believed that
the standard pre-war 5-storey walk-up tenements were already too high, pointing
to the difficulties in letting upper oors and recent committee decisions to reduce
the rents of family-sized units on upper storeys.47 In an effort to counter the valuers
concerns, Leeds City Council had been consulted about tenant reaction to the ats
Figure 4.7 Woodberry Down, nal site plan from LCC, Post-War Housing Schemes, 1949. Library,
public house, shops and estate office are on the east of Lordship Road (running northsouth), facing the
infants and senior schools and community centre. Plots for the medical centre and synagogue are in the
south-west corner of the site (London Metropolitan Archive).
79
80
Simon Pepper
Figure 4.8 Woodberry Down, 8-storey slab blocks on Seven Sisters Road, showing individual balconies
on lower oor ats (right), photographed by Simon Pepper.
at Quarry Hill. Leeds reported that most tenants accepted the new lift-served ats
although some still prefer the lower oors. Despite the promised lifts, Westwood
believed that there would still be difficulties with ats on high oors especially where
the family includes young children.48
Other events stoked the debate over high ats. The County of London Plan (1943)
had become a wartime best-seller and was widely praised for its vision of a brighter
future. But in the 19431944 consultation exercise high ats received the strongest
criticism. Of Londons local authorities, only Westminster (already nurturing schemes
of their own), Chelsea and Paddington expressed positive support for 10-storey
blocks.49 Finsbury (where Tectons high blocks would be built after 1945) saw no alternative but to agree the principle of providing ats.50 Poplar, in the heavily-bombed
dockland area, demanded houses for all families with children and would ght a bitter
rearguard action well into the 1950s against the LCCs increasingly ambitious plans for
ever-higher high-rise ats.51 Most other boroughs expressed reservations, questioned
the (high) proportion of ats and stated local preferences for family houses. The Town
and Country Planning Association (representing Garden City interests) denounced
ats of all sorts and provided a useful summary of the numerous wartime opinion
surveys which conrmed their stance. High ats were endorsed enthusiastically by the
London Communist Party and the ABT, the Association of Building Technicians (also
politically Left), spectacularly reversing the pre-war Lefts opposition to tenements
but, signicantly, qualifying their approval by coupling it with expectations of high

levels of servicing and planning and the avoidance of unnecessary overspill.52
Lewis Silkins LCC planning committee, however, endorsed the proposed density
bands and the at-based housing strategy for much of inner London; the only
concession being the apparent reduction of the outer band from the maximum density
of 100 ppa. in the County of London Plan to an average of 70 ppa.53 The town
planning committee formally urged both the housing and nance committees to
agree the changes without which the wider credibility of the London Plan would
suffer. Both committees agreed, but only for the two experiments.54 For Woodberry
Down, the architect now increasingly stressed the advantages of high-rise blocks in
preserving trees on an attractively wooded site, as well as helping to provide variety
and visual interest. This prompted the comptroller of the council (the nance officer)
to comment that it was a high price to pay for aesthetics.55 Herbert Westwood
insisted that ats in high blocks were not only costly, but (even with lifts) represented
vertical overcrowding and a awed housing solution.56
Changing the guard in 1945

These were the valuers last words on the subject, for Mr Westwood died suddenly
in July 1944.57 His successor, Cyril Walker, took up post in April 1945 just as the
imminent end of the war in Europe renewed urgency in preparing for the delivery
of post-war houses. London faced special difficulty meeting the expectations raised
by political promises, which now fell to a Labour government to deliver after the
July 1945 general election. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the LCC inner praesidium fell
back on the uncompromising housing policy rst agreed in 1941. With the exception
of Woodberry Down and Ocean Street, new housing would make use of pre-war
standard plans. In the looming crisis of 1945, the leadership of the LCC now accepted
Randalls proposal that all housing functions be placed in the hands of the valuer, now
to be styled director of housing and valuer.58 Some architectural staff would be transferred to the directorate, leaving the architect with planning, other buildings (chiey
schools and health facilities) and a loose developmental role in future housing design.
The chief engineer and the medical officer would also drop their housing responsibilities, to which they readily agreed.59
The architects staff, the RIBA and the ABT all attempted to win a reprieve. But
the Labour-controlled and Morrison-trained LCC was tightly-disciplined and its
leadership not noted for exibility. Moreover, key former defenders of the architect
and his plans were no longer in the inner Labour circle. Dawson stood down from
a second stint as housing chairman in 1944 and in July 1945 Lewis Silkin (planning
chairman) and John Wilmot (a housing committee stalwart), who were both MPs,
joined Clement Attlees ministerial team. The housing committee was not entirely
happy with the proposed change and the vote in full council was very close.
Nevertheless, the decision stood. The furore created in the architectural profession
has been well reported elsewhere, together with the architect-led media campaign
criticising LCC post-war housing which in the modernist version of events brought
the LCC nally to its senses.60 Unfortunately, despite formal protestations to the
contrary, this campaign contained much professional snobbery. As well as criticism of
81
82
Simon Pepper
the buildings erected by the new directorate, Cyril Walker (an LRIBA, later elected
FRIBA, as well as a qualied surveyor) was personally undermined.61 Nicholas
Bullock has argued convincingly that the decision in 1949 to restore housing design
responsibility to the architect stemmed more from the early inability of the valuer
to deliver the promised numbers of houses than from any design shortcomings.62 As
often happens, after a painfully slow start the numbers came at the very end of the
programme 19,025 new permanent dwellings by the end of 1949 representing a
considerable achievement.63 Successive economic crises, building labour and materials
shortages, confusion between the Ministries of Health, Works, Town & Country
Planning, Labour, and Supply all with some role in housing not to mention the
unusually severe winters of the late 1940s, made it surprising that the gures were
not much smaller.64
High rise in London and Britain after the war

These local events would prove signicant in the wider high-rise story. Forshaw
resigned from the LCC in November 1945 to become chief architect at the Ministry
of Health. His had been a voice of relative moderation in the push for high ats,
which he saw as necessary to achieve the densities required for the County of London
Plan, but only as part of mixed development and properly balanced by low-rise
houses for families with children. The death of Herbert Westwood removed the
most consistent internal critic of high ats. His successor, Cyril Walker, a forceful
gure who had a good war as director of housing in the south London borough of
Croydon, also opposed high-rise but did so without Westwoods total commitment,
agreeing to a series of modest exceptions for schemes by private architects working for
the LCC from the height limits xed during the war.65 But there was a major falling
out in 1949 with the architect (Robert Matthew, acting here as chief planning officer)
over yet more 8-storey blocks in Stepney. At a meeting called by the clerk to the
council to settle the dispute Walker rst declared that he personally did not greatly
object to the 8-storey blocks but believed the council felt itself bound by the wartime
decisions, only to be reminded of the earlier exceptions. Randall (by now deputy
clerk) produced the documents, whereupon he [Walker] changed his ground and said
that, although there might not be policy decision against them [the high blocks] at the
moment, his own inclination was to report against them. Here in an internal minute
Randall was being careful to inform the officer (Mr Shove) now serving the housing
committee of what had happened at what must have been a tense confrontation, and
he notes that the town planning committee had already approved the Stepney layout.66
As Walkers authority deteriorated he was less able to oppose the much higher ats
proposed when Robert Matthews architects department re-assumed their housing
design role in 1950. By November 1950, Walker very much on the back foot was
seeking housing committee support for a new policy on high ats, in the light of the
newly-empowered architects plans for 11-storey point blocks at Ackroyden.67
The balance of power was also changing in other places. Before the war Labour
had been generally (sometimes stridently) opposed to multi-storey housing, whether
in the form of walk-up tenements or the various mooted proposals for high-rise.
From 1945 the Ministry of Healths political leadership proved surprisingly willing
to embrace a policy for ats within schemes of mixed development. The Minister,
Aneurin Bevan, famously declared that he spent ve minutes a week on housing, and
the rest of his time creating the National Health Service. He exaggerated of course.
In one Commons speech he gave a new twist to mixed development when he spoke
of three ages of man demanding three kinds of accommodation: housing for the
young and childless, the family with children, and for old age.67 Material support for
mixed development came in the Housing (Financial & Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill
1946. In the debates the ministerial team put up a solid defence against widespread
cross-party criticism of ats and a subsidy system which now gave enhanced subsidies,
not only for housing on expensive sites, but for lift-served schemes of four or more
storeys, together with the low-rise houses needed on mixed development estates.69
Outside London the major local authorities moved cautiously on ats, each city
taking its own policy line and sometimes reversing previously-held political positions.
In 1945, Manchester approved the city engineers blanket rejection of multi-storey
ats.70 Coventry took the same line.71 But there were still surprises. November 1945
saw Bevan visit Liverpool in an attempt to persuade the city to father the construction
of tall blocks in rural settings as reported by the Liverpool Daily Post under the
headline: Liverpool May Have Skyscrapers Ten-storey ats outside city limits
Mr Bevans suggestion to Alderman Shennan.72 During the 1930s, Conservativecontrolled Liverpool had been the most prolic English at-building authority outside
London, and may have been seen as fertile ground for such an initiative. In 1945,
however, Liverpool was digesting a thoroughgoing rejection of ats as revealed in
its own wartime tenant opinion survey. The citys reconstruction plan now specied
three storeys as the normal maximum for ats, although the city architect, Lancelot
Keay, designed 10-storey blocks and 3-storey narrow-fronted terraced houses for the
high-density redevelopment he believed would be needed in Liverpools dockland,
still an area of predominantly casual employment where proximity to the dock gates
was important.73 In the event, Liverpool would wait until the 1950s for high rise.
By this time, London held what would soon become the unenviable distinction
of national leader in high-rise at construction. The LCCs 8-storey experiment at
Woodberry Down, the rst phases of Westminsters Pimlico housing (the result of a
1946 competition won by Powell and Moya) and Tectons high ats in Finsbury all
made possible by the policies introduced in the County of London Plan were the
best known post-war schemes.74 In absolute terms, the numbers of high-rise ats
were still very small and their predicted high costs and the post-war steel shortages
(compelling the redesign of both Woodberry Down and Pimlico) briey reduced
the Ministrys enthusiasm for ats. But the Rubicon had by now been crossed at a
number of levels of government: high-rise ats were now an acceptable part of social
housing provision.
The RIBA symposium on high flats

The results of, as well as the arguments for, the new policy were given a public
airing in February 1955 when the RIBA hosted a symposium on high ats chaired
by Dr Leslie Martin (LCC chief architect) with Forshaw (still chief architect at the
MHLG) delivering a critical commentary.75 The new minister of housing, Duncan
83
84
Simon Pepper
Sandys, was unable to attend but was represented by Dame Evelyn Sharp, soon to
become permanent secretary at the Ministry of Housing and Local Government, but
already recognised as one of the most formidable civil servants of her generation. The
gathering included one thoroughgoing enthusiast for high rise, Major Rolf Jensen, the
architect and town planning officer for the Metropolitan Borough of Paddington.76
The only prominent critic was Sir George Pepler, a staunch Garden City partisan,
former chief inspector of housing at the Ministry of Health and President of the Town
Planning Institute, who left the event early.
The event anticipated a revival of the slum clearance drive interrupted by the
war.77 Harold Macmillan, housing minister from 1952 to 1954, had broken through
the 300,000 new houses a year barrier, mainly by sweeping away the remaining
wartime building controls on the private sector (but also by cutting the generous
post-war space standards and discouraging steel-hungry ats).78 Most of those at the
RIBA knew nothing of government plans to alter the subsidy system in the 1956
Housing Act, which is now widely credited with initiating the real boom in high at
construction of the late 1950s and 1960s by giving additional support for each extra
oor in high blocks. However, most of them probably sensed a watershed. Churchill
might have called it the end of the beginning.
Whiteld Lewis (head of housing design at the LCC, and another future MHLG
chief architect) gave a broad-ranging account of recent and current LCC work,
focusing on the schemes surrounding Richmond Park in South West London where
the new point blocks and the Corbusier-inspired maisonette blocks were already
being built to eleven storeys. Other speakers illustrated high-rise in North America,
Continental Europe and British Medium-sized Towns and Suburban Areas (Harlow
New Town and Bath). Technical experts discussed structures, re protection and
means of escape, servicing systems, and shunt ues (solid fuel still being in use in many
schemes). Contractors paraded tower cranes, shuttering systems and pre-casting. All
of this gave a picture of state-of-the-art technology and a comfortable feeling that
problems only needed to be identied and understood before being resolved. Dr J. C.
Weston from the Building Research Establishment described efforts to understand
the embarrassingly wide gap in costs separating high-rise ats from ordinary 2-storey
house construction in the UK. Cost was clearly the elephant in the room for many
of those present.
The other elephant in the room was the user. Antipathy to the idea of living in high
ats was recognized, but now dismissed as conservatism. Margaret Willis, a sociologist
in the LCC architects department who had recently completed a survey of tenants
in high blocks, attempted to show that users were now more open minded. Much
of her paper lauded the virtues of high rise (views, fresh air, quiet, etc.) which were
evidently enjoyed by many of her very small sample. Only at the end of her paper did
she acknowledge that about two-thirds said that ideally they would like a little house
and a garden, and an even greater proportion of the people on the lower oors said
the same. Her audience was re-assured that the LCC at-dwellers were coming to
terms with their fate. Many realise that it is impossible for everyone to have a house
and so they are accepting at life instead and enjoying the advantages it has to offer.79
Mixed development had of course been conceived as a way of housing only small and
childless households off the ground, leaving families with children in houses. Forshaw
put his nger on this in his summary by pointing out the low percentage of houses in
schemes described by Whiteld Lewis: 4 per cent, 8 per cent and 10 per cent at the
most. London should do better. A footnote was later added (no doubt after protest)
pointing out that this is offset largely by the provision of up to 40 per cent of accommodation in 4-storey maisonettes with gardens.80
Forshaw was of course right. The social underpinning of mixed development as
explored by Elizabeth Denby and the wartime teams at the LCC was already lost in
a new orthodoxy which was increasingly aesthetic. Speaker after speaker at the RIBA
waxed lyrical on the awfulness of carpets of low-rise cottages or uniformly mediumrise ats, and the visual relief offered by high blocks. The theme was elaborated by
Frederick Gibberd, who had included a 10-storey point block at Harlow, and who
now proclaimed: The building of tall at blocks gives more pleasure to more people [original
emphasis], meaning both their residents and those within sight of them.81 Even the
famously tough-minded Dame Evelyn Sharp succumbed to the spell. As permanent
secretary in the MHLG she would exercise more inuence over the future shape of
British social housing than any architect, and her biographer says that she lived to
regret her support for high ats.82 In a speech which stressed the importance of cost,
good design, awareness of family structures and the potential value of maisonettes in
giving privacy and quiet, she veered into a celebration of mixed development:
high dwellings interspersed with low and middle-sized dwellings are really a
thing of beauty. There is nothing it seems to me more deadening in the urban
landscape than a uniform mass of low buildings covering acres and acres high
dwellings I think really very high dwellings are an enormous enhancement
of the scene.83
Conclusion
This chapter was written in 2013 when the 8-storey blocks at Woodberry Down were
already dwarfed by the rst phases of a private sector development (Woodberry Park by
Berkeley Homes) which will soon cover the entire LCC estate (Figure 4.9). The highest
of these new blocks rise to 25 storeys. When the Greater London Council (successor to
the LCC) was abolished, the estate was transferred to the London Borough of Hackney
which, after years of neglect, adopted a renewal strategy which will eventually see most
of the estate replaced by private sector apartments for sale, and the residents either
re-housed by social housing providers or (for those leaseholders who exercised their
right to buy) compensated at market value. Another social transformation is in train,
just as socially traumatic as that which overtook the pre-war residents.
By examining the processes shaping the rst Woodberry Down estate, I hoped
to answer some basic questions about the steps leading to the eventual widespread
adoption of high-rise social housing. Different answers would of course emerge from
different local authorities. What emerges from LCC records is an interesting policy
drift, which is most obvious in its changing physical form. Woodberry Down evolved
from the initial architects diagram from 1936, through its re-design as a medium-rise
mixed development in 1938, and at least one (possibly more than one) experimental
re-design from 1941 to 1943, before the construction of the rst high ats between
85
86
Simon Pepper
Figure 4.9 The shape of the future, 2013. Woodberry Park redevelopment phase 1 (replacing the school
and community centre complex of the post-war estate), photographed by Simon Pepper.
1947 and 1949. Clearly inuenced by pre-war commentators such as Elizabeth

Denby, the estate was also shaped by ideas generated by the wartime Forshaw and
Abercrombie planning team and by (not always creative) tensions between different
groups within the County Council. For much of the war, the top elected members
Latham, Silkin and Dawson supported limited design innovation, backing their own
planners and architects in tightly-controlled high-rise experiments against opposition
from the housing professionals in the valuers department, cost concerns from the
comptroller, and the anxieties of a group of inuential senior staff of the clerk to the
council who saw innovation as a threat to the prompt post-war delivery of tried-andtested pre-war designs. Paradoxically, the 1945 success of this last group in persuading
the council to remove control of housing design from the LCC architect from 1946
to 1950 opened the door to the much less tightly controlled re-introduction of mixed
development with much higher blocks of ats when the architect (Robert Matthew)
re-assumed responsibility for design in 1950. By then the authority of the director of
housing and valuer (a client once again and sometimes an advocate for the tenants)
was much reduced.
For high-rise policy these events proved to be a classic of unintended consequences, prompting the question: was mixed development now consciously employed
by architects as a Trojan-horse policy, making high-rise acceptable even desirable

in circumstances where otherwise it would have been rejected by politicians
deeply hostile to the tenement tradition? Ruth Owens acquits them of this charge
whilst conceding that aesthetics loomed large in their priorities.84 To those of us
familiar both with the failures of so many high-rise schemes and the high prices now
commanded by well located Victorian and Edwardian terraces, it is difficult to take
seriously the claims advanced for high-rise as visual therapy for intolerable monotony:
a professionally dened problem, as Alexi Marmot put it, to which the only
solution was mixed development with high blocks.85 But the mainsprings of pre-war
policy were initially social, high ats in mixed development being seen as a means of
re-introducing cottage housing in the inner city as an alternative to tenements. Before
the war, Elizabeth Denby and Trystan Edwards also explored the idea of high-density,
low-rise housing.86 Why this last idea never took proper hold in official circles until
the 1960s is just one of the many questions still to be answered.
Notes
1 I am grateful to the staff of the London Metropolitan Archive (LMA), Hackney Archives
and the University of Liverpool Library, Special Collections, for their ever friendly
assistance.
2 A. Ravetz, Model Estate: Planned Housing at Quarry Hill Leeds, London: Croom Helm, 1974.
3 S. Pepper, Ossulston Street: Early LCC Experiments in High-Rise Housing, 192429,
The London Journal, Vol. 7 no. 1, 1981, pp. 4564; S. Pepper, and P. Richmond, Upward
or Outward? Politics, Planning and Council Flats, The Journal of Architecture, Vol. 13, 1,
2008, pp. 5390.
4 P. Dunleavy, The Politics of Mass Housing in Britain 19451975, Oxford University Press,
1981; M. Glendinning and S. Muthesius, Tower Block, Yale UP, 1994; N. Bullock, Building
the Post-War World: Modern Architecture and Reconstruction in Britain, London, Routledge,
2002; M. Glendinning, Modern Architect: The Life and Times of Robert Matthew, RIBA,
2008.
5 Formal credit went to Cyril Walker OBE, MC (director of housing and valuer), and his
chief housing architect, S. Howard LRIBA; noting that the layout and plans were originally prepared by the former LCC architect, J. H. Forshaw, MC, FRIBA. However, LMA/
LCC/AR/TP/1/54, Minutes, Architects Department meetings, 19 & 23 September 1941
(PWH 2, 25/9/41) record that Messrs. Brooks and Hepburn had recently prepared a new
[layout] plan for Woodberry Down. North London Observer, 17 September 1948 reported
the architect, Mr J. W. Oatley showing visitors around the high blocks.
6 Pasted on the backs of photograph in LMA/28.75WOO/571394.
7 Health Mecca for Stoke Newington Mr Bevan Cuts the First Sod After Sermon on
Equality, Hackney Gazette, 18 March 1949.
8 Bullock, Building the Post-War World, p. 211.
9 The North London Recorder, 20 September 1935; Hackney & Kingsland Gazette, 28 February
1936 reported 12,000 to 15,000 incomers. Major Coumbe (Municipal Reform LCC
member) declared: Morrison and Latham [campaigned here in the last election] and if
they can conquer a few boroughs like this, they will. Gazette, 9 March 1936.
10 LMA/LCC/CL/HSG/2/55 Motion from Stoke Newington Conservative and Unionist
Association AGM 26 March 1936. The North London Advertiser, 23 February 1944, quoted
Frank Rye LCC, great blocks of ats a great attraction to the enemy. S. Parker, From
the Slums to the Suburbs: Labour Party Policy, the LCC, and the Woodberry Down Estate,
Stoke Newington 19341961, The London Journal, 24, 2, 1999, 5169, for an account and
social study of the post-war estate community.
11 LMA/LCC/CL/HSG/2/55, Architect to Housing and Public Health Committee (18
November 1936).
87
88
Simon Pepper
12 LCC, London Housing, County Hall, 1937, 114116, 111113.

13 LMA, LCC/CL/HSG/2/55, Order to Architect (13 July 1938) to consider greater
proportion (say 25 per cent) ats in 2-storey buildings and provision of 3-storey blocks of
maisonettes with ats above. The 1938 scheme comprised: 850 1934-type ats (5-storey),
160 1936-type staircase access ats (4 oors), 110 dwellings in 3-storey at/maisonette
blocks, 240 dwellings in 2-storey atted or cottages; total 1,360 dwellings.
14 J. H. Forshaw, CB, MC (18951973), architect to Miners Welfare Committee
19261939, Deputy Architect LCC 19391941, Architect LCC 19411945, Chief
Architect Ministry of Health (later MHLG) 19461959. Obituary, The Times, 19
September 1973.
15 Dougill died in 1943 shortly before the plan was published: tributes by Abercrombie, Town
Planning Review, XIX, 1 (1943), 9; Forshaw and Holford in RIBA Journal (March 1943),
114115; obituary, The Builder, 19 February 1943, 173.
16 For its post-war development, see G. R. Owens, Mixed Development in Local Authority
Housing in England and Wales 19451970, London University PhD, 1987.
17 E. Darling, Elizabeth Denby, Housing Consultant: Social reform and Cultural Politics in
the inter-war period, London University PhD, 2000.
18 Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, 44, November 1936, 6180.
19 Denbys European examples included Kungsholmen, Stockholm, where 3-storey ats
overlooked 2-storey family houses; Berlin Haselhorst where 1,214 ats in 3- and 4-storey
blocks shared the site with 724 small houses; Department of the Seine: Drancy-laMuette, Chtenay-Malabry and Maison-Alfort. Chatenay and Drancy had 1216 storey
skyscrapers, with families housed on 3-storeys.
20 Europe Rehoused, 263264.
21 A Novel Housing Scheme at the Ideal Home Exhibition, Architect & Building News, 14
April 1939, 2527. Photographs and plans in The Builder, April 21, 1939, 739. See also E.
Darling, The House that is a Womans Book come True: The All-Europe House and Four
Womens Spatial Practices in Inter-War England, in E. Darling and L. Whitworth (eds.),
Women and the Making of Built Space in England 18701950, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2007,
123140.
22 The Hon. Godfrey Samuel, CBE, Oxford, AA, Tecton, private practice. After war service,
appointed Secretary, Royal Fine Art Commission (19481969). Obituary, The Times, 18
December 1982.
23 Silkins visit in September and October 1935 is reported in London County Council,
Housing. Working Class Housing on the Continent and the Application of Continental Ideas to the
Housing Problem in the County of London, County Hall, 1936. The Scots travelled in August
1934, see Department of Health for Scotland, Working-Class Housing on the Continent. Report
by Mr John E. Highton CB on a visit to examine Housing in the Cities of Rotterdam,
Amsterdam, Hamburg, Berlin, Frankfurt, Prague, Vienna and Paris, HMSO, Edinburgh and
London, 1935, 6.
24 Op. cit., 19.
25 E. Darling, Reforming Britain: Narratives of Modernity before Reconstruction, London, Routledge,
2007, 199, 203208.
26 A Town is Born, The ArchitectsJournal, 27 July 1939, 128.
27 Slum Clearance and Rehousing: The First Report of the Council for Research on Housing
Construction, London, 1934.
28 S. Pepper, Ossulston Street.
29 S. Pepper and P. Richmond, Upward or Outward? 5658; R. Dennis, Babylonian Flats
in Victorian and Edwardian London, The London Journal, 33, 3, 2008, 233248.
30 A. Calder, The Peoples War: Britain 193945, London, 1969, 188262.
31 LMA/LCC/HSG/1/2, Memorandum as to Post-War Housing (no date but circulated for
the Leaders Conference 7 August 1941). Dawsons memorandum obviously derived from
discussions with senior officers, but the irregular format suggests that it might have been
written by Dawson himself.
32 Randall was appointed Assistant Clerk just before the war and after it made OBE and
promoted Deputy Clerk (number 2 in the hierarchy) when the Deputy Clerk, Oliver,
became Acting Clerk to the Council following Sir Eric Salmons death in July 1946.
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
Randall supervised Housing Committee business through much of the 1940s and was the
author of the paper (signed by Salmon) which proposed concentrating all housing functions
in the Valuers Department.
Ibid. Clerks and Heads of Departments Meeting, 30 September 1941; Randall and
middle ranking staff meetings on 13, 21 and 27 October, 4 November (Draft Report),
17 November (Revised Final Report). See also N. Bullock, Building the Post-War World,
203205.
LMA/LCC/AR/TP/1/61. Forshaws operational plan, 22 August 1941. The project was
launched officially in April 1941 (when the heaviest bombing seemed practically over).
Memorandum from Wesley Dougill, 12 November 1941, the surveys and drawings are
virtually completed: University of Liverpool, Forshaw papers, D113/3/3/7 which also
holds the Preliminary Report for London Plan 1941. There is a gap in Town Planning
Committee minutes for November and December 1941, making it difficult to reference
this important document.
For LCC schizophrenia on this topic, A. Saint, Spread the People: The LCCs Dispersal
Policy, 18891965, in A. Saint (ed.), Politics and the People of London: The London County
Council 18891965, London and Ronceverte, Hambledon Press, 1989, 215236.
County of London Plan, 1943, 83.
Ibid., 119.
Ibid. Reconstruction of an area of Shoreditch and Bethnal Green, facing p. 102; also Plate
XXXVIII between pp. 104105, showing redevelopment of Bermondsey; and Coloured
Plate 5, facing p. 82, showing an area next to Southwark Park.
Ibid., Coloured plate 6, facing p. 83.
LMA/AR/TP/1/54 Redevelopment Plan, 20 November 1941. Mr Silkin inspected
preliminary drawings for the Redevelopment Plan for London was in favour of
amending the existing height zoning High-density development should be permitted in
areas like Hampstead in spite of local objection ...
LMA/LCC/CL/HSG/1/12 Final draft of post-war housing plan, 17 November 1941.
LMA/LCC/CL/HSG/1/12, Manuscript notes of conference in Mr Lathams room (10
December 1941).
Ibid., Manuscript note, 10 December 1941. This policy was repeated at intervals during the
war, softened only by Silkins promise to the LCC Labour Group (in response to a minirevolt of housing committee members) that new designs would be introduced as far as
possible and where delay would not ensue. LMA/ACC/2417/C/078, Minutes, 9 February
1943.
Hackney Gazette, 28 February 1944.
LCC Debate reported Hackney Gazette, 23 February 1944; Council motion, Hackney
Archive, SN/C/44, Council Minutes, 29 February 1944, 164; Council debate reported North
London Observer, 4 March 1944.
LMA/LCC/MIN/7616, Housing Committee, Presented Papers, 5 May 1943, item 16.
Westwood was supported by Forshaw, arguing at another Leaders Meeting that 4-storey
without lifts should be adopted if lifts could not be provided in 5-storey blocks. The
Chairman [Lord Latham] felt that the scheme would have to go forward as planned. LMA/
LCC/CL/HSG/1/12, 7 December 1943.
Ibid., Housing Committee, Presented Papers, 21 July 1943, item 6(18).
LMA/LCC/MIN/11566 Town Planning Committee Presented Papers, 19 December 1944,
item 17 for feedback, ranging from letters to the printed reports of special committees.
Ibid., Letter and report from Finsbury MBC, 25 February 1944.
LMA/LCC/CL/HSGF/1/94, Correspondence and notes of meetings between Poplar
MBC and the Clerk to the Council, 10 January to 4 April 1956.
LMA/LCC/MIN/11213, Town Planning Committee, Minutes, 12 March 1945, TP378
summarises the feedback on the County Plans high rise proposals. See pamphlets
Examination of the County of London Plan by the London Communist Party, 1943 and ABT,
Your London Has a Plan, 1943.
Ibid, T.P. 451, Draft Report Town Planning Committee, 11 June 1945, and LCC, Minutes,
17 July 1945, 955 and 959. The distinction was between a maximum and an average density.
The committee was told that in outer areas where much of the pre-existing lower density
89
90
Simon Pepper
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
fabric was not to be replaced, it would be necessary to build new housing to at least 100
p.p.a. to achieve an overall average of 70 p.p.a.
LMA/LCC/MIN/7300, Housing Committee, Minutes, 23 February 1944, 33, item
3(3); Ibid. 8 March 1944, 44, item 12; Ibid. 2 May 1945, 104, item 11, Town Planning
Committee (HP430) memo seeking HTPC approval in principle for 810 storey
blocks.
LMA/LCC/CL/HSG/1/94 Memorandum by the Comptroller of the Council, Post-war
Housing: Costs of development in respect of block dwelling estates based on 1938 price
levels.
LMA/LCC/MIN/7617, Housing Committee, Presented Papers, 23 February 1944, item 8.
Herbert Westwood (18811944). Tribute in LCC, Minutes, 18 July 1944, 512, records that
he joined LCC in 1902 and after war service worked in the valuers department, becoming
valuer in 1937.
LMA/LCC/MIN/2796, Civil Defence & General Purposes Committee, Presented Papers,
22 October 1945, Doc 928, Housing Organisation of the Councils Work.
Post-War Organisation of the Councils Housing Work, LCC, Minutes, 18 December
1945, 11781182.
L. Esher, A Broken Wave: The Rebuilding of England 19401980, London: Penguin, 1981,
103104 credits J. M. Richards at the Architectural Review; see also J. M. Richards, Memoirs of
an Unjust Fella: An Autobiography, London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1980, 237238. M.
Glendinning, Modern Architect, 117, says the campaign was orchestrated by Robert Matthew,
Forshaws successor as LCC Architect.
Even very senior Labour LCC members were guilty. Ewart Culpin, an LCC Alderman and
architect, apologized to the LCC Labour group for statements made to an earlier meeting
doubting that Walker was a member of the RIBA. LMA/ACC/2417/C/078, LCC Labour
Party Minutes, 20 November 1945.
N. Bullock, Rebuilding Britain, 212216.
LCC, Minutes, 7 February 1950, 37.
P. Hennessy, Never Again, Britain 19451951, London, Penguin, 1992, 273339.
LMA/LCC/CL/HSG/1/94, Notes of Conference 14 February 1947; Ibid., Note of a
Conference in the Leader of the Councils Room 18 July 1947.
Ibid., Randall to Shove, 25 January 1949.
LMA/LCC/CL/HSG/1/94 copy of a report to Housing Committee, Hg. 734a, 21
November 1950.
G. R. Owens, Mixed Development, 13. Owens was told by Michael Foot, Bevans
biographer, that his private papers gave no clues to the source of his housing philosophy.
Second Reading Debate, Hansard (Commons), 6 March 1946, col. 346 for subsidies; and
for criticism of ats and defence of mixed development, 26 March 1946, col. 246 ff.
D. Kynaston, Austerity Britain 194551, London, Bloomsbury, 2007, 164.
Ibid., 164165.
Liverpool Daily Post November 5, 1945.
Housing and Rehousing, Liverpool, 1943. See also L. Thompson, Merseyside Plan 1944,
HMSO, 1945 and F. Chow, High Rise Housing in Liverpool, University of Liverpool,
BArch Thesis, 1984.
Tectons schemes for Finsbury had both been designed before the war, but would now
receive LCC planning approval. The conditions for Westminsters Pimlico housing competition were explicitly framed to conform with the County Plan.
RIBA Symposium on High Flats, London, Royal Institute of British Architects, 1955.
Jensen had supported the High Paddington proposal in 1952 and attempted (without
success) to secure LCC approval for three 15-storey blocks at Paddington Green.
MHLG Circular 30/54 (22 March 1954) required local authorities to prepare programmes.
H. Macmillan, Tides of Fortune 19451955, London, Macmillan, 1969, chapter XIII
Building the Houses.
Symposium, 18.
Symposium, 43. Forshaw was being generous: half of those in the maisonettes lived two
oors away from the ground.
Symposium, 14.
82 K. Theakston, Sharp, Evelyn Adelaide, Baroness Sharp (19031985), Oxford Dictionary of

National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004.
83 Symposium, 5.
84 Owens, Mixed Development, 20 and 69.
85 A. Marmot, How High Should They Live? The Role of Architects and Planners in the
Design of High-Rise Housing in England and Wales, PhD thesis, University of California,
Berkeley, 1984, 344.
86 A. T. Edwards, Modern Terrace Houses: Researches on High Density Development, London,
Tiranti, for the Chadwick Trust, 1946, brought together a largely pre-war body of work.
91
Figure 5.0 Typical patterns of mixed uses around the docks in the south of West Ham (English Heritage).
5
WEST HAM AND THE WELFARE STATE
19451970: A SUITABLE CASE FOR
TREATMENT?
Nicholas Bullock
The London Borough of Newham is located in the east of London and was created
in 1965 by the contested amalgamation of the County Boroughs of West Ham with
neighbouring East Ham (Figure 5.1). Its history since 1950 exemplies in parvo both
the promise and the failings of the welfare state.1 Since the middle of the nineteenth
century the two boroughs, and West Ham in particular, have suffered the worst
consequences of the free play of unregulated market forces and the rigours of war. It
is the kind of place that the planning and housing policies of the welfare state were
intended to help. By the late 1960s however, the policies pursued by the borough of
Newham had put it at odds with the local population, the very people whom it was
meant to serve. How had this happened and what can it tell us of the workings of the
welfare state in Britain?
Located just across the River Lea, West Ham became the location of so much
that was excluded from the capital. The nineteenth century left a legacy of lth and
pollution, of the stomach churning noxious trades, such as bone boiling or rubber
manufacture, forced out of London proper.2 Just out of reach of the Metropolitan
Building Acts, the physical fabric of West Ham was thrown together by jerry-builders
and served as a byword for the inadequacies of construction and the ill-judged
mixture of land uses. The coming of the docks and the bonded warehouses in the
early nineteenth century, and the arrival of the railways in the 1860s, ensured competition for space but no relief from squalor. Further east, in more salubrious East Ham,
the quality of construction was better and rows of terraced houses safe behind their
diminutive front gardens were built to house the clerks and countermen who worked
in the city. But in West Ham the old ways continued. As the population grew rows
of two-storey terraces were packed densely cheek-by-jowl with factories, docks and
railways wherever space allowed (Figure 5.2).
The growth of Empire and the passing of the First World War served only to
increase the traffic in the docks. During the inter-war years when the Port of London
was still the unchallenged centre of world trade, the activities generated by the docks
supported the riverside communities like Tidal Basin, Canning Town and Silvertown,
94
Nicholas Bullock
Figure 5.1 The location of Newham in Greater London (left) and West Ham in the 1950s (right) (Patrick
Dunleavy, The Politics of Mass Housing in Britain, 19451975, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981 (left);
Architects Journal, 27 September 1956 (right)).
Figure 5.2 Typical patterns of mixed uses around the docks in the south of West Ham (English Heritage (left);
Getty Images (right)).
and further north the railway communities around Stratford. The raw materials
brought in through the docks contributed to West Hams emergence as the largest
centre of industrial manufacturing in London.3 It was this concentration of industry
and the docks and the associated railways that ensured West Ham was a major target
for the Luftwaffe, leaving West Ham one of the most badly damaged of boroughs in
London.4 As the war drew to a close, West Ham could lay an early claim to the range
of benets from health and education to planning and housing that the welfare state
was established to provide.
West Ham and the Welfare State
West Ham 19451955: the reconstruction years

With the creation of the British planning system by the Town and Country Planning
Act in 1947, it looked indeed as if the fortunes of West Ham would improve. As early
as 1941, Sam Boyce, leader of the Labour Group on the borough council, asked Tom
North, the boroughs architect to start preparing a plan for post-war reconstruction,
and in 1944 North was invited to collaborate with the team led by Abercrombie
on the preparation of the Greater London Plan. The result, presented as part of the
Abercrombie Plan, was a vision of a future that stood in striking contrast to West
Hams past.
This was to be no utopian blueprint foisted onto an unwitting public by an
arrogant architect/planner, but a set of proposals developed by North working in
close conjunction with West Hams leaders.5 The terse summary of the boroughs
Development Plan submitted in 1947 conveys little of the Councils aspirations6,
but the lm Neighbourhood 15, commissioned by the borough at the time, set out to
show the people of West Ham the benets that reconstruction might bring.7 The
old West Ham was to be transformed. In its place, North and his team envisaged
the construction of a series of new neighbourhoods, offering the West Hammers
amenities that would stand comparison with the best that the New Towns could offer.
The lm casts the councillors and officers of the borough as a group whose prime
concern is to serve the common good, debating a series of plans conceived as being
in the best interests of the borough. North, born in West Ham and a son of the
borough, is presented as both the diffident defender of the common good, and as the
expert trusted to dream the ideal future desired by his fellow citizens (Figure 5.3).8
Figure 5.3 Tom North, son of West Ham and borough architect and planner (Architects Journal, 27
September 1956).
95
96
Nicholas Bullock
The starting point for Norths plans for reconstruction was the larger context set
by the Greater London Plan which envisaged an expansion of the docks to cope with
deep water shipping and the necessary expansion of communications between the
docks and the surrounding areas (Figure 5.4). New railways and roads were to ease
the links with the expansion of the docks downstream towards Tilbury. Elsewhere in
the borough industry might be decentralized in line with the general provisions of the
report of the Barlow Commission but post-war planners assumed that the pattern of
industrial and riverside employment in the borough would remain.
Within this larger context the task set for Norths team by Sam Boyce, the
mayor and energetic leader of the local Labour Party, was not just to rebuild but
to modernize and improve. Central to this task was the reduction in the boroughs
population.9 Even before the war this had been falling by around 5,000 each year from
a peak of 318,000 in 1925. But the war caused a dramatic acceleration of this trend so
that in 1950, despite the return of 46,000 evacuees in the two years immediately after
the war ended, the population was down to 170,000. This was only 5,000 higher than
the target gure of 165,000 taken for the Development Plan, a gure that the planning
team hoped to maintain by overspill arrangements with Basildon New Town.10
This target was generally welcomed by the ruling Labour Party. The reduction in
population would make it easier to improve communications, build better housing
and increase substantially the limited amount of public open space, although it also
had negative connotations, suggesting a loss of political authority and possibly even
the loss of the status of county borough.
As their rst priority, North and his team took the reconstruction of the south
of the borough, the Custom House, Tidal Basin and Silvertown, the wards that had
suffered so grievously during the blitz and the raids on the docks.11 The rst need of
the local community was housing. With the razors edge of housing need addressed by
the erection of 1,000 Nissen or 2 year huts and 500 EFM (Emergency Factory Made)
bungalows, North and his team set about the task of disentangling the unhealthy,
Figure 5.4 Proposals for West Ham as part of the Greater London Plan (left) and Neighbourhood 15 (right) (Plan
for Greater London, HMSO).
97
pre-war mix of housing, factories, railways and roads by shifting factories westwards
to the banks of the River Lea and widening streets such as Silvertown Way and the
Victoria Dock Road to lead the heavy dock traffic away from the residential areas.
Repeated across the rest of the borough, this pattern of development would have
enabled North and his team to create a virtual new town composed of 16 mixed
development neighbourhoods very much along the lines envisaged in the County of
London Plan and the Ministry of Healths Housing Manual 1944.12 The boundaries of
these neighbourhoods were to be dened by the major features of the area: the roads,
docks, River Lea and the line of the Northern Outfall Sewer. Each neighbourhood
was conceived as having a population of around 10,000 people and planned around a
secondary school and shops, and was further split into three residential units of around
3,000 people, each with its own primary school.
Within the new overall density for the borough of 100 people per acre, there was
some variation. Typical of the lower densities was the Appleby Road Estate built at
68 people per acre (Figure 5.5).13 This was laid out as a series of two-storey terraces
with occasional three-storey terraces of maisonettes over shops to produce a garden
suburb form of development very similar to the pre-war out-county estates built by
the LCC. Architecturally unadventurous though it may have seemed, it was, according
to local newspapers, accepted enthusiastically by its residents.
But even as Neighbourhood 15, the rst of the new neighbourhoods, was being
completed the shortage of space within the borough was creating dissent between
officers over the boroughs housing and planning policies. The modernization
demanded by leaders of the councils controlling Labour Group, the troika of Sam
Boyce, Arthur Edwards and Terry Macmillan, required not just new roads and
housing but more open space.14 In so crowded a borough, open space was needed not
just for parks and general recreation but for playing elds for the new schools as well.
For North, the solution to these contending demands for space was to build upwards
to reduce the housing footprint and liberate land for other uses. The borough had
done so before: in the 1930s it had built two-storey tenements and four-storey ats,
though these had not been popular with tenants. As early as 1949, North had tried
to persuade the housing committee to accept six- rather than four-storey blocks of
Figure 5.5 The Appleby Road estate, typical of early post-war developments (Architects Journal, 27 September
1956).
98
Nicholas Bullock
ats only to nd his proposals rejected on grounds of cost and at the start of the
1950s, despite a refusal by the Ministry to accept the case for higher subsidies to West
Ham, he was pressing for still higher blocks.15 This raising of densities by building
ats was opposed by the boroughs housing officer, J. J. Atkinson, who argued
instead for maintaining the existing low-rise policy but combining it with a policy
of out-borough housing.16 This, he argued, would not only release land for open
space but would at last make it possible to tackle the slums, both agreed priorities for
modernizing the borough.
The early 1950s saw a series of compromises between these two approaches. In
1952 North nally won the housing committees agreement for the construction of
two ten-storey blocks on an experimental basis and the Claremont Road estate in the
north of the borough was planned with the rst of the new high-rise blocks (Figure
5.6). In line with the contemporary policy of mixed development which combined
houses for families with children with ats for older couples or those without children,
it was laid out with an 11-storey block of ats surrounded by three- and four-storey
blocks and two-storey terraces to give a higher density of 135 people per acre. This
was judged appropriate for the more urban part of the borough near the shopping
area along the Romford Road, though the residents seemed to have preferred the
two-storey terraces to the three- and four-storey maisonettes and those even more
so than a at in the 11-storey tower, where vandalism was reported as a problem
almost as soon as the block was open.17 While trying high-rise ats, the council
also agreed, reluctantly, to explore exporting population through overspill. Given
the troikas ambitions to rebuild the boroughs population, the council was slower to
adopt Atkinsons proposals but following the rst review of the development plan in
1956, Atkinson secured agreement for the overspill agreement he had negotiated with
Basildon and the limited programme of slum clearance started in the early 1950s was
expanded.18
By the end of the rst post-war decade, the modernization of the borough was
underway. The austerity years of reconstruction were past and redevelopment was
moving to a different rhythm. By the end of 1955, more than 3000 new dwellings
had been built by the borough and a further 604 added by private enterprise; trunk
roads were being improved to keep residential areas free of dock and industrial traffic
Figure 5.6 Mixed development in West Ham: the Claremont Road estate (Architects Journal, 27 September
1956).
and a start had even been made on clearing the boroughs slums.19 In 1956, reviewing
Norths achievements of the previous decade, the Architects Journal recorded an
abiding sense of incompleteness but a condence that Norths policies were transforming conditions for the better.20 It gave the clear impression that the residents were
pleased with the results. They welcomed the separation of factories and housing, they
liked the easy familiarity of the Garden City neighbourhoods and enjoyed the new
areas of open space. For his services to the borough, North was awarded an OBE. To
judge from the local press, it was thought that he thoroughly deserved it.
West Ham/Newham 19651970: urban renewal as modernization

Ten years later, in 1965, many of the hopes of the post-war years had turned sour:
planning had failed to transform West Ham and, in the view of many of the supposed
beneciaries, matters were worse not better.21 Trust in planners and architects and
their ability to create a better society had been replaced by deep distrust and rancorous
suspicion of the high-handed way in which they imposed policy from above.
At the heart of the problems facing West Ham was the way that the programme
of modernization, adopted with the rm backing of the council as the sequel to
reconstruction at the end of the 1950s, came to be interpreted and applied over the
next decade. The population of West Ham fell from 171,000 in 1951 to 157,000 in
1961 and to 134,000 (for the West Ham section of Newham) in 1971. Faced with
this, and with it the potential loss of political muscle, the councils leading Labour
Group championed the cause of slum clearance as a way of transforming the lives of
the inhabitants of the borough and reinforcing the sense of the partys commitment
to working for the local community.22 Moreover, under the provisions of the
1956 Housing Act with its emphasis on slum clearance the resources from central
government for modernization seemed ready to hand. With the higher subsidies
offered for the higher rise housing considered necessary to achieving higher densities,
Norths approach now looked nancially affordable.23
There could be no doubt of the need to modernize West Hams housing. The
gures from the 1961 Census and the Milner Holland Report (1965) on housing
conditions in London show that West Ham was the only outer borough in Greater
London where conditions were comparable if without the overcrowding to the
worst conditions in central London.24 The central issue was the abject condition of
the boroughs housing, much of it terraces built in the late nineteenth century to
lower standards than was permitted by the London Building Acts whose jurisdiction
ended at the county boundary shared with Poplar. With inadequate kitchens and
bathrooms that were too often shared, the majority of houses were rented out by small
landlords who lacked the capital to improve their properties. Housing in West Ham
was old, run down and in urgent need of replacement.
An inevitable consequence of slum clearance was the rise in the numbers needing
re-housing. During the 1950s the numbers on the waiting list had remained stable
but as the slums were cleared more families applied. By January 1960 the numbers on
the waiting list already stood at 3,031 and were to keep on rising: by 1963, despite
the volume of new building, the number had increased to 5,808 with more than half
urgently requiring re-housing.25 Since 1956 the demand for re-housing had been
99
100
Nicholas Bullock
met in part by exporting population by means of the boroughs overspill arrangements with Basildon.26 But the simple logic of this policy had the grave disadvantage
that it ran counter to the leading Labour Groups ambitions to rebuild the boroughs
population.
Early in 1960 Council policy changed. At the urging of the troika, North and
Councillor Edward Kebbell, a younger councillor keen to make his mark, who was
installed as chair of the housing committee, successfully put forward proposals for the
new policy: stopping all overspill, boosting the housing programme to 1,000 approvals
per year and increasing the density of the boroughs new housing through high-rise
ats.27 These initiatives, it was argued, would limit the loss of population and, with a
step up in slum-clearance, accelerate the modernization of the borough. Now, in place
of the policy of homes for families and ats in low-rise blocks of up to six storeys,
North was free to propose the use of high-rise housing funded by the new subsidies.
The adoption of these policies was in part facilitated by the retirement of Atkinson, the
boroughs housing officer and long-term opponent of at-building, and the creation of
a department of housing management under Dobson, appointed from Coventry, and
a supporter of Kebbells and Norths proposals for higher rise blocks.28
In 1957, North had already proposed plans for a 15-storey point block to take
advantage of the subsidies offered under the Housing Act 1956, which increased
with height. The Housing Committee had turned this down but agreed instead to
an 11-storey type that was to be widely used across the borough for the next ve
years.29 From 1960 onwards, even taller blocks were commissioned. In 1961 approval
was given for 16-storey towers and later in the year for the rst 22-storey towers.
Despite the known difficulties for tenants with children in high ats, the housing
committee under Kebbell were prepared to approve a growing number of developments in which there were no houses for families with children. Amongst the earliest
examples were the two 22-storey towers at Eastbourne and Abbey Road and the two
22-storey towers at Eastbourne and Barnwood Road. The latter were designed by
the well-known architects Stillman & Eastwick-Field and not only published as an
example of exemplary housing architecture but rewarded with a Civic Trust design
award as well.30
However, building high was not without its disadvantages. Even with the new
subsidies, the cost of building over ten storeys rose sharply and these extra costs
were not offset by an equivalent saving in land. Over ten storeys the increase in
density was progressively marginal: an increase from ten to 15 storeys could only
raise density from 185 to 200 people per acre; above 15 storeys the effective increase
was even less.31 As a result, given the shortage of large sites in West Ham, the use of
high towers did little to open up the space for parks and playgrounds that they were
meant to result in. Instead, North found himself too often packing large numbers on
to small sites, a policy that only exacerbated the growing popular dislike of the new
blocks. But this counted for little with the boroughs leaders: according to Norths
deputy Kevin Lund, Boyce, the leading member of the troika, declared himself quite
prepared to sacrice the boroughs limited open space in his determination to build
more housing.32
This rise in the waiting lists due to slum clearance, together with the need to
release cleared land for new housing while avoiding the blight that resulted from
the demolition, demanded that the rate of construction should be speeded up. In a
borough like West Ham, however, so close to the City, this was difficult because of the
shortage of building labour, attracted away to the City by the high wages paid to those
working on the office-building boom. A solution to the problem, urged with growing
enthusiasm by Norths contacts in the Ministry of Housing and Local Government,
was to use industrialized building methods.33 Initially sceptical, North was gradually
won to the cause and in spring 1960 North began arranging a programme of visits
and conferences for members of the housing committee so that they might judge
for themselves the advantages claimed for industrialized building. Finally, in 1964,
following a trip to Copenhagen to see the factory for the Larsen-Nielsen precast panel
system, currently being used for the LCCs estate at Morris Walk, North produced
a report recommending the application of industrialized building.34 The housing
committee responded by agreeing its use for 1,000 dwellings, a major portion of the
boroughs programme.35
The following year, despite the doubts of those representing East Ham who
attacked Norths designs as a mass of pigeonholes and a series of Dartmoor
prisons, this programme of industrialized building survived the merging of the two
boroughs.36 The housing committee of the newly formed Borough of Newham not
only agreed to continue the policy but to develop the Clever Road clearance area
with 500 dwellings to be built in two and half years by Taylor Woodrow-Anglian
using the Larsen-Nielsen system.37 The year after (1967), the borough issued a letter
of intent to purchase a further 1,000 dwellings from Taylor Woodrow-Anglian for use
on the nearby Mortlake Road and Eldon Road sites. In doing so, the new borough
renewed its commitment to industrialized building with a programme of 600850
dwellings a year, though it is signicant that no industrialized high-rise blocks were
Figure 5.7 Newham modernized: 22-storey Taylor Woodrow-Anglian point-blocks in the early 1970s
(Hugo Hinsley).
101
102
Nicholas Bullock
built in the former East Ham.38 Looking back twenty years, Edwards remembered the
opening ceremony of the rst industrialized buildings as a gala day and a new era for
housing we didnt think wed produced a white elephant, we thought wed produced
a Pegasus that would get us out of our housing problems.39
However, having decided to commit the borough to a programme of industrialized building, Newhams housing committee found itself confronted by growing
difficulties. First was the rise in costs caused by curtailment of the progressive height
subsidy in 1965 and, more seriously, by the introduction of the Housing Cost
Yardstick in April 1967, a new form of funding that reduced the subsidy to buildings
over ten storeys even more sharply. Bravely, if unwisely, Newham chose not to
abandon its programme of high ats, but the changes demanded for the new Housing
Cost Yardstick were to involve extensive alterations to the original proposals and it
was not until the spring of 1968 that the blocks at Clever Road, announced with so
much fanfare in September 1965, were nally completed.40
More difficult still was the mounting antagonism to the boroughs programme that
now included plans for 3,200 system-built ats, or around 70 per cent of the boroughs
programme, many of them planned in 22-storey tower blocks.41 Those used to living
in terraced houses, however decrepit, enjoyed the freedom of a house and the advantages of a small yard, and were ercely resentful at being faced with the choice of
either having to accept the councils offer of a at or having to fend for themselves.
To refuse the offer was to declare oneself intentionally homeless, an almost impossible alternative in Newham where slum-clearance was quickly reducing the supply
of private rented accommodation.
As more slums were cleared, opposition to the high-ats mounted, surfacing in
complaints to local councillors or snippets in The Newham Recorder and The Stratford
Express.42 Early in 1968, however, dissent in West Ham went public in a manner that
caused maximum embarrassment to North and the boroughs leaders. Immediately
following the Town Hall presentation of the Civic Trusts Award for Barnwood Court,
BBC2s Man Alive team came to lm the project and the residents only to learn from
members of the Tenants Association about the lack of consultation over the ats and
the absence of community facilities, points clearly registered in the documentary
alongside the views of the designers.43
North, Kebbell and other members of the housing committee dismissed these
protests as the views of a minority of troublemakers and, unshaken, reaffirmed their
commitment to tall ats and industrialized building. In defence of these increasingly
unpopular policies, members of the housing committee could claim that, in keeping
with the long agreed aims of the council, the boroughs slums were being swept away
and replaced by large numbers of modern, labour saving dwellings. Gone were the
slums and the old, down-at-heel image of 1950s West Ham. Newham, asserted the
boroughs high command, was being visibly transformed.44
The limits to modernization

These claims to be modernizing the borough in the interests of the silent majority
were brusquely challenged in the furore that followed the collapse, on 16 May 1968,
of Ronan Point, one of the newly completed 22-storey towers of the Clever Road
estate, as a result of a gas explosion in a kitchen on the twentieth oor.45 In the rst
days after the accident the debate focused on the technical issues of the safety of industrialized building but soon widened to include the larger and more emotive issues of
housing families with children in high-rise dwellings. In 1960s Britain, where the
public protests were few and far between, the signicance of the Ronan Point collapse
was that it created a rare context in which the policies of the borough were subject to
scrutiny, both local and national.46
At local level the authorities faced protests from both those made homeless because
of the explosion and the larger group of those who were about to be moved into
the blocks awaiting completion. In the short term, the official response was neither
to reconsider nor to consult but to defuse the situation by arranging public meetings
the purpose of which was to undermine the protest and to assert the continuity of
policy: displaced tenants were found alternative accommodation in the councils
ats; prospective tenants were assured that, pending the ndings of the enquiry, the
ats were safe and would be occupied.47 At the local authority elections in May, the
collapse of Ronan Point does seem to have damaged Labours standing, boosting the
chances of Rate-Payer and Liberal candidates so that Labour was only just able to retain
overall control. But once conrmed in power, the Labour leadership used its authority
Figure 5.8 The collapse of Ronan Point on the Clever Road Estate, May 1968 (Newham Archives).
103
104
Nicholas Bullock
to counter and undermine the protesters, picking the leaders off one at a time and
coercing the rest to accept rehousing or fend for themselves. In the end, however,
the now discredited policy of high-rise was abandoned, together with the boroughs
reliance on industrialized building. From 1970, with a new Labour leadership and
with a new borough architect and planner, Kevin Lund, the council favoured low-rise
rather than high-rise ats, and from 1972 onwards a policy of increasing the number
of houses in its new high-density developments. By the early 1970s, the policies that
had shaped the borough since 1960 had been quietly jettisoned.
Nationally the collapse of Ronan Point is important because it marked a turning
point in the acceptance of the planning and housing policies of the welfare state.
Though perhaps seen more clearly with hindsight than in the immediate aftermath
of the event,48 it strengthened the voices of those already attacking Britains record of
post-war housing.49 How, asked those writing in the national press, had this approach
to housing and planning been justied? Criticism centred principally on the failings
of architects and planners; on the seemingly irrelevant or arbitrary concerns of architects with what to most people appeared to be trivial questions of design, and on the
arrogance of the planners, architects and the other professions and their unwillingness,
or their inability, to consult or even hear the voices of those whom they were meant
to serve.50
Perhaps there were those who tted this caricature of the architect and planner,
but North the son of the borough is hardly a candidate. It is true that he was
known outside the borough: as a member of the RIBA Official Architects Panel and
member of the Central Housing Advisory Committee (CHAC), he was seen as the
embodiment of the senior public service architect, the terms of the citation for his
OBE.51 As somebody regularly in touch with gures like Cleeve Barr at the National
Building Agency, he could bring word of the latest developments elsewhere. Within
the borough he would have had inuence as both architect and planning officer and
a long serving officer. As borough architect, he could translate the consequences
of Council decisions into densities and housing form. But from start to nish he
remained the servant of the borough. He might inuence policy and the way it was
implemented, but he did not make it. From the testimony of Edwards, one of the
troika, and Lund, Norths deputy, it is clear that North did what the council leaders
told him to do.52
But, if the failings went beyond the role of the local authority architect and
planner, who was ultimately responsible for the policies that they pursued? Was there
a larger failure of local government? Recent research on the eastern London boroughs
during the period of turbulent change from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s provides
a wider frame in which to understand what happened in Newham.53
Local government: the challenges of the late 1960s

One starting point to explain these failings is the changing demands made of
government at local level. By the late 1960s the style of the welfare state, particularly
at local level, was outdated. Conceived in the war years and inaugurated in years of
harsh austerity that followed, its mode of operation was essentially top-down. In the
days of rationing the mass of the population had accepted that scarce resources could
only be allocated by a benign authority. During the rst post-war decade, key years for
establishing the values and the operational style of the welfare state, wartime attitudes
to authority persisted: the judgment of the expert was generally accepted. By the
end of the 1950s, however, with growing affluence this gave way to a keener sense of
entitlement and consumer choice.
During the 1960s the planners expertise in particular came to be viewed with
growing suspicion. Proposals for the drastic modernization of the centre of cities
like Liverpool, Newcastle or Glasgow with American-style urban motorways and
the clearance of nineteenth-century housing were challenged by those familiar with
the troubled record of urban renewal in the U.S. and the work of Jane Jacobs.54 By
the end of the decade there was growing recognition even in Britain of the need
for a new approach to planning, of the need to consult with those in whose name
planning policy was being made. The views of the Skeffington Committee, established
to explore public participation in planning, were sought in the drafting of the Town
and Country Planning Act of 1968 that ushered in a new relationship between the
planner and the planned.55 But how could planning and housing policy in Newham
be recast to suit this new template? Neither council leaders like the troika, nor officers
like North were cast in the new mould. If consulted, who could speak for the local
communities, for the planned?
By the mid-1960s, the riverside boroughs like West Ham, the client communities
that the welfare state was designed to serve, were starting to change. Economically they
were already declining as the tonnage handled by the docks fell from the peak of 1961.
By the late 1960s the eastern docks were standing idle, by 1969 St Katharines Docks
were closed, followed the year after by the Surrey Docks. The Royal Docks remained
in use until 1981 but trade was declining sharply. At the end of the Second World
War, West Ham had been the centre of the largest concentration of manufacturing
industry in the South East with large rms such as Unilever, Standard Telephones and
Cables, and Tate & Lyle guaranteeing a certain stability and prosperity.56 But from the
mid-1960s employment in manufacturing in east London fell by 24,000 as companies
closed or merged. In 1967 when Tate & Lyle shed more than 3,000 workers, 550 of
those living in the south of West Ham lost their jobs.57 Here were the early signs of the
decline that was to transform West Ham into the shattered and abandoned industrial
landscape taken over by the London Docklands Development Corporation in 1981.
The faltering of the local economy was mirrored in changes in the structure of
the community. Not only did people leave the borough faster than before, but the
social composition of the borough (both Newham as a whole and in particular the
more industrial former West Ham) started to change. Previously, West Ham had been
notable for its relatively stable and homogenous working class communities (unlike the
pattern of casual employment of the inner East End), anchored to regular employment
and structured by the membership of trade unions, the Labour Party and the local
football club, but this was now beginning to break up. The more affluent moved
eastwards, beyond East Ham, to the better quality housing (and schools) of Barking
and Dagenham.58 Those left behind tended to be the less skilled and the elderly.
Moreover, while the traditional working class structure of West Ham was being
hollowed out, new arrivals were different from those leaving, coming predominantly from the New Commonwealth. The 1961 census shows just 1 per cent of the
105
106
Nicholas Bullock
population of West Ham in this category, but by 1966 in the newly formed Borough
of Newham this had more than quadrupled to 4.27 per cent, and by 1971, the number
had doubled to 8.48 per cent.59
Perhaps more signicant by the end of the 1960s than the absolute numbers, was
the way in which these new arrivals were not absorbed into the old working-class
communities; they remained outsiders. Generally unskilled, they tended not to
become members of a union, nor were they necessarily welcomed by the Labour
Party. There is every reason to think that many suffered the same fate as their fellow
immigrants in Southwark or Bermondsey, who when seeking membership tended
to be told that local branches of the party were full up.60 Unsurprisingly, too, those
coming from New Commonwealth countries were excluded from the better housing
enjoyed by the established working class (who scored higher on the point system of
housing allocations) and tended to end up living in the private rather than the public
rented sector.61
With the fragmentation of local community, who was there to speak for the
planned? The loss of the informal networks of support and the departure of the
younger, more energetic and better qualied who might have provided leadership,
tended to mean that those left behind were less well placed to organize an effective
opposition.62 With the erosion of leadership within the community the need for local
politicians to play an active role was more crucial than ever. But here, too, changes in
the political landscape of London in the mid-1960s with the formation of the Greater
London Council (GLC) and the amalgamation of the smaller boroughs meant that
the links between communities and their political representatives were dramatically
re-cast. In the small relatively stable boroughs of the 1950s and early 1960s, local
councillors were indeed able to know many of the people they served.
During the 1950s this was generally the case in West Ham. The troika had
all entered local politics in the 1940s or before: Sam Boyce in the late 1930s and
Albert Edwards and Terry Macmillan not long after the war. As Edwards recalled in
1982, they still looked back fondly to West Ham as it was before the war, a Labour
stronghold of well over 200,000 rmly based on the mass industries located up the Lea
Valley and along the docks.63 Their priorities reected this view: they wanted to build
up the boroughs population, and thus its standing; they wanted to modernize the
borough by sweeping away the slums and the unhappy mix of industry and housing.
Planning policy was aligned with these views: with the local preference for houses
rather than ats, the need for open spaces was always trumped by the need for more
and more modern housing. A younger generation like Kebbell, entering West Ham
politics a decade later and keen to secure their patronage, appeared to subscribe to the
same values, thus perpetuating the old priorities.
With the reorganization of London government in 1965, local politics changed.
The amalgamation of West and East Ham is a reminder of the difficulties that occurred.
With the need to merge two different political cultures, each with different housing
and planning policies, the formation of the new boroughs was problematic with
both officers and elected members ghting and jockeying for control of departments
and key committees a process that left less time for the routine of departmental
business.64 With the larger slum clearance programme, and more available land than
the former East Ham, planning and housing activity was inevitable concentrated in
former West Ham and it is not surprising that West Hams troika was able to secure
the position of chair of the new boroughs housing and planning committee for their
nominee, Edward Kebbell.
With the consolidation of their inuence in the new enlarged Borough, Boyce and
Edwards both elected councillors on the new GLC could now play on a regional
stage increasingly remote from the day-to-day problems of local constituents and the
details of local politics. Their priority was to promote Newham in competition with
the other boroughs. Lund remembers the importance attached to Newhams position
in the London-wide league tables and the pride taken, for example, in the boroughs
industrialized housing programme, the largest in London.65
If the local politicians were forced to deal with the larger scale problems of the
larger boroughs, they were backed by officials who were equally, if not more, remote
from the population they were serving. Tom North with his local roots remained
something of an anomaly amongst the officers now brought in to take responsibility
for the new larger departments; his later deputies and his successor certainly came
from outside. With their larger budgets (and correspondingly higher salaries) and
running larger departments with more staff, they were generally men (not women)
hired from outside rather than promoted from within. They thus lacked the intimate
understanding or engagement with the borough and its communities that would have
provided a balance to the way in which policies like urban renewal, slum clearance
and industrialized building, pushed by central government and fashionable elsewhere,
were adopted locally.
Conclusion
If what was happening in West Ham/Newham was replicated elsewhere and there
is reason to believe that there were close parallels in other London boroughs such
as Southwark, Lambeth and Tower Hamlets, if not in other large towns in Britain
should we not revise contemporary judgements on the failings of planning and
housing? First we need to acknowledge the political context in which housing and
planning policy was developed. Looking through some of the better known development plans of the period, such as Shankland Coxs Liverpool Plan, one might be
forgiven the impression that they were a product of a modernizing agenda set by the
planners. But as we have seen in West Ham and then in Newham this was not the
case. As in so many other towns and cities, policy was set by the key councillors who
controlled the local council. In West Ham this was based on an essentially nostalgic
view of the borough as the major centre of manufacture it had been in the 1930s and
was still in the 1950s. Second, we should recognize that though the policies of the
late 1940s and 1950s might well have been equal to the task of ordering this world,
by the end of the 1960s the problems were very different from those envisaged in the
early days of the welfare state. Gone were the days when the focus of planning was
controlling the use of land and density, when planners operated with little more than
zoning maps, and when the architecture of housing was largely guided by publications such as the Housing Manual of 1949. By the late 1960s, planners and architects
(and their political masters) were being asked to address in spatial terms the social and
economic consequences of the rapid and turbulent transformation of East London.
107
108
Nicholas Bullock
Faced with the problems of a failing economy, rising unemployment, sharpening

racial divisions, there should be little surprise that they were no more successful than
others in trying to provide through the ageing machinery of the welfare state for the
needs of a society that was changing so fundamentally and so fast.
Notes
1 This account relies on a number of published sources for the general post-war history
of West Ham and Newham. These include P. Dunleavy, The Politics of Mass Housing in
Britain 19451975, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1981, Chapter 7; J. Marriott, The Political
Modernism of East London, in T. Butler and M. Rustin (eds.), Rising in the East? The
Regeneration of East London, London, Laurence and Wyshart, 1996; J. Marriott, Beyond the
Tower: A History of East London, London, Yale University Press, 2012; D. Rigby Childs,
Slum Clearance and Urban Redevelopment: Post-War Housing in West Ham in Architects
Journal, 27 September 1956, pp. 451458. Local sources include the boroughs two
newspapers, Stratford Express, covering the area that, after 1965, became the eastern GLC
boroughs, and for the period after 1965, the Newham Recorder, both could be critical of
West/Newham Borough Council. The boroughs voice was The West Hammer, published
quarterly from January 1961 and, after amalgamation in 1965, The Newhammer. Finally,
I have benetted greatly from being able to draw on two interviews recorded by Miles
Glendinning in the spring of 1989: the rst with Albert Edwards, one of the three key
gures in the Labour leadership of the borough; the second with Kevin Lund, Thomas
Norths deputy and then successor as borough architect and planning officer: unpublished
interviews by Miles Glendinning of Albert Edwards, 14 April 1989, and of Kevin Lund, 15
March 1989 (pagination from my transcription).
2 H. Morley, Londoners over the Border, in Household Words, 12 September 1857.
3 Marriott, Beyond the Tower, Chapter 9.
4 See Air Raids, War Damage on The Newham Story website: www.newhamstory.com
5 P. Abercrombie, The Greater London Plan 1944, London, HMSO, 1945, pp. 170174.
6 West Ham Development Plan, submitted 1 December 1952 and approved 1 June 1956.
7 Neighbourhood 15, directed by Stanley Reed, sponsored by West Ham Borough Council,
1948.
8 Obituary, Thomas E. North, RIBAJ, Vol. 92, No. 6, June 1985, p. 105.
9 The gures on the boroughs population are taken from Dunleavy, Politics of Mass Housing,
p. 207.
10 Lund Interview, p. 3.
11 The destruction in these wards was so bad that they were used by the army from 1943 to
1944 to train people in house-to-house ghting in the run-up to the invasion, ibid.
12 The qualities of Norths plan for the borough are vividly conveyed in Neighbourhood 15.
13 Rigby Childs, Slum Clearance and Urban Redevelopment, p. 458459.
14 Edwards is revealing on the workings of local politics, particularly the dynamics of the
Labour leadership and rivalry between Freemasons and Catholics, interview pp. 12.
15 Dunleavy, Politics of Mass Housing, pp. 214215.
16 West Ham Minutes (WHM) Vol. 66A (1951) p. 87.
17 Rigby Childs, Slum Clearance, pp. 462463.
18 WHM, Vol. 71B (19561957), p. 337.
19 Rigby Childs, Slum Clearance, p. 4.
20 Ibid, p. 467.
21 See, for example, the clash between the Tenants Association and the Housing Committee
over the design of Barnwood Court and its lack of facilities in Dunleavy, Politics of Mass
Housing, pp. 219223.
22 The Edwards interview brings out well the concern for maintaining the boroughs
population and the way in which the Labour leadership saw the number of housing starts
as a measure of its commitment to modernising the borough, pp. 12.
23 On the subsidies offered under the Housing Act 1956 see Dunleavy, Politics of Mass Housing,
pp. 159165, especially Table 4.6.
24 The Report of the Committee on Housing in Greater London (The Milner Holland Report),
London, HMSO, 1965, particularly Chapters 4, 5 and 9.
25 WHM, Vol. 77B (19621963), p. 793.
26 Lund interview, p. 3.
27 WHM, Vol. 74B (19591960), p. 718; Vol. 75B (19601961), p. 656; Edwards emphasised
Kebbells role as a bag-carrier for the troika, a view corroborated by Lund, who worked
closely with Kebbell, Lund interview, p. 4.
28 Edwards interview, p. 5.
29 WHM, Vol. 73A (1958), p. 198; for the number and height of blocks approved in West
Ham see Dunleavy, Politics of Mass Housing, Figure 7.4, p. 218.
30 Architects Journal, 31 January 1968, p. 262.
31 See, for example, The Density of Residential Areas, London, HMSO, 1952, especially Figure5.
33 Dunleavy, Politics of Mass Housing, pp. 224228; the Lund interview brings out well
the sense of the pressure from the Ministry on local government to adopt industrialised
building, p. 4.
34 WHM, Vol. 78B (19631964), p. 890, Appendix p. 895.
35 WHM, Vol. 79A (1964), p. 35; Vol. 79B (19641965), pp. 410, 507, 585.
36 Quoted in Dunleavy, Politics of Mass Housing, p. 235.
37 London Borough of Newham Minutes, Vol. 2A (1965), p. 555 and Vol. 3A (1966), p. 443.
38 Dunleavy, Politics of Mass Housing, p. 235.
39 Edwards interview, p. 5.
40 Housing Project with a Difference in The Newhammer, No. 2, September 1965, p. 3.
41 Dunleavy, Politics of Mass Housing, Figures 7.4 and 7.6.
42 Ibid p. 393, note 140.
43 For a summary of the Barnwood Court events see Dunleavy, Politics of Mass Housing, pp.
210223.
44 The Newhammer, regularly carried articles featuring in glowing terms the housing achievements of the borough. A typical example is Abrahams Point, Red Letter Day for Newham
in December 1967, which gave an upbeat account of industrialised building: For the rst
time, the much talked of industrialised building system has been used by the Newham
Authority and its use has vindicated all the talk of faster building to beat our housing
problems.
45 Besides the official enquiry, The Report of the Enquiry into the Collapse of Ronan Point (The
Griffiths Report), London, HMSO, 1968, there is an extensive literature on the collapse of
Ronan Point that ranges from the technical, see for example, S. Webb, The Ramications
of Ronan Point, RIBAJ, Vol. 87, No. 1980, p.15, to the sociological, for example, G.
Weightman, Ronan Observed, New Society, July 11, 1974, pp. 6970.
46 Lund commented in 1989: Up to Ronan Point, we hardly had any public meetings at all,
Ronan Point was the catalyst that got things going, Lund interview p. 7.
47 Dunleavy provides an invaluable summary of the councils response to the collapse which
should be read alongside the councils public statements in The Newhammer: Ronan Point
Disaster, June 1968, p. 1; The Ripples from Ronan Point, December 1968, p. 4 which
talked with no apparent irony of the much praised calmness of the tenants of Ronan Point.
48 In one of the rst retrospective accounts of the period, Lionel Esher judged the collapse to
have sparked a wave of irresistible unity high ats should cease to be built in Britain, A
Broken Wave: The Rebuilding of England 19401980, Harmondsworth, Pelican, 1981, p. 80.
49 The attack was led by Nicholas Taylor in a notable article, The Failure of Housing,
Architectural Review, November 1967, pp. 341358.
50 M. MacEwen, Crisis in Architecture, London, RIBA, 1974.
51 See note 9 and Norths biographical le held in the RIBA Library.
52 Lund interview, p. 5; North was a second tier gure rather than one of the boroughs Chief
Officers, Edwards interview, pp. 2 and 4.
53 See, for example, H. Carter, The Life and Death of Old Labour: Collective Action in
Sheffield and Southwark, 19451997, Oxford, Unpublished DPhil dissertation, February
2005; and Goss, S. Local Labour and Local Government: A Study of Changing Interests, Politics
and Policy in Southwark 19191982, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1988.
109
110
Nicholas Bullock
54 Esher, A Broken Wave, pp. 139171.

55 S. Ward, Planning the Twentieth-Century City: The Advanced Capitalist World, Chichester,
Wiley, 2002, pp. 245246.
56 Marriott, Beyond the Tower, especially Chapter 10.
57 Ibid., p. 343.
58 The issue is discussed in N. Deakin and C. Ungerson, Leaving London: Planned Mobility and
the Inner City, London, Heinemann, 1977.
59 On race and class in West Ham, see G. Bell, The Other Eastenders: Kamal Chunchie and West
Hams Early Black Community, Stratford: Eastside Community Heritage, 2002, and more
generally, J. White, London in the Twentieth Century: A City and Its People, London: Vintage,
2008, pp. 390393 and D. Donnison and D. Eversley (eds.), London: Urban Patterns, Problems
and Policies, London: Heinemann, 1973.
60 Carter, The Life and Death of Old Labour, Chapter 4.
61 Ibid., see especially the section dealing with housing allocation in Southwark, pp. 6471.
62 As Dunleavys study of Newham shows, the loss of key leaders bought off by the council
led to the rapid collapse of the protests against the councils housing policy.
63 Edwards interview, p.1.
64 Both Edwards and Lund refer to the difficulties of merging the two boroughs; both were
contemplating merging with different partners: West Ham with Leyton and East Ham
with Barking; Edwards interview p. 4.
PART II
Figure 6.0 The structure of housing types in the agglomeration of Bordeaux, from Lenny, Couvreur and
Chombart de Lauwe, Logement et comportement des mnages dans trois cits nouvelles de lagglomeration
bordelaise, 1958.
6
WHO NEEDS NEEDS? FRENCH
POST-WAR ARCHITECTURE AND
ITS CRITICS
ukasz Stanek
The decision of French authorities in the course of the 1950s to respond to the
housing shortage by the construction of the grands ensembles large-scale housing
estates, mass produced at the outskirts of French cities was as much a choice in
urban design as a way to stimulate economic development and rationalize building
industry in the attempt to modernize the French economy. It was thus a part of a
larger restructuring of post-war France, and the discussion about mass housing was
from the outset part of general debates about the French welfare state. This chapter
takes the concept of needs as a privileged entry point into these debates, and revisits
the agency of this concept in the studies by Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe in the
1950s; in the work of Henri Lefebvre and the Institut de Sociologie Urbaine in the
course of the 1960s and 1970s; and in the institutional research of Ren Lourau,
Georges Lapassade, and the researchers at the Centre dtudes, de Recherches et de
Formation Institutionnelles (CERFI).
Rather than suggesting a common denominator for these thinkers and groups, let
alone for other actors participating in the debates around post-war housing in France,
in this chapter the concept of needs is posed as a eld of dissensus. In what follows,
I will map the variety of roles played by the concept of needs in these debates: as a
cognitive framework employed in empirical research studies; as a theoretical postulate
which describes the deep structures of subjectivity of inhabitants; as an operative
concept for architects and urban planners; as a normative tool regulating entitlements
of various strata of population; as a critical concept debunking the normalization of
these entitlements; and as a political means for a speculation about an evolution of
new plural subjectivities from users to inhabitants.1 In the course of these debates
the concept of need was not only qualied and differentiated (with the introduction
of fundamental or deep needs, and with the distinction between individual and
social needs) but also replaced by a range of other concepts which were expected
to uncover the dynamics of the everyday uses of architecture: aspirations, practices,
demands and desires. Revisiting these concepts which are sometimes overlapping,
sometimes corresponding, and sometimes contradictory, allows us to account for some
114
ukasz Stanek
of the key controversies in French post-war architecture, and sketch a few trajectories
which led beyond that period.
From needs to aspirations: Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe

The post-war work by Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe (19131998) drew on his
previous and diverse experience, including his studies in philosophy, anthropology
(with Marcel Mauss), sculpture at the Acadmie des Beaux Arts in Paris, and participation in ethnographic research, as well as his experiences in the French Resistance
and his service as a pilot during the Second World War. His studies on the everyday
life of inhabitants of collective housing estates were carried out from the 1950s within
two institutions which he co-founded: the Groupe dEthnologie Sociale (GES) and
the Centre dtude des Groupes Sociaux (CEGS). In the course of the 1950s and early
1960s Chombart and his teams conducted research and interviews in housing estates
in Paris and other French cities, with the improvement of housing policy in view
and continued with commissioned research on workers housing and new housing
typologies.2 These studies resulted in a number of recommendations for architects
concerning the preference of the inhabitants for specic typologies of kitchens and
baths; the demand for better sound insulation and larger oor areas; and the introduction of social facilities into new neighbourhoods.3
Chombarts ambition was not only to respond to the request for guidelines by
architects and administrators, but also to advance fundamental research. This is how
he explained the role of the study Logement et comportement des mnages dans trois
cits nouvelles de lagglomeration parisienne (Housing and household behaviour in
three new towns in the Paris agglomeration, 1957) which offers a glimpse into the
concept of need in Chombarts work.4 The study was carried out in winter 1955
in three (unnamed) recently built housing estates in Parisian suburbs of differing
typologies: a neighbourhood of detached and semi-detached houses, a housing
estate consisting of buildings of three to eight storeys, and an ensemble of towers of
twelve storeys. Based on interviews with 50 families, the researchers gathered data
on the occupation of the apartments, their disposition and arrangement and types of
housing. The study, as Chombart wrote, permits an understanding of the accordance
or discordance between the needs of the families and the accommodation which
they inhabit.5 The researchers evaluated housing typologies against each other (for
example, pointing out that the inhabitants of the estates have more opportunities
for contact with neighbours, but face serious problems with acoustic insulation) and
commented on minimum oor area requirements, conrming the previous recommendations by Chombart and his team. They also registered more general complaints
concerning the lack of commercial facilities in the neighbourhood, the materials used
for ooring, rooms being too small or too long and narrow for convenient furnishing,
and kitchens that were not large enough to contain a dining table.
Chombarts study ended with the list of fundamental needs.6 They were described
as theoretical concepts, formulated by means of a generalization of the interviews
with inhabitants. Fundamental needs were conceived by Chombart as a limited
set of postulates constituting a deep structure which, supposedly, generated the
French Post-War Architecture and its Critics
specic wishes and demands voiced by the interviewees. They included the need
for space which comprised basic surface requirements, but which was also reected
in the specic characteristics of the occupation of rooms, and the need for spatial
independence of the group within a family (for example, for parents, adolescents,
schoolchildren) which relates to the possibility of rearranging spaces. The need for
the plan and the arrangement to be adapted according to family structures required
a oor plan which lent itself for rearrangement in such a way that each person was
able to nd a place in the apartment according to their position in the family (for
example, while most families preferred eating in the kitchen during the week, for
special occasions they would like to eat in the main, or living room.) The need for
rest and relaxation was posed both against the noise of neighbours and as a demand
for a possibility of separation from playing children, which also related to the need
for separation of functions not only between sleep, food, hygiene, but also between
eating and the preparation of food (a number of families complained about the
open kitchen). The need for liberation from material constraints was expressed by
families who, for example, complained that the high rents prevents them from buying
kitchen equipment. The authors discussed also the need for prestige, or of being
kept in regard, which related to the availability of rooms appropriate for receiving
guests. Other needs were theorized as balanced against each other: the need for the
separation of the family from neighbours, and the need for social contacts outside
the family which were under the control of the family rather than imposed on them
involuntarily by others.7 These conclusions were conrmed by the study Logement
et comportement des mnages dans trois cits nouvelles de lagglomration bordelaise
(Housing and household behaviour in three new towns of the Bordeaux agglomeration, 1958), carried out by the CEGS in winter 19561957 in three new towns
(Cit Le Prche in Bgles, Cit Le Jard in Mrignac, and Cit Carriet in Lormont)
which offered a combination of collective houses differentiated in height and density,
in the agglomeration of Bordeaux (Figure 6.0).8
Chombarts studies had much in common with with the work of the architect Robert
Auzelle, in particular his design of the housing neighbourhood Cit de la Plaine in
Clamart (19471967) in the agglomeration of Paris (Figure 6.1). As a writer and editor,
teacher and researcher, but rst of all, architect and urban planner, Auzelle pursued an
individual path in France, paying particular attention to the interdependence between
social and spatial morphologies; launching interdisciplinary research with historians,
geographers, demographers and ethnographers; and broadening traditional modes of
intervention of planning by new institutional and educational mechanisms.9 The project
in Clamart beneted from his previous experience: the renovation projects (late 1930s
onwards) for various quartiers insalubres which adopted the lot as the basic unit of intervention; the concept of a free dwelling (logis libre) which allowed the inhabitants to
decide about the arrangement of the interior spaces; and the understanding of the urban
plan as a synthesis of the interventions of authorities on various scales, from municipal
to national. Since the mid-1940s Auzelle had argued for the necessity for social research
related to architectural studies, in particular dealing with lhabitat dfectueux (the concept of
habitat, which became essential for discussions in post-war CIAM, was adopted by Auzelle
because of its stress on the totality of the physical and geographic conditions oflife).10
115
ukasz Stanek
116
Figure 6.1 Robert Auzelle, general plan of the Cit de la Plaine in Clamart, constructed between 1947 and 1967 (Frdric Bertrand, Robert Auzelle: lurbanisme et la
dimension humaine, Paris: Institut Franais darchitecture, 2000. Fonds Auzelle. SIAF/Cit de larchitecture et du patrimoine/Archives darchitecture du XXe siecle).
The Cit de la Plaine stood out within French post-war urbanism for the attention
to intermediate scale, the differentiation of housing typologies (from detached and
terraced houses to ve-storey collective buildings), and the careful design of open
spaces qualities which are still discernible on site, in spite of the recent thermal
renovation of buildings which resulted in the change of the faades (Figures 6.26.4).
Even the choice of the brick as the material for the residential buildings made the
project unusual, as did the prolonged construction time (19471967) which, while
involuntary, permitted the arrival of new inhabitants to be phased and eased their
integration into the community.11
After its partial completion, Chombart and his team were commissioned by the
Ministry of Construction (19581959) to study the Cit de la Plaine in comparison
with the Cit Benauge in Bordeaux designed by Jacques Carlu and Le Corbusiers
Unit dhabitation in Nantes-Rez. According to Chombart of the architects [Le
Corbusier] brought the most attention to peoples needs and aspirations but had
a somewhat naive view of social classes when he thought he could make them
disappear by another organization in the city and accommodations.12 By contrast,
Auzelle made the effort to think of housing and residential groups that reected the
lives of the people.13 In retrospect, he argued that the quality of the neighbourhood
resulted from the relatively low density of the built areas, an aesthetically considerate
choice of materials, the separation of pedestrian paths from traffic, respect for the
surrounding architecture and, above all, the structuring of the ensemble into small
housing units which may not seem like a big deal, but they were very important in
contrast to the grand ensembles and towers [that] multiplied at that time.14
Figure 6.2 Robert Auzelle, Cit de la Plaine in Clamart, collective housing estates, current state, photographed by ukasz Stanek in July 2012.
117
118
ukasz Stanek
Figure 6.3 Robert Auzelle, Cit de la Plaine in Clamart, individual houses, current state, photographed by
ukasz Stanek in July 2012.
Figure 6.4 Robert Auzelle, Cit de la Plaine in Clamart, collective housing estates, current state, photographed
by ukasz Stanek in July 2012.
Auzelle shared with Chombart not only a progressive Catholicism but also a feeling
for everyday urban life, with its vitality, heterogeneity, social mixture and sociability.
These were the characteristics of the rue Mouffetard in the 5th arrondissement of
Paris discussed by Chombart in one of his TV programmes in 1959, in which he
interviewed a saleswoman, a Moroccan student and a bus driver and debated with
sociologists, a shop owner and a colourful local leader.15 Chombart called for the
preservation of the social life of this lot insalubre which he contrasted with the
anonymous and socially segregating housing schemes appearing around while
acknowledging that renovation was needed to improve the appalling sanitary and
technical conditions of the neighbourhood.16
This position of what we might term moderate modernization runs through
the work of Chombart, whose respect for the voices of the people was combined
nonetheless with an ambition to modernize French family structures by means
of housing. He warned that this should not be felt as a constraint by the families
concerned but rather as a liberation from the old customs and outdated cultural
models.17 In the introduction to Famille et habitation (Family and dwelling, 1959), which
repeated the list of fundamental needs,18 he urged that needs should be studied in
cooperation with architects and administrators, so that families could blossom in
their new accommodation, freed not only from their old housing but also from their
old habits.19 Yet at the same time he argued against universal norms, and maintained
that needs are to be qualied by local, psychological and cultural differences among
the occupants. In his subsequent work Chombart suggested the superimposition of
the schema of need, function, ensemble of functions with a series of others, such
as situations behaviours, functions social structures, and behaviours needs
aspirations.20 For Chombart, aspirations referred to features such as silence, beauty,
rest, familiarity and dignity and they thus implied a stress on the singularity of each
individual, as opposed to the general character of needs.21
From needs to practices: Henri Lefebvre and the ISU

In the course of the 1960s this critique of the concept of needs was politicized within
the Marxist critique of capitalism. Henri Lefebvre (19011991) was among the rst
in France to reect in a critical way about the concept of needs within his broad
project of the critique of everyday life: the privileged sector of practice in which the
needs become desires.22 Lefebvres Critique of Everyday Life (1947, 1961, 1981) was
motivated by his attempt to rethink Marxism in view of the post-war development
of capitalism, and this critique was informed by his research in rural and urban
sociology, starting with his study of rural communities in the Pyrenees initiated during
the Second World War, with special attention to the processes of modernization of
the French countryside.23 The study of the new town of Mourenx in south-western
France (1960), together with his review of the design of a new town in Switzerland
(1961), marked a shift in his research interest from the rural to the urban as the title
of one of his omnibuses goes.24 As with Chombart, much of this work was developed
at the Centre dtudes sociologiques, where in 1960 Lefebvre created the Group
of sociological research on everyday life, gathering an impressive group of collaborators, including Guy Debord, Christiane Peyre, Georges Perec, Henri Raymond and
119
120
ukasz Stanek
Nicole Haumont. The two last became Lefebvres close collaborators in the Institut
de Sociologie Urbaine (ISU), founded in 1962 with the aim of carrying out research
on the possibilities of urban development on the north side of Paris (the research on
the plateau of Montmorency was launched as one of the preparatory studies for the
1965 masterplan of Paris). The Institut soon moved to other topics commissioned
by various state planning agencies, including the major study of everyday life in the
suburban detached house or pavillon, as compared with the large housing estates or
grands ensembles.25 Together with subsequent work of the ISU, these studies became
key contributions to debates about housing architecture in the late 1960s, signicantly
inuencing French architectural culture. They were also essential, if rarely explicitly
referred to, for the formulation of Lefebvres theory of production of space, published
in six books between 1968 (The Right to the City) and 1974 (The Production of Space).26
Seen within this larger research framework, a signicant step for Lefebvres critique
of the concept of needs was his 1961 review of the design for a new town of 30,000
inhabitants near Otelngen, a village in the Furttal valley north of Zurich, designed
by the team headed by Ernst Egli, professor of urbanism at the ETH Zurich.27 In
the discussion of the project in the book Die neue Stadt: eine Studie fr das Furttal,
Zrich (The new town: a study for Furttal, Zurich, 1961), the sociologist Werner Aebli,
a member of Eglis team, distinguished three fundamental needs: the need for
society, the need for community, and the need for freedom. He then went on to
distinguish the levels of social organization: from the individual, through the family,
neighbourhood, group of neighbourhoods, small quarter, quarter, district, to the
city. These levels were combined with a list of 12 needs, namely nutrition, hygiene,
recreation, nursing, religion, science, art, protection, welfare, politics, administration
and upbringing. The resulting matrix permitted control of the way that every need
was answered on every level of social organization.28
The members of the planning team saw their contribution as a revision of the
Charter of Athens (formulated in 1933, published in 1943) and its theorization of
the urban territory in terms of ows between production (work) and reproduction
(housing, leisure):
It is not sufficient to examine the well-known urban functions housing, work,
traffic, taking care of the body and mind in isolation, just to account for
them in an isolated and rigidly theoretical way in urban planning. Rather, we
intended to consider them on all levels of the community and organization, and
thus to realize them in a much more ramied and overarching form.29
Yet in spite of these declarations, the city was planned in a rigid, functionalist manner,
with a threefold division into housing, industry, and central functions (administration,
culture). All three were linked by an oversized, segregated and crossroad-free traffic
system. The introduction of cores of social life reected discussions in post-war
planning of the concept of community and Sigfried Giedions and Josep Llus Serts
search for a new monumentality.30
While impressed by the conceptual rigour of the Swiss designers, Lefebvre
developed a critique of the project which set the tone of his writings on post-war
urbanism. He wrote that the project: presupposes a simplied theory of needs and
functions. The community is composed with families in the same a way as the
functions of the city are composed, with basic needs attributed to different levels.31
This leads to an omission of elements which cannot be included in a functional grid,
such as an event, a monument, or a traditional street with its playful uses (the game
does not correspond to any elementary need, while presupposing all of them, wrote
Lefebvre).32 In the years to come he would develop this critique in two directions.
On the one hand, he would stress the heterogeneity and differentiation of needs, as in
the seminar on functional needs, which he co-organized in Nanterre (19681970).33
On the other, he would refer to Marxs discussions of social needs, which pertain
to large social groups which hence are to be satised by society as a whole. In his
1972 reading of Marxs Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875), Lefebvre attributed
to Marx an understanding of an emergence of a new need, that of the urban life
(la vie urbaine) of the city, which can be satised neither by the market nor by state
institutions.34
At the same time, Lefebvre targeted the functionalist procedure of translating
specic needs, conceived as discrete and isolated, into a system of segregated
functions, assumed to be complete and covering the totality of social life. He
argued that functionalist urbanism aims at an overarching equilibrium constructed
according to the matrix of functions. Dened by their balanced relationship to each
other rather than to an external reality the demands of the inhabitants or the
urban experience the masterplan becomes a system of differentiated functions in
which the identity of every function is dened by its relationship with every other
in the system. Lefebvre argued that this concept of urbanism subscribed to the
logic of differentiation which structuralism, dominant in French social sciences and
humanities from the 1960s, had proclaimed as common to all sectors of the emerging
society of consumption. Hence, in the analysis of Jean Baudrillard, Lefebvres
doctoral student at Nanterre, the objects of consumption do not respond to a need
of the consumer but rather are autonomized as differential signs within the social
production of codes of signication. For Baudrillard, needs are as essential for the
order of production as the capital invested by the capitalist entrepreneur and the
labour power invested by the wage laborer: there are only needs because the system
needs them.35 Yet according to Lefebvre while structuralism claimed to have revealed
the deep structures of cultural phenomena, its theorizing of societies as stable, selfregulating systems conformed to the ideology of the French post-war state. The
underlying logic of differentiation was the exchange economy, where the exchange
value of a commodity was established by a relationship to all other commodities on
the market, rather than by a reference to its use value.36
Taking the Marxist concept of use value as his starting point, during the 1960s Lefebvre
aimed to develop an alternative conceptual framework for urban research in general. This
was inspired by the studies of the ISU, in particular by the large research project about
the everyday life in the pavillon or detached suburban house, published in three volumes
in 1966 as Lhabitat pavillonnaire, Les pavillonnaires and La politique pavillonnaire.37
The rst level on which dwelling was studied were the practices by which space
was appropriated. Appropriation was the term used by the ISU for the operations
of marking, limiting, and arranging space, familiarizing oneself with it and transforming it by manipulation of objects. Such activities as building a fence, taking care
121
122
ukasz Stanek
of the house, maintaining the garden, introduce fundamental oppositions, like that
between open and closed, clean and dirty, empty and full, seen and hidden, seeing
and being seen. The approach was not that of localizing in a pre-existing space a need
or a function, but, on the contrary, of spatializing a social activity, tied to a practice
as a whole, by producing an appropriated space.38 Against the nineteenth-century
pedagogical project of good use (bon usage) and the pedagogy of dwelling in Le
Corbusiers Manire de penser lurbanisme (1946), in Lefebvres writings appropriation
is an individualized mastering of space, in response to intersubjective, interiorized
mental patterns.39 Indebted to the discussions in architectural culture of the 1960s,
with such books as Amos Rapoports House Form and Culture (1969) and Philippe
Boudons Pessac de Le Corbusier (Lived-in Architecture: Le Corbusiers Pessac, 1969),
Lefebvre theorized appropriation not in terms of inevitabilities and determinations,
but in terms of possibilities and constraints.40
In other words, the marked distinctions are always already socialized: translated into those oppositions, such as public and private, female and male, work and
leisure, which structure social groups in a given society (for example, family, friends,
neighbours, visitors). The second level of analysis accounted for practices in the
socialization of space, that is to say practices which introduced these meanings into
the domestic space. In order to secure a gradation of levels of privacy, the inhabitants
introduced boundaries, thresholds, or spaces of transition: starting with the front
garden and progressing through the entrance, dining and living rooms, kitchen and
childrens bedrooms, ending up with the parents bedroom as the most private place,
with connotations of nudity and sexuality.41
To investigate the ideology of the pavillon the third level of dwelling analysed in
Lhabitat pavillonnaire was in fact the initial aim of the research.42 However, the initial
hypothesis that the pavillonnaire way of life expresses the ideology of petit-bourgeois
was revised in the course of the research. Thus, the ISU concluded that the preference
of the French for the pavillon stems from the fact that its spatial layout facilitates the
expression of the French cultural model dened in reference to the work of Georges
Gurvitch and, in the course of the 1970s, approximated with Pierre Bourdieus
concept of habitus.43 One of the main arguments of the research of the ISU was that
the inhabitants transform spaces in order to comply with their cultural model: a sense
of what is and what is not appropriate to do in specic spaces in the pavillon.
The shift of the research perspective in the ISU studies from the inhabitant
as a being of needs to a being of practices, and the division of these practices
into three broad groups, were translated by Lefebvre into a framework of urban
analysis. In his 1966 essay Besoins profonds, besoins nouveaux de la civilisation
urbaine (Deep needs, new needs of the urban civilization), and somewhat against
its title, Lefebvre suggested analyzing urban reality not in terms of needs but in
terms of heterogeneous practices. He called for an analysis based on three levels
corresponding to those developed in the study of the pavillon.44 The rst level was
that of the conict between the constraints (institutional, nancial, conventional)
and possibilities of appropriation of space. The second level was that of what he
termed the imaginary, for which monuments constitute privileged points in the
city. In Lefebvres reading, monuments not unlike the garden for a pavillonnaire
refer to a different time, a different place: a utopia. But the urban imaginary
was also conveyed by the street, with its accidental encounters, signs and symbols.
Finally, the third level was that of ideology, in particular the ideology of the state,
manifested in the urban voids: parade squares or large avenues. One reads the
city, its writing, on these three levels, their juxtapositions and their interferences,
he wrote, proposing that this conceptual framework would also be useful for
designers.45
From needs to desires: institutional analysis and CERFI

Commissioned by state planning agencies, the studies of the ISU were indicative of
the increasing absorption of critical research into French state urbanism in the course
of the 1960s. Within the more general process of institutionalization of critique by
the modernizing French state, the established position of critique (including Marxist
critique) as external to its subject was destabilized. In this context, critical concepts
were short-circuited into the discourses of all political actors, so that slogans such as
changer la vie, changer la ville (change life, change the city), rst associated with the
radical left, could subsequently be found at any point in the political spectrum.46 This
included concepts coined by Lefebvre himself, and when publishing his books on
space between 1968 and 1974, he witnessed the incorporation of critical concepts
into the increasingly self-critical French state planning discourse.47
A case in point was the question of participation of the inhabitants in the development of their neighbourhood. As Brian Newsome has shown, in the course of the
1960s participation became an increasingly standard procedure in French post-war
urbanism. What began in the 1950s with polls concerning users preferences carried
out around exhibitions organized by the Ministry of Reconstruction, led to the introduction, during the next decade, of elected residents councils that would co-manage
socio-cultural institutions in the neighbourhood and participate in the decisions
about the housing estates.48 While Lefebvre saw permanent participation, together
with collective ownership and management of space, as an essential aspect of a new
political project,49 he was highly critical of the ways participation was put in place in
French urbanism: as a means to enforce consensus on inhabitants, a mystication of
pseudo-democracy.50
The institutionalization of participation procedures was soon recognized by critical
social scientists and activists as a way to normalize the demands of those concerned.
This is because, as Georges Lapassade and Ren Lourau argued in 1971, an institution
is not only a medium for messages which over-determines what can be said and what
must remain unsaid, but also a message itself, that about social hierarchy.51 In contrast
to Chombart and post-war applied sociology, rather than isolating the users in order
to examine their needs, Lapassade and Lourau argued that what should be subjected
to critique was the social condition which produces the very concepts of users
and needs. Against mainstream Marxist discourse in 1960s France, they aimed at a
critique of social dynamics from within, addressing the sequence of decisions which
resulted in the commission of the analysis in the rst place.
This approach was essential to the project of institutional analysis developed by
Lapassade and Lourau in the late 1960s and 1970s. Both had been colleagues of
Lefebvre at Nanterre (Lourau was in fact a PhD student of Lefebvre, who contributed
123
124
ukasz Stanek
to the invisible college of institutional analysis in the early 1970s).52 Drawing from
psycho-sociology, socio-analysis, Marxism and psychoanalysis, Lapassade and Lourau
argued that to analyze a rm, a hospital or a trade union from an institutional point
of view means revealing the social forces at work in an institution seemingly ruled by
universal norms and supposedly assigned with specic functions.53 This approach was
developed in numerous interventions which were commissioned by the management
of commercial, educational or administrative institutions.
Since each such commission originated in a response to a crisis, Lapassade and
Lourau explained that in order to understand this crisis, institutional analysis needs
to start with the analysis of the commission (commande) and the implicit demand
(demande). In this way, the analysis is always a situation during which the analyst
encourages unfettered speech of the participants and confronts them with their
positive and negative references to groups, categories, ideologies. This situation
must be constructed as self-managed in order to make all participants discover their
real place in the social organization.54 As explained by Lourau, to instigate selfmanagement (autogestion) is, above all, to break the individual resistance or that of
a group, together with hierarchies, small or big secrets, and the division of labour
institutionalized as normal, rational, and eternal.55 In this way, the analyst becomes
an animator, whose aim is to liberate social energy in the group and mobilize the
liberated energy for the collective activities, to make it circulate and to furnish it with
occasions of investment.56 This is only possible by allowing discourses of various
orders, both theoretical ones and micro-discourses relating to everyday life and space,
to communicate transversally.57 In the specic context of an analytical situation, this
meant a radical openness of conventions, where everything is up for debate: the spatial
arrangement, the length of each session, and the time of its beginning and end; this
also included a negotiation about the remuneration of the analysts who, by putting
this to debate, accepted the risk of not being paid at all.58
This concept of a critique from within was a response to the increasing lack of
a critical perspective stemming from the institutionalization of critical research. This
changed condition of critique was also the starting point of the work of the Centre
dtudes, de Recherches et de Formation Institutionnelles (CERFI). Between 1967
and the early 1980s CERFI constituted a shifting network of researchers and political
activists which offered a platform for an extra-academic encounter between psychoanalysis and social and political movements of the period.59 In the introduction to the
1973 themed issue Les quipements du pouvoir (The facilities of power) the editors
of the journal Recherches, published by CERFI, argued that after the events of May
1968 the separation between professional and activist life was intolerable. While some
activists opted for an exit from the capitalist system and established communities on
the basis of an agricultural and pre-capitalist economy, the members of CERFI aimed
at an urban community based on what is as capitalist, as bureaucratic as possible.
They accepted state research contracts and argued:
Far from eeing money or bureaucracy, we wanted to plow into it, to come to
grips with issues of power and internal sclerosis by using the money we earn as a
tool and as a reality-check that connects us to the actual mechanisms of capitalist
society: we call this laudable ambition collective analytic undertaking, and we
see it as a new ingredient of the activist ideal, although this makes most leftist
activists sneer: let them sneer!60
While CERFI agreed with the Marxist argument that theory is a moment of social
practice, practice for them was not only political or economic, but, above all, a
libidinal practice which traverses all practices as distinguished by Marxism. Every
militant practice is, rst of all, a libidinal practice, which brings into play a certain type
of unconscious forces, a certain regime of desire , they wrote.61
The starting point for the analytical work of CERFI was the post-war, state-led
urbanization, seen by the members of the group as a part of a long process of material
techniques of mastering the individual.62 In order to write the genealogy of this
process, the researchers examined social facilities from the mid-eighteenth century,
including housing, road networks, prisons, hospitals and schools. In line with the
work of Michel Foucault on discipline and, from the mid-1970s, on biopolitics,
the cerstes (as they became known) refused to see these facilities as answering to
a pre-existing, objective needs (shelter, mobility, security, health, education), since
needs manifest themselves socially only according to the possibilities offered to their
satisfaction (in the way that a new product produces the need for itself 63). Rather
than answering a need, the objective of social facilities was the normalization of the
population. Hence, each facility produces its proper person: the school produces a
child as a social category; the care home, the old; and the prison, the criminal.64 In the
words of Franois Fourquet, the collective need (of education, of health, etc) which
a [collective] facility was supposed to answer, is nothing but an illusion, a post-factum
rationalization of a political operation of public order.65
CERFI called for a redenition of concepts referring to the production of space.
Accordingly, architecture should not be restricted to discrete objects but, rather,
understood as a means of territorial organization; the city should be addressed as
a network of social facilities; and the instrumentality of urbanism in the territorial
distribution of populations should be revealed. Writing specically about French
post-war urbanism, Jacques Dreyfus (not a member of CERFI but close to the group)
developed a fundamental critique of urban planning as a set of operations which
reduce social complexity, in particular desire, the unconscious and sensuality. Much
in the vein of Lefebvre, Dreyfus argued that the concept of needs as operationalized
in urbanism implies their autonomy, their stability over time, their hierarchization,
and the understanding of humans as a sum of their needs. Yet, he stressed, needs
were interdependent, implied by one another and constantly changing. This is why
the concept of need should be replaced by that of desire, which was always free and
anarchic, and urbanism should be posed as the re-territorialization of desire.66
This focus on desire emerged from the researchers interest in institutional therapy
and from the very rst commission of CERFI in 1967 they focused on psychiatric
institutions. In response to this commission, the cerstes and the participating architects (Americo Zublena and Antoine Grumbach) opposed the governments proposal
of gathering the mentally ill of the ve new towns around Paris into one central
psychiatric institution. Instead, the group recommended a set of smaller institutions,
and rather than focusing on the buildings proposed studying the relationship between
staff and patients. In a later contribution to the designs of the psychiatric institutions
125
126
ukasz Stanek
in Evry and Marne-la-Valle, the authors argued that a unit consisting of a kitchen
and ve rooms is all they need in terms of an architectural programme.67 Inuenced
by Felix Guattari, at that time co-managing the La Borde clinic, and Gilles Deleuze,
CERFI understood desire as a force working in the social and political domain, a
ux between people and groups which does not have a code and is manifested in a
negative way: as lapsus, revolt, refusal; but also as love, project, hope. Yet when these
forces become inscribed onto the social body in a material-social process, oppression
and alienation are inevitable.68
It was this refusal to ossify the ux of desire that motivated CERFI to envisage the
micro-politics of subversion. When commissioned to study new public facilities or
urban renewal projects, the members of the group suggested constructing situations
for the collective analysis of desires. In the introduction to the rst (and last) issue of
the journal Parallles, the editors called for an invention of underground institutions
which would reactivate the play of energies and collective knowledges69 and thus the
only architecture the authors want to imagine is one sweated by the body, continually
disseminated by the gestures, looks [regards], contacts.70 Another example was the
experience of the rue des Caves in Svres, where the socialist-communist municipality offered to allow a group of young people to move into an old building until
it was demolished. The participatory research of CERFI described this experience
as a mobilization without an aim, without a program, without community (as the
editors of Recherches wrote, it was not a communitarian experience because the
community is already a spectacle).71
Perhaps the most telling was the story of the Petit Sminaire, a neighborhood
in Marseille designed by the architectural partnership Candilis-Josic-Woods. It was
completed in 1959 as a part of the Opration Million, carried out between 1958
and 1960, which aimed at reducing the production cost of two-bedroom apartment
to one million francs, half the standard cost.72 The rehabilitation of what had become
an immigrants neighbourhood was carried out between 1975 and 1986 by the group
CERFI-Sud (Marseille). The rst phase of the project (19761979) started with the
attempt to include all the inhabitants in the process of renovating the neighbourhood.
Hence, the researchers discussed with the inhabitants various proposals for changing
their apartments, both to add quality to them and to transform the image of the neighbourhood and thereby the image which the inhabitants had of themselves. After a test
case comprising seven apartments, the second phase of the intervention (19801981)
focused on the impossibility of representation: nobody is represented, everybody
speaks for himself or herself. With the rejection of the idea of representation, the
analysts focused on the social bond, encounters, vitalities, interactions between inhabitants, and the verbalization of problems, questions, stakes; mediations of conicts.73
During this phase, conicts among the inhabitants came to light, as well as the hidden
hierarchies in the neighbourhood. Working closely with the architects, the inhabitants
focused on shared signs (while leaving out the signs of poverty) and differentiated
details such as entrance areas or balconies. This comprised the third phase (1981
1985), with an almost complete reworking of the apartments, faades and common
spaces. In this phase, the analysts understood themselves as mediators, working on
the interface between the inhabitants, the contractors and others involved.74 The
architects were interpreting the free speech of the inhabitants, providing them with
both common signs and the possibility of individual interventions: in the words of the
leader of the group, Michel Anselme, the inhabitants speak, the architects interpret.75
This approach resulted in the effacement of the original design, much to the despair
of architectural historians appreciating the original design by Candilis-Josic-Woods.76
Yet in retrospect, Anne Querrien, one of the leaders of CERFI, saw the failure of the
project elsewhere: in the very fact of the ending of its nancing and in the abandoning
of the continuous programming of the social spaces in the neighbourhood.77
Conclusion
In this way, the work of CERFI appears as a point of intersection between several
trajectories in post-war French architectural culture oscillating around the concept of
needs from the 1950s to the 1970s. During this period, intense exchanges between
architecture and social sciences facilitated a renewal of architectural culture, critical both
of the disciplines position within the social division of labour and about its political
agency. What started with Chombarts moderate reformism targeting specic housing
typologies, was extended towards a critique of the incompleteness and alienation of
the political order in its longue dure, and a speculation about a prospective collective
subject, the inhabitant, which would transcend the fragmentation and complexity
of a society moving beyond Fordism. While often highly speculative, abstract, and
general, at its best this critique historicized modernism by showing architecture as
an agent of normalization within the modernizing post-war state, whose genealogies
reached back to the eighteenth century, as the cerstes demonstrated. What started as a
productive relationship aimed at specic recommendations for architects and administrators, became a resource for a critique of architecture, from Lefebvres undermining
of the specic conceptual framework of post-war architectural discourse, to CERFIs
fundamental questioning of the materiality of the architectural object, which it saw
as an empty shell when it ceases to spark interaction, debate, disagreement. Yet
discourses such as the one by CERFI, with its references to French post-structuralism,
were increasingly taken over by the architectural neo-avant-garde.78 Hence, from the
late 1990s, architects, critics, and theorists on both sides of the Atlantic have gone
back to the writings of other protagonists in this chapter, in particular to Lefebvre, in
order to rediscover both the ordinary rhythms of the everyday and the possibilities of
a critical position within an engaged architectural practice.79
Notes
1 M. Bellet, J.-N. Blanc and R. Vasselon, Vers le logement pluriel: de lusager aux habitants, Paris:
Ministre de lquipement et du logement plan construction et architecture, 1988.
2 See the following works by Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe: Paris et lagglomration
parisienne, 2 vols., Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1952; La vie quotidienne des familles
ouvrires, Paris: CNRS, 1956; Famille et habitation, 2 vols., Paris: CNRS, 19591960; Paris,
essais de sociologie 19521964, Paris: ditions ouvrires, 1965.
3 W. B. Newsome, French Urban Planning 19401968. The Construction and Deconstruction of
an Authoritarian System, New York: Peter Lang, 2009, pp. 130131.
4 P.-H. Chombart de Lauwe, Logement et comportement des mnages dans trois cits
nouvelles de lagglomeration parisienne, Cahiers du Centre scientique et technique du btiment,
1957, vol. 30, pp. 1352.
127
128
ukasz Stanek
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
Ibid., p. 48.
Ibid., pp. 5052.
Ibid.
J. Lenny, L. Couvreur and P.-H. Chombart de Lauwe, Logement et comportement des
mnages dans trois cits nouvelles de lagglomeration bordelaise, Cahiers du Centre scientique et technique du btiment, 1958, vol. 32, pp. 256.
F. Bertrand, Robert Auzelle: lurbanisme et la dimension humaine, Paris: Institut franais
darchitecture, 2000.
Centre dtudes, Direction de lamnagement du territoire, Recherche dune mthode denqute
sur lhabitat dfectueux, travail excut sous la direction de Robert Auzelle, Paris: Vincent, Fral et
Cie, 1949, p. 2.
Bertrand, Robert Auzelle, pp. 1215.
T. Paquot, Entretien avec Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe, n.d., www.urbanisme.u-pec.fr
Ibid. See also P.-H. Chombart de Lauwe, Un anthropologue dans le sicle. Entretiens avec
Thierry Paquot, Paris: Descartes & C, Paris, 1996.
Paquot, Entretien.
Rue Mouffetard: la dcouverte des franais 3, 1959, Archives INA/Paris.
Ibid.
J. Lenny et al., Logement, 56.
Chombart de Lauwe, Famille et habitation, vol. 1, pp. 1718.
Ibid., 1618; P.-H. Chombart de Lauwe, Des hommes et des villes, Paris: Payot, 1965.
Chombart, Des hommes et des villes, p. 145; P.-H. Chombart de Lauwe, Sciences
humaines, planication et urbanisme, Larchitecture daujourdhui, 1960, vol. 9192, p. 195.
T. Paquot, Des besoins aux aspirations: pour une critique des grands ensembles,
Urbanisme, 2002, vol. 322, pp. 7980.
H. Lefebvre, Psycho-sociologue de la vie quotidienne, in H. Lefebvre, Du rural lurbain,
Paris: Anthropos, 1970, p. 90.
H. Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life Volume 1: Introduction, New York: Verso, 2008; H.
Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life Volume 2: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday,
New York: Verso, 2002; H. Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life Volume 3: From Modernity to
Modernism (Towards a Metaphilosophy of Daily Life), New York: Verso, 2006.
H. Lefebvre, Les nouveaux ensembles urbains (un cas concret: Lacq-Mourenx et les
problmes urbains de la nouvelle classe ouvrire), in Lefebvre, Du rural lurbain, pp.
109128; H. Lefebvre, Utopie exprimentale: Pour un nouvel urbanisme, in Lefebvre, Du
rural lurbain, pp. 129140.
A. Haumont, N. Haumont, H. Raymond and M.-G. Raymond, Lhabitat pavillonnaire,
Paris: Centre de Recherche dUrbanisme, 1966; N. Haumont, Les pavillonnaires: tude
psycho-sociologique dun mode dhabitat, Paris: Centre de Recherche dUrbanisme, 1966;
M.-G. Raymond, La politique pavillonnaire, Paris: Centre de Recherche dUrbanisme,
1966. For other works of the ISU and their discussion, see . Stanek, Henri Lefebvre on
Space: Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of Theory, Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2011.
H. Lefebvre, The Right to the City, in E. Lebas and E. Kofman (eds) Henri Lefebvre:
Writings on Cities, Oxford: Blackwell, 1996, pp. 63182; H. Lefebvre, The Production of
Space, Oxford: Blackwell, 1991; see Stanek, Henri Lefebvre on Space.
Lefebvre, Utopie exprimentale, E. Egli et al., Die Neue Stadt: eine Studie fr das Furttal,
Zrich: Verlag Bauen & Wohnen, 1961.
Egli et al., Die Neue Stadt, pp. 16, 25.
Ibid., 21.
S. Giedion, Architektur und Gemeinschaft: Tagebuch einer Entwicklung, Hamburg: Rowohlt,
1956.
Lefebvre, Utopie exprimentale, p. 135.
Ibid., p. 138.
F. Bedos, M. Dameron, C. Leroy, H. Raymond and L. Sturge-Moore (eds), Les besoins
fonctionnels de lhomme en vue de leur projection ultrieure sur le plan de la conception
architecturale. Compte rendu de n de contrat, Paris: Centre de recherche darchitecture,
durbanisme et de construction, 1970.
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
H. Lefebvre, La pense marxiste et la ville, Paris: Casterman, 1972, p. 148.

J. Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, Telos Press, 1981, p. 82.
For a discussion, see Stanek, Henri Lefebvre, Ch. 3.
A. Haumont, et al., Lhabitat pavillonnaire; N. Haumont, Les pavillonnaires; M.-G. Raymond,
La politique pavillonnaire.
H. Lefebvre, Espace et politique: Le droit la ville II, Paris: Anthropos, 2000, p. 12.
D. Pinson, Usage et architecture, Paris: Harmattan, 1993, pp. 152ff; Le Corbusier, Manire de
penser lurbanisme, Boulogne-sur-Seine: ditions de larchitecture daujourdhui, 1946.
A. Rapoport, House Form and Culture; Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969; P. Boudon, Lived-in
architecture: Le Corbusiers Pessac revisited, London: Lund Humphries, 1972.
A. Haumont, N. Haumont, H. Raymond and M.-G. Raymond, Lhabitat pavillonnaire.
Ibid., 65.
H. Raymond, Habitat, modles culturels et architecture, in H. Raymond, J.-M. Stb
and A. Mathieu-Fritz, Architecture, urbanistique et socit, Paris: Harmattan, 2001, p. 217;
P.Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003,
p.72.
H. Lefebvre, Besoins profonds, besoins nouveaux de la civilisation urbaine, in Lefebvre,
Du rural lurbain, pp. 197206.
Ibid., 201202.
For discussion and bibliography, see Stanek, Henri Lefebvre on Space, Ch. 1.
Ibid.
Newsome, French Urban Planning.
Lefebvre, Production of Space, 422.
Urbanose 15: Entretien avec Henri Lefebvre, dir. Michel Rgnier, 1972, lOffice national
du lm du Canada.
G. Lapassade, R. Lourau, Clefs pour la sociologie, Paris: Editions Seghers, 1971, pp. 106107.
R. Hess, Postface: La place dHenri Lefebvre dans le collge invisible, dune critique des
superstructures lanalyse institutionnelle, in H. Lefebvre, La survie du capitalisme. La reproduction des rapports de production, Paris: Anthropos, 2002, p. 202.
Lapassade, Lourau, Clefs pour la sociologie, p. 169.
Ibid., 178.
R. Lourau, Bilan de lintervention socianlaytique, in LIntervention institutionnelle, Paris:
Payot, 1980, p. 225.
G. Lapassade, Lintervention dans les institutions dducation et de formation, in
LIntervention institutionnelle, Paris: Payot, 1980, pp. 186187.
F. Guattari, Entretien, in LIntervention institutionnelle, Paris: Payot, 1980, p. 123.
Lapassade, Lintervention, 168.
H. Mattsson, M. Schalk and S.-O. Wallenstein, Cer: An Introduction; A. Querrien,
Cer: Four Remarks; F. Fourquet, The History of CERFI, Site 2/2002, pp. 1011;
S.-O. Wallenstein, CERFI, Desire, and the Genealogy of Public Facilities, Site 2/2002,
pp. 1214; H. Mattsson, Schizoanalysis and City, Site 2/2002, pp. 1416.
Prsentation, Recherches 13, Decembre 1973, p. 5.
Ibid., p. 10.
. Le Breton, Pour une critique de la ville: la sociologie urbaine franaise, 19501980, Rennes:
PUR, 2012, pp. 123124.
F. Fourquet, Laccumulation du pouvoir ou le dsir dtat. Synthse des recherches du
Cer de 1970 1981, Recherches, 1982, 46, p. 20.
Le Breton, Pour une critique, p. 138.
Fourquet, Laccumulation du pouvoir, p. 19.
J. Dreyfus, La Ville disciplinaire: essai sur lurbanisme, Paris: ditions Galile, 1976; for
discussion, see Le Breton, Pour une critique, pp. 137138.
Quoted in Le Breton, Pour une critique, p. 147.
Fourquet, Laccumulation du pouvoir; Le Breton, Pour une critique.
I. Billard, ditorial, Parallles. Revue trimestrielle des groupes dexprimentation sociale 1976,
vol. 1, p. 3.
A. Baldassari and M. Joubert, Architectures, Parallles. Revue trimestrielle des groupes
dexprimentation sociale 1976, vol. 1, p. 48.
129
130
ukasz Stanek
71 Histories de la rue des Caves, Recherches 1975, vol. 19. p. 5.

72 Newsome, French Urban Planning, p. 98.
73 M. Anselme, Le Petit Sminaire. Chronique raisonne dune rhabilitation singulire,
in A. Mollet (ed.), Droit de cit: la rencontre des habitants des banlieues dlaisses, Paris:
lHarmattan, 1986, pp. 105148.
74 Ibid.
75 Anselme, Le Petit Sminaire, 126.
76 Ensembles & Rsidences Marseille 19551975. Notices monographiques 1308 Le Petit
Sminaire, www.paca.culture.gouv.fr
77 Interview with Anne Querrien, Paris, July 2012.
78 K. M. Hays, Architectures Desire: Reading the Late Avant-Garde, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 2010.
79 J. Chase, M. Crawford and J. Kaliski (eds), Everyday Urbanism, New York: Monacelli Press,
1999; I. Borden, B. Penner, J. Rendell (eds), Gender Space Architecture: An Interdisciplinary
Introduction, London: Spon, 2000; D. Berke and S. Harris (eds), Architecture of the Everyday,
New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997. See also . Stanek, A Manuscript Found
in Saragossa: Toward an Architecture, introduction to H. Lefebvre, Toward an Architecture of
Enjoyment, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014, pp. xilx.
Figure 7.0 Piet Blom, Kasbah housing project, Hengelo (196974) (Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam).
7
THE OPEN SOCIETY AND ITS
EXPERIMENTS: THE CASE OF THE
NETHERLANDS AND PIET BLOM
Dirk van den Heuvel
Many modern architects of the post-war period referred to the idea of an Open
Society suggesting they were building towards such a society. While the term was
not coined by him, it was the Austrian-British philosopher Karl Popper who both
theorized and popularized it with his monumental book of 1945, The Open Society
and Its Enemies.1 In Team 10 circles too, it was a favourite phrase, just like the ones
of open aesthetics and open form. British architects Alison and Peter Smithson and
leading voices of Team 10 stated that an open society needs an open city. Freedom
to move and somewhere to go, both inside and outside the city.2 They spoke of the
open city with an open centre with regard to the various projects they proposed
for the war-devastated German city of Berlin during the late 1950s and 60s, among
others their famous Hauptstadt Berlin competition entry of 19571958.3 This period
was the heyday of the Cold War and the notion of anything open was tailored against
the Communist threat from the East, just as it was presented as the embodiment of the
humanist alternative to the defeated Nazi regime and its fascist and racial doctrines.
The open city of the post-war period was to be an all-inclusive city: for each man
and all men as Aldo van Eyck put it in 1959.4
The Open Society and what it stands for are key to understanding how the idea
of a welfare state developed from working-class relief in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century to the comprehensive, political undertaking that affected all walks
of life after the Second World War. For instance, the famous Spangen housing block
in Rotterdam (19191921) by Michiel Brinkman is a proud example of a collectivist working-class enclave, one which follows a strategy of both containment and
emancipation: whereas the large-scale city expansions of the post-war period such as
those by Cornelis van Eesteren for Amsterdam and Lotte Stam-Beese for Rotterdam
presented all-inclusive strategies in anticipation of a much more mobile society.5 As
part of these strategies, collective and public spaces were often fused into a continuous
landscape of open spaces so as to build new social identities. Looking back however,
we can see that the all-inclusive aspect of the Open Society as guaranteed by a neutral
state apparatus paired with a new individual freedom based on egalitarianism created
134
Dirk van den Heuvel
irresolvable contradictory conditions for the architects who sought to build for the
Open Society.
Within this debate on the question of how architects might build towards an
open, egalitarian and democratic society, the position taken by Team 10 is the most
vulnerable one. Yet at the same time it is also the most challenging one, because of
its ambition to balance those contradictory demands of the Open Society.6 Herman
Hertzberger stated that in architecture Team 10 and CIAM as well are the equivalent
of socialism. He immediately qualied this: Im not saying literally. Maybe Giancarlo
De Carlo is the only one who directly linked politics and architecture. Bakema
certainly did not and Aldo van Eyck did it in a more philosophical way.7 Whatever the
exact political position, one might state that Team 10 represented one of the clearer
moments at which architects claimed for the architectural discipline a capacity to
deliver an architecture that was open and all-inclusive in line with the post-war ideal
of a democratic, egalitarian society.
In the case of Team 10, the proposed theoretical concepts and architectural
typologies that would foster such an ideal were geared at the creation of in-between
spaces or spaces between, most notably the doorstep or threshold. Such in-between
spaces were of special interest to enhance the encounters between the inside and
outside world, the familiar home and the other from which a larger community
would grow.8 Hence, within the design production of Team 10 one can observe all
sorts of transition zones between the public and the private, which were intended to
enable the reciprocal creation of both individual and collective identities. An excellent
example of this ideology is Van Eycks proposal for the new town hall of Deventer,
a winning competition design of 1966 which was not realized (Figure 7.1). Unlike
his ground-breaking Orphanage of 19551960, which was built on the periphery
of Amsterdam, the Deventer town hall is set in the middle of the medieval inner
city. In Van Eycks proposal the new town hall interiorizes the qualities of the dense
urban fabric of small-scale alleys. The building itself becomes such a fabric, a microcity of its own, with a public route brought into the building volume itself. Public
street life penetrates the interior of the political institute while upsetting the conventions of urbanism and architecture. Such a strategy was also the guiding principle
of Hertzbergers design for the town halls of Valkenswaard (1966) and Amsterdam
(1967), which were based on a grid of interior streets. Hertzberger eventually
realized this idea with the office building for the insurance company Centraal Beheer
in Apeldoorn (1968-72), epitome of so-called Dutch structuralism, the label for the
specic Dutch contribution to Team 10 from the 1970s onward (Figure 7.2).9
The typological inventions of public interior streets and open streets-in-the-air
as part of a built complex or ensemble were often deployed in the post-war period.
They were intended as demonstrations of community building through architecture.
Today, they also hold a notorious reputation for many of the social problems that
are now identied with them: vandalism, insecurity, a feeling of anonymity rather
than identity. Well-known examples range from the Bijlmermeer in Amsterdam
to Sheffields Park Hill, from Robin Hood Gardens to Toulouse-le-Mirail, from the
Barbican to Thamesmead. Apparently, when these projects were conceptualized the
radical publicness of their vast access systems was not questioned. On the contrary,
that everybody could enter them seemed a matter of course; not just as a practical
The Open Society and Its Experiments
Figure 7.1 Aldo van Eyck, sketch for the town hall of Deventer (1966) (Aldo van Eyck archive).
Figure 7.2 Herman Hertzberger, Centraal Beheer office building in Apeldoorn (19681972), view into
an interior street, photographed by Willem Diepraam (Studio HH, Amsterdam).
135
136
Dirk van den Heuvel
demand for deliveries by the milkman, but also as a matter of principle: every member
of the new egalitarian society had a right of way in these public streets.
Behind the experience of these particular estates and the confusion of public spaces
with collective enclaves lurks a much bigger question impossible to address fully here,
yet that is related to the kind of universalist, public space that designers and policymakers seemed to have had in mind when building the welfare state. In reality we are
dealing with mixed and uid communities living together, who dont necessarily share
a common idea of public space and public behaviour, and at times these notions of
public space (including who is allowed to appear in this space and on what terms) are
actually contradictory to the kind of public space that is generally associated with the
egalitarian public space of the Open Society. There is an issue of contestation at stake
that is all too often overlooked. Oscar Newman addressed many of these problems in
his Defensible Space (1972) relating them to issues of territorial control in a sociological
sense. Similarly Alison Smithson in her essay The Violent Consumer (1974) turned
away from the universalist ideal of a middle class way of life. She concluded that a city
of fragments might be a better option to bet each and every social group in the best
of possible ways.10 This idea of difference of condition was already latently present in
the Smithsons Cluster City proposal of 1957, the city as a polycentric conglomerate
of districts of varying densities, programmes and spatial congurations.11 Such an idea
of difference seemed to have been behind Colin Rowe and Fred Koetters revisionist
project for a Collage City of 1975 as well, despite the authors rejection of architecture
and planning as tools for social improvement and accommodation.12
Therefore, looking at the social problems involved and the rst revisionist texts of
the 1970s (from within and without the modern architecture discourse) one might
ask: how open can an open society really be? How open a city or its architecture?
The Netherlands provided some of the most radical experiments in architecture, all
under the banner of the welfare state. They were sanctioned by would-be enlightened
officials, who supported experiment and innovation as an alternative to the technocratic tendencies that were also part of the welfare state system. To counterbalance
the logic of Taylorist models a system of checks and balances was installed: special
nancial arrangements, programmes of industrial innovation and exemptions from
normal regulatory and administrative requirements. Together with an appetite for the
new that admittedly included a destructive element too, this resulted in the nowadays
derided generous tolerance of the so-called permissive society of the 1970s (in a
sense, the other face of the Open Society), with its embrace of multiculturalism,
sexual emancipation and spiritual open-mindedness.
This chapter attempts to take a fresh look at the spaces of the post-war welfare state,
especially its public spaces.13 It situates the assumed failure of welfare state planning and
its architecture in the status of these public spaces, particularly their open character.
This open, all-inclusive character has proven to be untenable, despite its desirability.
It highlights the inherent contradictions of the ideology of the democratic welfare
state or the Open Society. Post-war Netherlands and the Team 10 discourse serve as
a backdrop to discuss the contributions made by Dutch structuralism, especially the
Kasbah housing project (19691974) of Aldo van Eycks most famous student, the
ludic architect Piet Blom.
The Open Society and the architects predicament

Re-reading Poppers book today from an architectural point of view, three aspects of
his Open Society help us understand how architects were confronted with an almost
impossible mission when building toward such a society. First there was Poppers basic
anti-collectivist position and the privileging of individual freedom over common
interest, and second, in relation to this, the necessarily abstract character of the Open
Society. The third aspect, namely, his emphasis on the need for experiment and
so-called piecemeal engineering put the architects at the forefront of the task of
realizing the Open Society, while at the same time bringing inherent risks of failure.
In The Open Society and Its Enemies Popper denounces historicism, totalitarianism
and what he calls Utopian engineering. Written in exile in New Zealand during
the war and published in 1945, the book involves a still-provocative rethinking of
Platos ideas on the state and the propositions of Marx and Hegel regarding the
historical process, class struggle and their assumed laws, all against the background of
the question of what constitutes a truly democratic and egalitarian society in which
everybody can fully participate no matter in which family or class one is born. Popper
denes the Open Society as one based on human reason in contrast with what he saw
as the closed societies based on irrational custom.14 The possibility of critique is key.
Criticism of the institutions of the closed society is impossible, whereas in the Open
Society criticism forms an intrinsic element of the institutions. The closed society is
a tribal society or, in anthropological terms, a magical society with taboos, myths
and rites which regulate everyday life as if these were equal to natural laws; whereas
in Poppers view they should be considered as conventional law and thus open to
debate, change or correction by the members of a society. Both naturalism as applied
to society, and the idea of society as an organism, are refuted by Popper and shown to
be anti-democratic and anti-humanist since they deny the idea of personal freedom
and personal responsibility. To sustain personal freedom and personal responsibility
society needs to move beyond the irrational and organic, even when this comes at
a rather high price as we also learn. The all-inclusiveness of the Open Society leads
Popper to conclude that the Open Society has to be a largely abstract society:
As a consequence of its loss of organic character, an open society may become,
by degrees, what I should like to term an abstract society. It may, to a considerable extent, lose the character of a concrete or real group of men, or of a
system of such real groups.15
Popper expands his denition of the Open Society as an inevitably abstract society
by admitting that it can only offer social groups that are incapable of providing a
common life and are poor substitutes of the real groups of the closed society. Such
abstraction of human and social relations is not an original insight of Poppers one
thinks of the work of the German sociologists Ferdinand Tnnies and Georg Simmel.
As unfortunate as this loss may be, Popper connects it to an idea of twentieth-century
democracy and thus he values this abstraction of human associations as something that
also holds positive effects and connotations:
137
138
Dirk van den Heuvel
But there are gains. Personal relationships of a new kind can arise where they
can be freely entered into, instead of being determined by the accidents of birth,
and with this, a new individualism arises. Similarly, spiritual bonds can play a
major role where the biological or physical bonds are weakened, etc. I hope,
[I] have made plain what is meant by a more abstract society in contradistinction
to a more concrete or real social group; that our open societies function
largely by way of abstract relations, such as exchange or co-operation.16
It is at this point that we touch on the dilemma of the architects building towards the
Open Society, most certainly so in relation to the challenge given to them of creating
new cities full of meaning and identity. The combination of universalist abstract
society on the one hand and real emotional social needs on the other put architects
in a predicament. Team 10 was based on the recognition of this predicament, which
architects were asked to negotiate and rebalance. Alison and Peter Smithson imaginatively demonstrated it in their 1953 Urban Re-identication grid as presented
at the CIAM conference in Aix-en-Provence.17 They distinguished between the
four categories of the house, street, district and city, which they summarised in the
so-called human association diagram.18 On the level of the house (as the place of the
family, a very real group) they spoke of involuntary association and on the level of
the city (the most abstract level) of voluntary association. Of the levels higher than
the house they would say that it is extremely difficult to dene the higher levels
of association, but the street implies a physical contact community; the district an
acquaintance community, and the city an intellectual contact community.19 New
social and physical mobility (suburbanization and car ownership most specically)
complicated matters. The Smithsons observed how in a modern society real social
groups cut across geographical barriers and that the extended family can be
scattered through many districts and classes of a town; and the assessment group of
the intellectual or artist may be international and not co-lingual, yet with more in
common than with many neighbours.20
In his short text The fake client and the great word no of 1962 Aldo van Eyck
summarized the architects dilemma as an irresolvable riddle. He rhetorically asked
how architects could build the counterform of human associations for each and for
all in a society which has no real form of its own, how one could expect architects to
build truly habitable places and the urban interiors society needs when the real
client has disappeared behind the fake client of anonymous government bodies.21
Aldo van Eyck was probably the most radical thinker of Team 10, ready to accept
the consequences of his polemical and uncompromising position. After one attempt
at a truly large-scale housing project in Amsterdam in 1963 (the Buikslotermeer, in
collaboration with Jaap Bakema), he would never touch on the issue of the greater
number again, in the sense of actually designing for large scale planning and housing,
perhaps except for the international PREVI competition in Lima, Peru, in 1967.
Van Eyck was one of the few architects who practiced the great word no, even
though it would marginalize him in terms of building commissions, at least until he
got involved in the process of urban renewal in the city of Amsterdam.
Jaap Bakema and his Rotterdam-based rm Van den Broek and Bakema was more
willing to face the contradictions of the welfare state, its ideology and production
conditions. In many ways Bakemas work and thinking embodied the Dutch project
for the welfare state and the new egalitarianism of a supposedly classless society. He
did so by combining paradoxically both a subservient role and that of a visionary. Not
only was he willing to accommodate the demands of a highly modernized building
industry, the regulations set by the bureaucratic bodies of the government and the
values of the new middle-class citizenry, but working under these conditions he would
still provide heroic images with a clear-cut visual language for the new socio-political
arrangement of the post-war period. For this he developed the idea of the visual
group among others: an urban housing unit that comprised a micro-society of citizens
of all ages and household types so as to secure social cohesion and consensus a sociopolitical doctrine typical of the Dutch approach (still evident today, despite current
neoliberal policies). As a model for mixed development, including amenities such as
schools, shops and churches, it also provided a model to translate and combine the
various pillars of Dutch society that is the communities of protestant, catholic or
socialist denomination into coherent city plans such as the schemes for Rotterdam
Alexanderpolder (1953 and 1956) or the monumental scheme for the Amsterdam
extension of Pampus (1964-65) (Figure 7.3).
Poppers ght against totalitarian Utopianism made him the enemy of blueprint
planning, a tabula rasa approach and social engineering. At the same time, he was
not against social reform or a rational approach to the problems of social reconstruction, as he put it.22 Instead of Utopian engineering Popper proposed piecemeal
engineering, allowing for experiments and readjustments, and learning from mistakes
all in line with positivist thinking.23 It should be noted that piecemeal sounds
much more modest than what was meant by Popper; his phrase social reconstruction
Figure 7.3 De Opbouw and the Van den Broek and Bakema office, panel of the CIAM Grid of 1956,
visual group for Rotterdam Alexanderpolder (Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam).
139
140
Dirk van den Heuvel
is more revealing. By piecemeal engineering Popper could still imagine blueprints

for single institutions such as healthcare or educational reform. Of these blueprints
he would say that they were comparatively simple and if they should go wrong,
damage was not very great, and a readjustment not very difficult.24 From todays
perspective one might question the assumed simplicity in these matters, but it should
be noted that Poppers position was far removed from a liberal, laissez-faire attitude and
that it was supportive of all sorts of social democratic intervention.25 This is especially
important given that in the 1970s, with the rise of postmodernism as a new paradigm
for architecture, Colin Rowe with Fred Koetter used Poppers Open Society to criticize
post-war modernist planning and the architecture of the welfare state.
Although in The Open Society Popper never talked about architecture, housing or
city planning, his notion of piecemeal engineering and progress by way of experiment
put architects at the forefront of delivering the Open Society, despite all the contradictions involved. From the start, industrial and technological innovation was key in
making the Western European welfare state a reality. By the mid-1960s in recognition of the dominance of the building industry government incentives and nance
for constructional innovation were in place in the Netherlands. In May 1968 the
Christian Democrat minister of housing Wim Schut, an engineer and urban planner
himself, announced a new nancing programme for experimental housing aimed at
the improvement and differentiation of housing typologies and the living environment.
Although only about 5000 units were realized in ve years, not much considering the
vast number of houses produced each year (up to 155,000 in 1973 alone), the idea was
that by diversication and offering alternatives and setting examples, it would compel
the larger housing stock production to adjust and innovate.26
It was under this programme that the Kasbah housing project in Hengelo
(19691974) came into being. Many of Piet Bloms projects stemmed from
building programmes focusing on innovation: among others his projects for the
Twente University campus, two refectory buildings and the Agora campus centre
(19621969). Bloms best-known and most controversial project, the Cube houses in
Rotterdam (19781984), was also the result of a policy aimed at innovation and the
diversication of the housing stock backed at the highest level of government by the
Social Democrat minister of housing Hans Gruyters and the Rotterdam alderman
Hans Mentink.27
Piet Blom and the Hengelo Kasbah

In an explanation published in 1970 Blom made it quite clear how the Kasbah
housing project was meant to be all-inclusive, while at the same time specic:
Houses that dont get lost in universalisms: every house its own situation;
houses for singles and the many, for the working-class and migrant-workers,
students and civil servants, academics and artists, for adventurers, priests, a junk
dealer, any trouble maker; for big and small families, for complete and broken
marriages; for big and small children, for orderly, noisy, Christian, left-wing,
right-wing, socialist, brown, green, yellow, white and black people. How shall
we compose these houses, into what do we compose them?28
The Kasbah is situated at the edge of one of the suburbs of the former industrial town
of Hengelo in the east of the Netherlands. Between conventional streets lined with
decent row housing and front gardens it makes a dense conglomerate of 184 red-tiled,
pitched roof houses that are raised on concrete stilts. The whole complex sits rather
elegantly in its surroundings, each side of the latent superstructure being manipulated to respond casually to its specic edge condition. The south side overlooks a
sunny lawn and pond, the double-height ground oor spaces form a galleria which
is occasionally used for a modest market (Figure 7.4). The north side joins a street
with again a double-height arcade, which here accommodates a series of smaller shops
and studios, plus the local pub with its slightly corny name the Kasbar. The shorter
side on the west looks over a school and playground and on the east over the stillopen countryside, which is actually quite unexpected in its picturesque effect. The
vast undercroft of the Kasbah is its most distinct characteristic (Figure 7.5). It houses
all sorts of spaces that are usually absent from suburban complexes such as work and
leisure facilities, including a theatre and childrens farm. It also creates a natural place
for the more banal everyday requirements such as car parking and storage. By inserting
special open spaces there is also room for collective gardens.
The housing typology is tailored to suit different seizes of households. There
are four basic house types, but they are not recognizable as such. Blom devised the
scheme in such a way that the individual house types merge into the image of a larger,
autonomous settlement such as the one of a kasbah, indeed. Type A was devised as
an incomplete house for the student or artist, basically a studio-unit; type B was for
the young couple or small family; type C for the medium-sized family with 3 or 4
bedrooms; and type D was a combination of types A and B. All except type A enjoy
a large outdoor terrace space of ve by six metres and each unit has a 1.5 parking
space in the undercroft. With a density of 100 houses per hectare, the mat of Bloms
Kasbah is three to four times as dense as the usual Dutch suburb of the 1970s, in
hindsight still an astonishing achievement in itself.
Still, one could say and this is the ever-recurring criticism on the project the
Kasbahs potential remained largely underused. In the end the building costs were
too high to allow for the lower classes to rent a house, despite the special fundings,
and instead middle class families moved in. The undercroft too, remains rather quiet,
almost abandoned, compared to the busy social life of an actual kasbah. Of course,
the reference to a North African kasbah was always meant as a metaphor to trigger
the imagination, but while the promise of spontaneous interaction and communitybuilding seems not to have been fullled at the time, 40 years later it might be thought
to have been realized in the community spirit generated by the quest to maintain the
character of this unique complex.29
In its original conception the undercroft was meant as a Situationist terrain vague,
an open landscape to be appropriated by that favourite of the post-war Dutch avantgarde, Johan Huizingas playing man, or Homo Ludens: the seer, magician, artist,
poet and child, who holds the key to that mythopoetic, cosmological order beyond
modernist rationalism.30 Because of this unfullled promise to bring out the Homo
Ludens in middle class man, the Kasbah is usually dismissed as the hopelessly overoptimistic product of a socially engineered society. Piet Blom, too, is said to have
been critical of the whole undertaking. A suburb was not exactly the ideal location
141
142
Dirk van den Heuvel
Figure 7.4 Piet Blom, Kasbah housing project in Hengelo (19691974), south faade, photographed in
2010 (Dirk van den Heuvel).
Figure 7.5 Piet Blom, oor plan of Urban Roof Study (1965) with inserted Provo references (Het
Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam).
for his vision of an alternative to the prevalent Functional City concept. Blom had
been born and raised in the famous Amsterdam working-class neighbourhoods of
the Pijp and the Jordaan and would have preferred it to be built in the centre of
Amsterdam, where it could have revitalised the messiness of those places, which
he loved so much and, which at the time, were under threat of sanitization and
demolition. The Hengelo Kasbah was at best a demonstration of what his alternative
might offer.
The overall concept behind the Kasbah and its undercroft space can be traced to
Bloms Wonen als stedelijk dak (Living as Urban Roof ) project of 1965, which had
been commissioned by Nedaco, the Dutch association of roof-tile manufacturers, and
presented to the national government at the time another example of the (neo-)
avant-garde working with industrialists under welfare state conditions.31 At this stage
Piet Blom, still in his early thirties, enjoyed a cult-hero reputation, with special issues
of Dutch journals devoted to him, due largely to the relationship he enjoyed with
his mentor Aldo van Eyck. It was Van Eyck who discovered Bloms talent when the
latter arrived at the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture in 1956 and Bloms student
projects The cities will be inhabited like villages (1958) and Noahs Ark (1962)
were instrumental in developing Van Eycks ideas. Van Eyck presented Bloms student
projects at the Team 10 meetings of 1959 and 1962, positioning his work at the heart
of the debate on the future direction of modern architecture and planning. These
schemes were close to Van Eycks own approach, which he dened as steps towards
a congurative discipline and which later would be labelled as Dutch structuralism.32
According to Hertzberger, it was Blom who actually succeeded in developing the
next step in the development of this new congurative discipline and in the issue of
the greater number.33 According to a very critical Hertzberger, neither Van Eyck nor
Bakema succeeded in developing a successful approach: even Van Eycks Orphanage
was to him an expanded singularity rather than a real response to the problem of
counterform and housing the greater number.34 This next step was the Urban Roof
study of 1965. In a dramatic gesture Blom lifted all houses off the ground, creating
a roof while establishing a free space underneath for unplanned events and spontaneous encounters, more or less as in the working-class neighbourhoods in which
Blom grew up (although Blom himself pointed to the work of Yona Friedman and
his Ville Spatiale as an inuence for this conceptual step).35
The Urban Roof study was also inuenced by the anti-authoritarian, anarchist
Provo movement, which ourished in Amsterdam (and in Dutch culture) in the
years 19651967. Provo organized happenings which disrupted public life in the
Amsterdam streets and challenged the local authorities. Although Provo actions were
pacist, they made their reputation by throwing a smoke bomb at the wedding of
Princess Beatrix in 1966.36 Provo was a loosely organized group of individuals, partly
politically activist, partly artistic. Apart from their journal, of which only 15 issues
appeared, their so-called white plans form their most tangible legacy. Among those
were the white bicycle plan for collective bike ownership and the white car plan
to introduce electric cars, all in order to come to more environmentally friendly
transport systems. A white wives plan entailed a liberal sexual education programme,
the white housing plan called for squatting actions to ght real estate speculation and
the white chicken plan chicken being Amsterdam slang for a police officer aimed
143
144
Dirk van den Heuvel
to disarm the police and transform this repressive institution into a social workforce
instead. In a nutshell the Provo schemes established the new socio-cultural mentality
that would dominate the 1970s in the Netherlands.
On the ground oor plan of the Urban Roof project, between the columns and
access points to the raised houses, Blom inserted hand-written slogans and atmospheric
references to the Provo interventions (Figure 7.5). Its a ludic mix of political statements and romantic insertions, but also of darker urban and religious fantasies and new
economic realities. The drawing still reads like a mix of Cobra poetry and Situationist,
psycho-geographical mapping. The continuous, open urban space was made up of
points and spheres of attraction, diversion or repulsion, not unlike Constants dynamic
labyrinth of New Babylon. This interest in a new kind of ludic urban space was key
to Blom and his attempt to turn around the then current housing typologies for the
Dutch welfare state. The Provo mentality of dtournement was also evident in the name
that Blom chose for his office, the Workshop for Public Works, founded in 1965 to
realize his second university refectory building, the Bastille in Enschede.37
Another sketch from the Urban Roof Study, called human anno 1965, shows
the section of the project as a variation on the raised superstructures of Friedman and
Constant. Three lower zones form the basis of the new city, not just for structural
reasons but also for traffic and, more importantly, for Bloms social model. Zone 3 is
the ground level which is designated as city, contact and us: in the words of Blom
the societal space, reason why you live somewhere.38 This is also the zone that corresponds with the space of the undercroft in the Kasbah in Hengelo. Zone 4 hovering
above the ground levels is reserved for the I, the small cells of the city realized
through the technocracy kind of living minimum. These cells are an affordable
living start yet expandable in the course of time. The vertical zoning system replaces
the four functions of CIAMs Charter of Athens, based on differences of scale and
accommodating changes over time. As with the ideas of CIAM, or the Japanese
metabolists, or Friedman and Constant, it implicitly takes technology and technocracy
not just as the precondition of the Dutch welfare state project but as the pure socialist
idea. The Urban Roof, however, does not offer a clearcut political or philosophical
concept; Blom provocatively states that this is belief and it is biology not urbanism.
As if to underline all this radical reli-bio-sociology, we see a small plane cruising over
the new cityscape with a banner proclaiming Out of NATO.
Still, Bloms ambition as theoretically ambivalent as it might be represented
a new, broader cultural mentality in Dutch society. Constant and his New Babylon
project have been mentioned already, just as Van Eyck and the Forum group, of
course. There was the architect-engineer Frank van Klingeren whose cultural centres,
de Meerpaal in Dronten (1967) and t Karregat in Eindhoven (1973), embodied the
most experimental typologies for social programmes.39 Van Klingerens buildings
were open landscape-like spaces that accommodated all sorts of social amenities and
programmes (schools, kindergartens, markets, sporting facilities, cafs, etc.) in a single
hall without walls and other physical separations, eliminating obstacles to spontaneous
social interaction and encounter in the manner of Bloms Urban Roof Study and later
Kasbah estate. Van Klingerens idea was to bring an end to the so-called pillarization
of Dutch society and realize the new egalitarian society, in order to enhance the selfrealization of its members. Social encounters between individuals and communities
Figure 7.6 Piet Blom, Kasbah housing project in Hengelo (19691974), ground oor and location plan (Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam).

145
146
Dirk van den Heuvel
were not just geared towards a harmonious living together, but friction, conict and
the questioning of established values were part of the process that would ultimately
produce a new society.
Ironically perhaps, most of these revolutionary projects were to be realized in
suburban contexts, where there was ample room for experiment in the late 1960s and
1970s, under perfect welfare state conditions with generous government subsidies for
innovation. Blom also designed Kasbah plans for other, more historic places such as
Zaandijk, Monnickendam, Wijk bij Duurstede, and even one for Amsterdam, most
notably at the instigation of Roel van Duijn, a former Provo activist who in the 1970s
became a city alderman. But none of those schemes was built. Remaining an incident
then, its still quite astonishing to see how the Kasbah project captured the mood of
the day, not only in terms of cultural aspirations developed within a welfare state
context but also architecturally. As a serialist ordered mat of houses with red-tiled,
pitched roofs, the Kasbah was perfectly situated between Brutalism and Dutch structuralism on the one hand and Pop Art and the incipient populism of postmodernism
on the other.
Piet Blom and Team 10

One of the curious aspects of the historiography of the Kasbah and Bloms achievements remains how they were suppressed from Team 10 history, most notably by
Alison Smithson. By 1974, Alison Smithson had started writing the history of the
Team 10 meetings. At the time, in the early 1960s, the inner core of the group
made her responsible for the editing of the Team 10 Primer, but by the 1970s this
had turned into a much more personal, retrospective project of documenting and
stocktaking. Smithson completely edited out the Kasbah project from her account of
the Team 10 meetings. Neither in her account of the Rotterdam meeting of 1974,
nor in her seminal essay on mat-building published in 1974 in Architectural Design,
did she mention the project, even though the Team 10 group visited it as part of
the Rotterdam meeting.40 Urban myth has it that upon arrival the Smithsons simply
refused to get out of their car while the other Team 10 members walked around the
project. The only reference to the Hengelo visit in Smithsons mat-building essay is a
swipe at so-called casbah-ism and she criticized another Dutch project, Hertzbergers
building for Centraal Beheer, visited on that same Team 10 trip, as an off-shoot of the
mat-building phenomenon.41 Her preferred example of the mat-building typology
was the Berlin Free University by Shadrach Woods, which Team 10 had visited the
year before, in 1973. Clearly, she felt some lines had to be drawn but it is hard to see
why the Kasbah, as well as the Centraal Beheer building, did not deserve some sort of
positive appreciation, especially given that the Smithsons had been working on a new
urban plan for Kuwait City, which displayed many similarities to the Dutch projects,
notably a completely raised structure of buildings supported on pilotis, underneath
which a new urban space for exchange and encounter was situated. From the start of
the Team 10 discourse rivalry between the Smithsons and the Dutch had always been
intense, and one cannot but conclude that Bloms contribution fell victim to those
clashes. The whole tragedy seems riddled with unhappy paradoxes and misunderstandings, starting with Bloms persistent absence from Team 10 meetings (Van Eyck
always presented Bloms work), which meant that the Smithsons and Blom never
even met.
Part of the debate between the Smithsons and the Dutch branch of Team 10 was
about the appropriate language for the anonymous collective of the welfare state and
the various urban concepts needed to achieve some sort of identity through exchange
and encounter. The Israeli architect Arthur Glikson, a guest at some of the Team 10
meetings, distinguished two standpoints within Team 10, one of understatement
and the other of overdesign. Shadrach Woods and the Smithsons were on the side
of understatement and Van Eyck and Hertzberger on the side of overdesign.42 The
Smithsons were aiming for an ordinary, anonymous vernacular, as they had argued for
in their 1973 book Without Rhetoric and demonstrated at their Robin Hood Gardens
project.43 In contrast the Dutch looked for a language that consistently articulated
individual units and cells, corners, doorsteps, and other spatial transitions. In a much
later interview, in the late 1990s, Peter Smithson said that in Dutch structuralism form
and structure were confused. Referring to Bloms work explicitly, he said that it was
actually highly formalistic.44 But that is probably too quick a dismissal. Rather, one
sees a divide between two different sorts of principles of organization, one that thinks
of the city as a set of diverse systems working only loosely together, and the other that
tries to develop a coherent, all-encompassing language fully integrating architecture
and urban planning.
The suppression of the Kasbah from Team 10 history is in line with the Smithsons
earlier verbal criticism of Bloms Noahs Ark design, which Van Eyck had presented
passionately at the Royaumont meeting in 1962.45 Probably more than any other
project, Noahs Ark embodied the full integration of architecture and planning as
envisioned within Team 10 circles. It proposed the large-scale urbanization of the
Amsterdam region by way of a vast system of interlocking grid structures based on
massive, polycentric units each housing 10,000 to 15,000 inhabitants, which were
to be built between the cities of Haarlem, Alkmaar, Amsterdam and Hilversum. Van
Eyck presented Bloms project as the ultimate illustration of his Albertian credo that
the house should be like a small city, and the city a big house. To him, the structure
of the small was mirrored in the large, and vice versa. In the exchanges with Van
Eyck the discussion then completely derailed. Responding to Van Eycks exhaustive
explanation of the Blom scheme, Alison Smithson insisted it entailed an apparently
endless repetition of units and that some sort of Gestapo mentality emanated from
the proposal. To her, it represented nothing less than a fascist approach to the issue of
large-scale urbanization.46 Peter Smithson said that Bloms project took the city-house
analogy too literally:
Were looking for systems which allow things to develop as they need to
develop without compromising each other. Here you have a system which takes
absolutely literally the concept that the city is a big house; but the city is not a
big house; it is a complete false analogy, a false image.47
This rift between the Smithsons and Van Eyck became a key element of the myth
around Piet Blom. After Blom received similar criticism of the Noahs Ark project
from his teachers at the Amsterdam Academy, he is reported to have destroyed the
147
148
Dirk van den Heuvel
models by throwing them down the stairs; only a couple of diagrams and some
out-of-focus photos of the model taken by Kisho Kurokawa at the Royaumont
meeting survived. Adding to the myth surrounding Noahs Ark was the subsequent
exchange that happened between Blom and the office of Le Corbusier. The Chilean
architect Jullian de la Fuente, a co-worker of Le Corbusier, attended the 1962
Royaumont meeting and invited Blom to Paris to show his work at the Le Corbusier
atelier in the rue de Svres 35. Blom attended but there is no exact account of what
took place, which only serves to enlarge the myth of course, in anecdotes and interviews.48 The story is important however, since it suggests there is a triangulation
between the work of Le Corbusier and his design for the Venice hospital, the work
of the Candilis-Josic-Woods team, especially their competition designs for the Free
University and the unrealized design for the Frankfurt city centre, and Bloms work.
Together they mark a shift within the modern architectural discourse from a vertically organized city to a close-knit, horizontal one of high density with an emphasis
on pedestrian movement.
Towards a conclusion
The house-city analogy was a strong element of the Team 10 discourse and the
revision of the relation between architecture and urban design that it aimed for. The
metaphorical image of the kasbah was certainly one of its most distinct ones, and
perhaps best demonstrated by Van Eycks slogan vers une casbah organise. This was
the concluding slogan of the The Story of Another Idea, the Forum issue of 1959,
which presented Bloms work for the rst time as the ultimate example of Van Eycks
ideas of architecture as a congurative discipline.49 In all the designs mentioned, built
and unbuilt, we see an upsetting of the balance between public and private, urbanism
and architecture, with the public and urban penetrating the private realm by way of
all sorts of street typologies.
How then should we view this historic production in light of the vicissitudes of
welfare state policies and the ideal of an Open Society? Centraal Beheer was always
Figure 7.7 Piet Blom, Kasbah housing project in Hengelo (19691974), the undercroft with public gardens and
parking, photographed in 2010 by Dirk van den Heuvel.
a private building; it is now listed as a monument, despite its interior being gutted
several times. The Free University was the most public building due to its academic
functions; now it has been completely renovated by Norman Foster and has the
generic look of an airport or corporate headquarters. Robin Hood Gardens is due
for demolition; the pressure of real estate value of nearby Docklands sealed its fate
as a so-called sink estate, while the overall vandalization of the streets-in-the-air
prevented the estate from being listed. The Kasbah, with its open undercroft and
hardly any social control, was also vulnerable to neglect and vandalism, although
certainly not as badly as Robin Hood Gardens. At the Kasbah there were and are all
sorts of legal and practical ambiguities when it comes to such basic notions as land
ownership and control. Who owns the undercroft? Who is entitled to use it? Who
is responsible for its upkeep (city, corporation or tenants) and who pays for it? Can
everybody park their cars there or only the inhabitants, etc.?50
Site visits to the project show that, surprisingly enough perhaps, the Kasbah has
withstood the test of time rather well, and that the current condition is not as drab
as is usually assumed of 1970s architecture (Figure 7.7). The inhabitants formed their
own association and took on the responsibility of co-maintaining the complex. The
most recent development is the establishment of the modest Piet Blom Museum inside
the Kasbah, which is a homage to its designer and his legacy.51 Like the Marseille
Unit, the Kasbah has regained much of its earlier charm, even though it is now
more middle class than ever before. This might be a devastating assessment in light of
Bloms desire for the messiness of the real kasbah, and especially the messiness of the
old Jordaan neighbourhood which he loved so much. At the same time, the Hengelo
Kasbah and its publicly accessible open space can be seen as a vessel carrying cultural
values and potential into the future, just like a Noahs ark perhaps. Its ambiguity
due to its openness is its most important quality. It embodies both the promise and
failure of the urban space envisaged by Dutch Forum, Team 10 and the Amsterdam
Provo, an open space meant for encounter and exchange but also terribly vulnerable
to vandalization in all sorts of ways, as we have learned. That the Kasbah was built in
quiet Hengelo may well have been its saving grace; had it been built in Amsterdam
one wonders if it would have survived.
The paradox in the story of the welfare state is that the moment when egalitarianism seemed to be nally realized, in the early 1970s, the system started to
collapse, due to the economic crisis. Today, the built legacy of the post-war welfare
state, including the open spaces of its cities and districts, are being privatized, as are
so many other sectors of the welfare state. Everywhere in our cities, but especially
in the post-war, late modernist districts, fences are erected, open spaces closed off,
connectivity disrupted; the continuous landscape of open and collective spaces makes
way for the city of closed perimeter blocks and private enterprise introducing new
social hierarchies and strategies of containment.52 Is this only natural as a response to
the radical publicness and all-inclusiveness of the post-war welfare state, or are there
other lessons to be learned so as to develop alternatives? The Hengelo Kasbah might
suggest that the experiment sanctioned by the welfare state did pay off after all; albeit
neither on its own ideological terms nor on the ones of the technocratic kind of
management that comes with government funding. Nonetheless, there are valuable
lessons there in terms of architecture and planning with regard to density, innovative
149
150
Dirk van den Heuvel
housing typologies and mixed use in public space. Originally conceived as a generic
model for improved mass housing, 40 years later the Hengelo Kasbah now makes a
specic place with its own history and community.
Figure 7.8 Piet Blom, Kasbah roofscape, model (Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam).
Notes
1 K. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, London: Routledge, 2002; originally published
in 1945. The term Open Society was coined by Henri Bergson in 1932 as acknowledged
and explained by Popper himself in pp. 512513. For a recent introduction to Popper see
H. Keuth, The Philosophy of Karl Popper, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005.
2 A. and P. Smithson, Ordinariness and Light, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1970, p. 180.
3 For a compilation, see A. and P. Smithson, Urban Structuring, London: Studio Vista, 1967;
also published in their two volume monograph The Charged Void, New York: Monacelli
Press, 2001 and 2005.
4 By way of his diagram of the so-called Otterlo Circles as presented at the last CIAM
conference of 1959; see also F. Strauven, Aldo van Eyck. The Shape of Relativity, Amsterdam:
Architectura & Natura, 1998, pp. 349350.
5 For an explanation of the political and theoretical preparation of the post-war planning
practice in Holland see K. Bosma and C. Wagenaar (eds.), Een Geruisloze Doorbraak. De
geschiedenis van de architectuur en stedebouw tijdens de bezetting en de wederopbouw van Nederland,
Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 1999. With regard to the Spangen housing block Susanne
Komossa makes a similar observation in her book The Dutch Urban Block and the Public
Realm. Models, rules, ideals, Nijmegen: Vantilt, 2010, esp. pp. 168171.
6 For an overview of the history of Team 10 see M. Risselada and D. van den Heuvel (eds.),
Team 10. In Search of a Utopia of the Present (19531981), Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2005.
7 C. Tuscano, I am a product of Team 10, interview with Herman Hertzberger, in

Risselada and Van den Heuvel, Team 10, pp. 332333.
8 This position is not unlike the ones of urban theorists like Jane Jacobs, Jan Gehl or William
H. Whyte, of course. For an architectural theoretical explanation of Van Eycks ideas in
particular see Strauven, Aldo van Eyck; G. Teyssot, A Topology of Everyday Constellations,
Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2013, pp. 153182.
9 See also A. Lchinger, Structuralism in Architecture and Urban Planning, Stuttgart: Karl
Krmer Verlag, 1981; W. J. van Heuvel, Structuralism in Dutch Architecture, Rotterdam: 010
Publishers, 1992.
10 O. Newman, Defensible Space, New York: Macmillan, 1972; A. Smithson, The Violent
Consumer, or Waiting for the Goodies, Architectural Design, May 1974, pp. 274279.
11 A. and P. Smithson, Cluster City, The Architectural Review, November 1957, pp. 333336.
12 C. Rowe and F. Koetter, Collage City, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1978; rst published in
The Architectural Review, August 1975, pp. 6690.
13 This text is part of a larger research project into Dutch Structuralism; earlier publications
include: S. Frausto and D. van den Heuvel (eds.), Open Structures. An Introductory
Dossier on Dutch Structuralism, supplement to Volume 35: Everything Under Control, 2013;
D. van den Heuvel, Piet Bloms Domesticated Superstructures, in DASH (Delft Architectural
Studies on Housing), The Urban Enclave, Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2011, pp. 5670.
14 Popper connects the emergence of open societies with the emergence of commerce, trade,
travelling and migration, basically a society of burgers; how the industrial revolution and
the new forms of capitalism and organization of labour might or might not be compatible
with such an idea of society is not quite elaborated.
15 Popper, The Open Society, p. 166.
16 Ibid., p. 167.
17 The Smithsons UR grid has been widely published, see for a discussion of the grid and its
part in the Team 10 history see Risselada and Van den Heuvel, Team 10.
18 Together with William and Gill Howell for the CIAM 1953 conference, Commission 6;
published in Alison Smithson (ed.), The Emergence of Team 10 out of CIAM, London: The
Architectural Association, 1982, pp. 89.
19 Smithson, Ordinariness and Light, p. 48.
20 Ibid., p. 42.
21 A. van Eyck, The fake client and the great word no, in V. Ligtelijn and F. Strauven
(eds.), Aldo van Eyck. Writings; volume Collected Articles and Other Writings 19471998,
Amsterdam: SUN Publishers, 2008, pp. 324326; originally published in Forum, August
1962.
22 Popper, The Open Society, p. xxxvi.
23 Ibid., p. 147 and p. 153.
24 Ibid. p. 149.
25 The (anonymous) introduction to my edition of the Open Society calls it a largely social
democratic argument, which at rst I found strange since I had situated Popper as a witness
to the critique on modernism (due to Rowes strong argument of course); it remains odd
since Popper was brought to the London School of Economics by Von Hayek, and in our
days of bank and Euro crisis, Von Hayek is not quite considered to be on the left side,
to put it mildly. Still, one may also consider that Popper proposed such relatively simple
blueprints of piecemeal engineering as an alternative to the revolutions of 1917 in Russia
and 1918 in Germany; from that point of view, any sort of reformist approach is more
simple and much less damaging to society.
26 W. J. Van Heuvel, Vijf jaar experimenteren in de woningbouw, Polytechnisch Tijdschrift,
1975, nr. 9, pp. 273278.
27 J. Hengeveld with J. W. Vader and A. Blom (eds.), Piet Bloms Rotterdam. New Life at the Old
Harbour, Amersfoort: Jaap Hengeveld Publicaties, nd.
28 P. Blom, Kasbah Hengelo, Plan 2, 1970, pp. 8188.
29 I elaborated the relationship between the kasbah idea and multiculturalism in: D. van den
Heuvel, The Kasbah of Suburbia, AA les 62, 2011, pp. 8289.
30 J. Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, Boston: Beacon Press,
1955.
151
152
Dirk van den Heuvel
31 The original brochure Wonen als stedelijk dak is available in the Piet Blom archive at the
former NAi, now Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam.
32 A. van Eyck, Steps toward a congurative discipline, Forum 3, 1962, pp. 8194. Bloms
designs were also published in Forum, the journal edited by Van Eyck, Bakema, Hertzberger,
Dick Apon and Gert Boon during those years of 19591963.
33 H. Hertzberger, Zijn pozie is mijn muziek, in: Niet om het even wel evenwaardig,
Rotterdam: Stichting Rotterdam-Maaskant, 1986, p. 105.
34 Ibid, p. 105.
35 P. Blom, Fascisme in een sneeuwvlok, in: Niet om het even wel evenwaardig, Rotterdam:
Stichting Rotterdam-Maaskant, 1986, p. 87.
36 Provo is not very well-known outside of the Netherlands; a brief discussion of their journal
is included in B. Colomina and C. Buckley (eds.), Clip, Stamp, Fold. The Radical Architecture
of Little Magazines 196X to 197X, Barcelona: Actar, 2010. Even in the Netherlands literature on Provo in relation to architecture and town planning is scarce. In 1992 Virginie
Mamadouh published her doctoral thesis De stad in eigen hand. Provos kabouters en krakers als
stedelijke sociale beweging, Amsterdam: Uitgeverij SUA, 1992. The International Institute of
Social History in Amsterdam holds the Provo archives.
37 J. Hengeveld with F. Strauven, A. Blom and D. Verwoerd, Piet Blom, Amersfoort: Jaap
Hengeveld Publicaties, nd, p. 53.
38 Conceptual sketch menselijk anno 1968 (human anno 1968), archive of the former NAi,
now Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam; published in Hengeveld, Piet Bloms Rotterdam,
pp. 128129.
39 For an excellent overview of Van Klingerens work see: M. van den Bergen and P. Vollaard,
Hinder en ontklontering. Architectuur en maatschappij in het werk van Frank van Klingeren,
Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2003.
40 A. Smithson (ed.), Team 10 meetings (19531984), New York: Rizzoli, 1991.
41 A. Smithson, How to Recognise and Read Mat-Building. Mainstream Architecture as
It Has Developed towards the Mat-building, Architectural Design, September 1974, pp.
573590.
42 Risselada and Van den Heuvel, Team 10, p. 123.
43 A. and P. Smithson, Without Rhetoric. An Architectural Aesthetic 19551972, London: Latimer
New Dimensions, 1973.
44 W. Vanstiphout, Mart Stams Trousers. A Conversation between Peter Smithson and
Wouter Vanstiphout, in Crimson with M. Speakes and G. Haddes (eds.), Mart Stams
Trousers: Stories from behind the Scenes of Dutch Moral Modernism, Rotterdam: 010 Publishers,
1999, pp. 121138.
45 For an account of the events see: Strauven, Aldo van Eyck. pp. 397406.
46 These remarks were not made public by Alison Smithson. They can be found in the
typescript available at the archive of the former NAi, now Het Nieuwe Instituut in
Rotterdam.
47 Smithson, Team 10 Meetings, p. 79.
48 See, for instance, F. Strauven and M. Risselada, Interview with M. Schiedhelm and G.
Jullian de La Fuente, in M. Risselada, D. van den Heuvel and G. de Waal (eds.), Team 10.
Keeping the Language of Modern Architecture Alive, Delft: TU Delft, 2006, pp. 830.
49 Two other key examples used in the Team 10 discourse were the Roman amphitheatre in
Arles and the Palace of Diocletian in Split, historical structures that, just like the kasbah,
were capable of accommodating change over time receiving a completely different inll
alltogether.
50 J. P. Baeten, Surbuban Urbanity. Piet Bloms Kasbah Housing in Hengelo, Archis 3, 2000,
pp. 5873.
51 There is a website: www.pietblommuseum.nl/en/
52 For instance in the case of the Amsterdam Western Garden Cities.
Figure 8.0 Skrholmen Centrum, photographed by Sune Sundhal, 1968 (Collections of The Swedish Centre for
Architecture and Design).
8
WHERE THE MOTORWAYS MEET:
ARCHITECTURE AND CORPORATISM
IN SWEDEN 1968
Helena Mattsson
If you drive from Stockholm city centre ten minutes south on the motorway, and turn
right at road junction 151, you end up in Skrholmens multi-storey car park one
of the largest in Northern Europe. Within the building three motorways on different
levels intersect with a shopping mall, and the extended landscape is brought into the
man-made structure connecting the surroundings with Skrholmens centre.
When Skrholmen was planned in the mid-1960s, both motoring and consumerism were presented almost as forces of nature, unquestionable and impossible to
stop. The increase in cars was often depicted as the coming tide which society had
to mobilize for. But soon to come were other voices, questioning the fundamental
principles of Swedish suburban planning. In fact, just days after its inauguration,
Skrholmen, with its projected 26,000 inhabitants, was interpreted as a dystopian
image of the welfare state, motoring and consumerism.
In the literature there is a widespread, but over-simplied, narrative of the Swedish
twentieth century welfare state, its architecture and its housing policies. According
to this, the Social Democrats were the dominant, if not the sole, players, who in the
1930s formulated the ideological ground the so-called Folkhemmet (The Peoples
Home) and continued by developing the Swedish welfare state in the post-war era.
In this account it was the modernist architects of the 1930s the Swedish functionalists who literally built the new society with the Social Democrats and continued
this project in the period following the Second World War.1 This interpretation is
questioned in this article, not because it is fundamentally wrong, but because it puts
too much emphasis on the presumption that Swedish functionalism, and later largescale building structures, were formed mainly by a Social Democratic state. Instead, the
article explores the trajectory of a Swedish corporatist policy that was striving towards
a consensus between the state, the business world, and powerful interest groups.
The aim is to investigate the inuence of trade and industry on Swedish welfare
state architecture and on the built environment at large. Certainly, the Social
Democrats, together with other political parties in the parliament, were important in
the shaping of Swedish housing policy. But the development cannot be understood
Helena Mattsson
156
Figure 8.1 Model of Skrholmen, Boijsen & Efvergren (Collections of The Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design).
Architecture and Corporatism in Sweden
Figure 8.2 Skrholmen Centrum, drawing by Boijsen & Efvergren (Collections of The Swedish Centre
for Architecture and Design).
without considering other inuential forces lobby groups, the building industry
and the logic of consumption. Moreover, to reconsider the period labelled as that of
the welfare state, and to try to understand the role of capital and commercial groups
in that period, is also a contribution towards understanding the conditions regulating
Swedish architecture today. It is an attempt to trace the origins of todays neoliberalism
and look for continuities rather than breaks.2
The suburban development of Skrholmen, its architecture, and the debates it
caused, provide the starting point for this investigation. Discussing three important
elements that shaped Skrholmen cars, consumption and the building industry the
chapter aims at tracing the forces stemming from trade and industry, and by doing so
enriching our understanding of the role of architecture within the Swedish welfare state.
The Swedish welfare state: a corporatist democracy

In welfare state studies, Gsta Esping-Andersens The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism
(1990) was the rst comprehensive attempt at dening different models.3 The liberal
model, where the state encourages the market to develop private welfare schemes, is
exemplied by the United States, Canada and Australia (and partially Great Britain);
the conservative or corporatist regimes, where rights are attached to class and status,
are exemplied by Catholic-dominated countries like France, Italy and Germany;
while the Scandinavian countries form the third social democratic model, characterized by universalism and de-commodication. De-commodication is dened by
Esping-Andersen as the degree to which they [the regimes] permit people to make
157
158
Helena Mattsson
their standards independent of pure market forces, and in this way social rights
diminish citizens status as commodities.4 In recent studies, this notion of the Nordic,
or Scandinavian, model, has been criticised for ignoring differences between those
countries. The fundamental question if the Scandinavian model was a purely Social
Democratic project has also been raised.5 Esping-Andersens notion of the social
democratic model, characterized by de-commodication, can also be challenged
from an architectural point of view. In fact, as early as the 1930s the discourse (and
practice) of architecture and design suggested a strategy where the individual was to
be made into a consumer, dependent on the market.6 Klas mark supports this when
he points out that social democracy aimed at strengthening the role of the workers
in the market, rather than making them independent of it.7 Another qualication of
the standard narrative has recently been made by Jenny Andersson and Kjell stberg.8
They argue that the Swedish model was built up of three elements: rst, good
relations in the labour market, Saltsjbadsandan (the Saltsjbaden spirit);9 second,
a relatively large tax-funded welfare state, Folkhemmet (The Peoples Home); and,
third, a corporatist political system, often referred to (after the name of the prime
ministers country house where meetings often took place) as Harpsundsdemokratin
(Harpsund democracy).10
How, then, is the Swedish version of corporatism to be understood? Following
Phillippe Schmitter and others, corporatism may be described as a way of organizing
the public decision-making process on the basis of the institutionalised participation
of key interest groups.11 In the corporatist system organized interests, such as associations for trade and industry, trade unions, or the agricultural sector, get a prioritized
position which makes them legitimised participants in the process of public decisionmaking. In Sweden these channels to power have typically included participation in
government commissions, representation on boards of the civil service, and inclusion
in political consultation processes. If this kind of participation dominated the decisionmaking process, the system could hardly be termed democratic, but used as a practice
inside a functioning parliamentarian democracy, it can be considered a democratic
system with some unclean elements.12 Experts on corporatist democracy often refer
to Sweden as the typical example of such a system, reaching its highpoint in the
1950s and 1960s and giving way by the end of the century to a system based on
non-institutionalized participation i.e. lobbying. Corporatism and lobbyism differ
in many ways, but there are also similarities and the institutionalized participation of
interest groups representing traffic, roads and transport, shows a strong continuity from
corporatism to lobbyism.13
In the 1960s the corporatist system in Sweden came to shape urban planning and
large-scale architecture, not least at Skrholmen. Through a prioritized position in the
consultation process, organizations such as the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce and
the Stockholm RetailersAssociation had an important impact on the democratic process.
Through the Civil Engineering Board (a government agency), which was involved in
the decision-making process, other interest groups representing the motoring and
road-building industries exerted inuence. The same goes for the building industry,
which was heavily represented in the important government commission Investigation
of the Industrialisation of Buildings (Byggnadsindustrialiseringsutredningen) that
paved the way for standardized and centralized large-scale housing production.14
The citizen as a consumer

Consumerism was a fundamental driving force in the construction of Skrholmen, as
well as other suburban developments during the 1960s. This was not a new feature.
Since the 1930s Swedish modernism had been deeply involved with the private market
and the logic of consumption; this was one of its most striking characteristics and one
that made functionalist architecture and its social ideals so relevant to the Swedish
welfare state. Whereas in most European countries the shift from crisis to golden age
came after the Second World War, in Sweden the crisis was short, lasting only from
1931 to 1934, and the economic boom that ended it overlapped both with Swedish
modernism and with the Keynesian politics formulated by the (Social Democratic)
nance minister Ernst Wigforss, who saw consumption as a driving force in society.15
In this way, consumerism had a central role in functionalist strategies, as well as
in society at large, and the logic of consumption was embedded in architecture and
planning. This does not mean that consumption was affirmed as such; rather the idea
was of a rational consumer in a rational planned economy, in which the citizens were
considered as educated consumers who inuence society through purchasing power.16
Contrary to what is often believed, American consumer culture had a major impact
on Swedish society. From 1955 until the 1970s Sweden had the highest number of
cars per capita in Europe.17 One of the pioneering European shopping-malls was in
Sweden, Ralph Erskines Shopping in Lule (1955), and an early example of a glassroofed shopping centre was the Tby Centrum (1968) outside Stockholm.
Towards the end of the 1960s, however, the forces stemming from the commercial
world became more visible in Sweden, as in the rest of Europe, and consumption and
the western lifestyle came under attack. Advertising and consumerism were widely
discussed in the media as well as in politics, and consumers, politicians, and institutions
alike called for greater state regulation. At the same time official state investigations into issues such as low income and the effects of advertising were undertaken,
revealing deep problems in the structure of the democratic system.18 Criticism of the
dominant capitalist forces led to Swedish corporatism being seen as a corrupt system.
In fact, by now the idea of the welfare state was in deep crisis.
If we turn to architecture and urbanism, it is also evident that commercial interests
had transformed planning ideology in the decades following the Second World War.
These changes are clear if we compare the three post-war suburban developments of
rsta Centrum from 1953, Vllingby Centrum from 1954, and Skrholmen Centrum
from 1968.19 rsta Centrum was built just outside Stockholm.20 It was considered
by critics as a failure (both nancially and socially) due to the overweighting of civic
facilities such as the library, theatre and cinema. In particular, the critics accused
the planners of rsta for being too heavily inuenced by sociological theories and
socialist ideologies and for ignoring the need for shopping areas. They were accused
of a nave utopianism based on community building and neighbourhood units and
in Dagens Nyheter, the largest newspaper in Sweden, rsta was described as a dolls
house democracy.21 By the time Vllingby Centrum was planned in the beginning of
the 1950s, the planning ideology had shifted. Vllingby was the rst realized so-called
ABC-suburb (A for arbete, work, B for bostad, housing, C for centrum, centre),
with similarities to the slightly earlier Stevenage New Town outside London.22 The
159
160
Helena Mattsson
Retailers Association was directly involved in the planning process for Vllingby, with
the result that the shopping areas planned were almost seven times as large as those
at rsta.23
The ideological shift visible in Vllingby was to be taken further in Skrholmen.
Instead of a utopian and socialistic idea of a community (rsta), here the ideology
was of individualistic liberation through consumption and motoring. In Skrholmen
the shopping areas were three times bigger than in Vllingby, and with its direct
connection to three motorways it was the perfect location to become the consumercentre for the region (Figure 8.3).
Skrholmen
8 September 1968. The main square in Skrholmen was full of people, the sun was
shining, and the City Commissioner Hjalmar Mehr was standing on the dais in the
middle of the square. It was the inauguration day of Skrholmen Centrum. The
administrative performance behind the creation of Skrholmen with its 400 million
Kronor as a total investment is a unique example of building society on a large scale
in the western world, Mehr declared.24 He thanked the builder AB Svenska Bostder
(Swedish Housing Ltd) for what they had achieved but the architects were not
mentioned. Gunnar Hjerne from Svenska Bostder went on:
We have done our job in great humility in relation to this overwhelming and
difficult task. Today we are convinced that the principal solution is correct. But
also that it is not a nal solution. The right solution for a planning commission
like this is never a nal solution. Skrholmen Centrum will always be in
transformation.25
The last speaker was Prince Bertil, a member of the Royal Family, who hailed
Skrholmen as the Mecca of planners, the city all planners in the world should visit
at least once in their lifetime to see new ideas realized.26 The following day, however,
the rst alarming article appeared in the daily press: Tear down Skrholmen!27
With 86 shops, 10 restaurants and 4,000 parking spaces, Skrholmen was
designed to satisfy the needs of the 300,000 consumers in its catchment area.
It was the rst regional shopping centre in Stockholm planned and located in
accordance with Reillys law of retail gravitation.28 Svenska Bostder considered
the project a development from their earlier Vllingby Centrum. Skrholmen
Centrum was a man-made structure in concrete, a materialisation of the forces
of modernity of the 1960s. It was the new nature made up by goods, cars and
concrete (Figure 8.4).
As already pointed out, Skrholmen is situated next to an intersection of three
motorways that became the backbone for the whole area and dened the basic
structure. Thanks to the different level of the three roads, regional traffic could be
brought at different levels into the car park building, which constituted the main east
entrance to the centre. The car park gradually turned into the shopping mall, which
opened up towards the main square, which in turn was connected to the housing
areas on the northern side. On the main square was the other main entrance to
161
Figure 8.3 Plan of Skrholmen, Stockholm City Planning Office, 19 October 1964 (Collections of The Swedish
Centre for Architecture and Design).
162
Helena Mattsson
Figure 8.4 Skrholmen Centrum, view from the south, drawing by Boijsen & Efvergren, 4 August 1968
(Collections of The Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design).
Skrholmen, the subway station. The public and the private transport were symbolically placed on each side of the public square.
Skrholmen Centrum was planned as one big machine made of concrete, with
underground service roads providing the structure with all kind of supplies. Below the
service streets was a district heating/cooling plant supplying the whole area. According
to the mythology of Skrholmen, the underground area was soon inhabited with
young people sniffing glue and thinner.29 The Centrum had an advanced separation of
traffic. Traffic with supplies to the shops and restaurants had its entrance on the south
side where it entered a street level (-1) under the shops while the ground level (0)
was free from traffic (except inside the car park). The regional traffic from Stockholm
entered the car park building at level +1; from Stra at level -1; and from Sdertlje
at level -2. Level 0 was connected with the square and was reserved for local parking.
Skrholmen was divided into ve areas: the car park building (on the east side);
the shopping areas (in the middle); culture and social activities (on the west side);
six-storey housing blocks (on the north side, on a hill) and, even further west, threestorey housing blocks. Even if the area was separated into functional parts, the overall
idea was to intertwine housing and other activities; Svenska Bostder stated that the
housing should connect and even penetrate the Centrum.30 This was mainly done
through the circulation system, by connecting public streets and social spaces to each
other. The central square, for example, was almost a continuation of the public stairs
in the housing area that was built on a slope above the centre, and the roofs of the
shops lining the main square functioned as social terraces for the housing areas and
created a link to the life on the square (Figure 8.5).
A community centre was proposed but this was cancelled and instead the schools
were to be opened at night to serve the community.31 The library was also seen as
providing the functions of a community centre. This strategy of multi-programming
was cheaper and saved space. A hotel for elderly people incorporated in the main
structure, together with the double use of the school and the library, shows the
ambition to transgress functional separation. Skrholmen was a suburb organized
Figure 8.5 Skrholmen Centrum: the public street connecting shopping areas, social spaces and the housing area, photographed by Sune Sundhal in 1968 (Collections of The
Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design).

163
164
Helena Mattsson
through separation of functional units, but at the same time with the ambition to
merge these units into a more complex whole.
In the contemporary sources on the planning of Skrholmen, the architects are
almost invisible, in marked contrast to other actors such as the builder (Svenska
Bostder), the Swedish Chamber of Commerce, and the City Planning Office. Boijsen
& Efvergren were the lead architects and they also designed the centrum and the
infrastructure systems for the area. Other architects were also involved, for example,
Ahlgren Olsson & Silow, a well-known rm, designed the six-storey housing. The
only written material coming from Boijsen & Efvergren on Skrholmen that I have
found consists of some notes of meetings with the City Planning Office. While the
written material is limited, the collection of drawings, however, is quite rich.32
Consumer organizations in the planning process

The building contractor, Svenska Bostder, stated in its 1968 presentation of
Skrholmen: It should primarily be planned for consumers with cars, it should be
located close to the motorway and contain large areas to hold both shopping malls
and food stores as well as competing specialised stores.33 Urban planning in Sweden
in the 1960s was strongly inuenced by the United States, for example, by Victor
Gruens Northland Center in Detroit and Southdale Center in Minneapolis, but
also by European consumer environments such as the Lijnbaan shopping street in
Rotterdam.34
In the consultation process, which started as early as 1960, the proposed general
plan for the Stra Property area (where Skrholmen would be located) was sent
by the City Planning Office to various bodies for comment.35 The Stockholm
Retailers Association, with future prime minister Gsta Boman36 as one of the
signatories, noted in its response that the Association had been an important actor in
the planning of Vllingby, with a proposal that led to the construction of Vllingby
Centrum and consequently to the breakthrough of the large commercial centres in
the planning of the Stockholm region.37 The Association argued that the plan as
drawn up was based on old principles and that another solution should be sought,
based on the fact that small independent shops would soon disappear. Rather than
splitting shopping into two centres, there should be a single large-scale commercial
centre next to the motorway. While there might be drawbacks with the change
to large-scale shopping centres (The progress towards fewer shops is unsatisfying
not only for the consumer but also for the merchants. The amount of shops would
shrink and the consumers walking distance and discomfort would increase.38),
this was the inevitable future. In the Associations view, It is no use in the long
run to neglect adapting urban planning to the changed habits and reactions of the
consumers.39
Another issue on which the Association had strong views was the proposal for areas
of mixed housing, where garden city typologies were combined with a more dense
urbanity. In their view the explosion of motoring had created the preconditions for a
more homogenous urbanism, as in the United States: If the different housing types
single-family houses and housing blocks were separated into different neighbourhoods it is likely that a more adequate environment would result.40
The response from the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce was similar to that of the
Retailers Association. But in addition they stressed that the change in modes of travel
from public to private would give more freedom to planners, since the walking distance
between areas of housing and the public transportation network was no longer a major
issue.41 Not everyone was of the same opinion, but the only complaint (conrmed with
a list of names) found in the les came from property owners in the area who considered
that the planning of the public transport was poor: Generally, a distance of 1,500 metres
between the stations is too long and will lead to an increasing use of private transportation.
In keeping with the Citys traffic policy the distance between the stations should be less.42
The General Plan underwent repeated revision until the nal version was produced
in 1963. Towards the end of the process the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce
ordered an investigation into consumer aspects from the Stockholm School of
Economics and this was to have a major impact. The authors of this report used the
same modied version of Reillys law as they had for Vllingby Centrum and Tby
Centrum, but with one fundamental difference. In Vllingby it was estimated that half
of the population would use public transport and half would use private transport. In
Tby the calculation was that twice as many would travel by car as by public transport.
In Skrholmen everyone was expected to use their own car.43 This was a dramatic
increase, which meant providing 5,000 parking spaces instead of 3,000.
Put together, the main demands from the business and retail organizations sent to
the City Planning Office were the following: have one large commercial centre placed
next to the motorway instead of one centre in each of the two housing areas; reduce
the amount of small local independent stores; separate family houses from housing
blocks; have greater distances between stations; and increase the number of parking
spaces from 3,000 to 5,000.
The consumer groups were seen as experts and their opinions, strongly inuenced by the United States, were considered as objective truths based on science and
mathematical forms; and so most of the claims from the consumer organizations were
incorporated into the nal General Plan. In this way the planning process, and in the
long run the built environment, became a fullment of their visions, rather than of
the ideas of architects, planners, or politicians.
In the planning process of Skrholmen, architecture and the built environment
seems to have been handled like a exible entity that had to relate to forces more
connected to the ow of private capital than to ideas about society. It was not architectural ideologies, as earlier in Vllingby Centrum (although how much is open to
debate), that shaped the new suburb: rather, it was the interests given power by the
corporatist model. Nonetheless, architecture still served as an important tool. Through
the materialization of ideas into architectural forms, different interests could merge
into concrete plans for a future society. Architecture was in this sense a precondition
for the corporatist regime to work in the planning process.
Mass motoring
Mass motoring came to Sweden after the Second World War and became established more rapidly than in most other European countries. By the end of the 1960s
motoring was on top of the political and public agenda. Like consumerism, it was
165
166
Helena Mattsson
regarded almost as a force of nature; society simply had to mobilise for the inevitable
increase of cars. Strong national and international forces pushed for this development.
Experts put forward exaggerated projections of future car ownership; visions from
the United States inspired Swedish planners, and measured by value of output, the
car manufacturer Volvo in 1970 became the largest company in Sweden.44 In the
sales catalogue for Skrholmen it was stated that the site decided on for Skrholmen
was an open eld and a low meadowland with scattered groups of oaks surrounded
by mountains in north and south. This would be the place where the motorways
meet and where the customers would oat into the shopping-centre from the arteries
serving the urban structure like the water in the streams on the former lowland.45
The priority of motoring, in the period investigated here, is clearly visible in a
number of official documents, such as Principles for urban planning with respect to road
safety: The SCAFT guidelines 1968.46 The ruling principle was that norms for how
to build and plan cities became looser, while traffic planning was regulated by more
precise norms. As has been pointed out by Per Lundin, city planning had to adapt to
roads and infrastructure rather than the other way round.47
The building layout therefore had to be elastic and adjust to the road system. But
how were the roads planned? Again, organized interests had an important role. In
the case of motoring the Swedish Road Association, together with the car lobby
in general, was a central actor in corporatist policy.48 To understand the rapid and
Figure 8.6 Skrholmen Centrum, conceptual sketch for traffic by Boijsen & Efvergren, 11 March 1967
politically uncontroversial adaptation of Swedish society to motoring one needs to

take these organizations into account.49
An alliance was established in the 1950s between the Swedish Road Association
and the main state agency, the Civil Engineering Board, and together they worked for
a Taylorization of the roads. In this way, the potentially controversial policy area of
traffic became a scientic and objective eld for the experts. The new subject traffic
engineering was introduced and engineers were sent to the United States to study at
the source. In the Vgplan fr Sverige (Road Plan for Sweden) of 1959 this scientic and
de-politicized approach provided the rules that were coming to regulate not only the
roads but also city planning and housing.50
How about the architects? What kind of architectural response did the car create?
Even if critical voices were heard by the middle of the 1960s, the discussion was not
Figure 8.7 Skrholmen Centrum, drawing by Boijsen

& Efvergren, 1415 April 1964 (Collections of The
Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design).
167
168
Helena Mattsson
as elaborated among architects and planners as it was, for example, by Team 10 in

Britain.51 It was never theorized and developed into an architectural standpoint with
architectural consequences, although of course architects, too, might have views about
motoring. The fascination with cars and infrastructure, as shown by, for example,
Alison and Peter Smithson, was also present in the Swedish context.52 If traffic was
turned into a scientic subject for engineers, it became an aesthetic category for architects. Transport systems were investigated and treated not only as technical problems
but also as architectural issues. It is as if during the 1960s architecture and planning got
stigmatized and infrastructure made up a new creative eld of freedom.
Despite the discourse based on numbers, rationality and expertise, at Skrholmen
infrastructural elements such as motorways, communication systems, inner streets,
loading streets, underground culverts, street decks and terraces were treated with high
architectural ambition. Skrholmen as a structure could be read as a gigantic machine
made up of infrastructure and transport ows. The levels coming from the dramatic
topography of the natural landscape were intertwined into a complex network that
formed the backbone of the area. This tendency can be connected to international
discourses on cybernetics, system theory and topology, although explicit references
to these discussions were usually absent in the Swedish discourse. On the other hand,
these themes were realized to a large extent in Sweden ideas were tested without
any developed theoretical contexts. This radical pragmatic attitude is a striking feature
of the Swedish welfare state.
The building industry

Skrholmen Centrum is constructed of 25,000 prefabricated building elements, while
50 kilometres of piles reinforced the muddy soil below. In the sales catalogue it was
stated that the need for rapid construction and as small a workforce as possible as
favoured by contemporary housing production dictated [the use of] system building
with thorough-going prefabrication.53 A single company, Byggproduktion AB, partly
owned by the Trade Union Confederation (Landsorganisationen), undertook the
construction.
If motoring and consumer lobby groups were two strong forces in the formation
of the welfare state architecture, the building industry was another. There have never
been any state-owned Swedish construction rms, and contrary to what is often
believed Sweden has had fewer state-owned companies than most other European
countries.54 In the mid-1960s there was still a shortage of housing, even though the
standard and the supply had been dramatically increased in the previous 15 years, and
housing policy was an urgent topic on the political agenda. The idea of building a
million dwellings in ten years was discussed both in parliament and by Stockholm
City Council. The Social Democrats were hesitant to commit to this very large
programme, but eventually decided to start what was later called the one million
programme.55 Thus, this large-scale housing programme was not, as it is often
perceived, something typically social democratic. The same could be said about the
standardization of the building industry.
The new welfare state housing policy realized after the Second World War
had some complex effects. The building of housing for prot was curtailed and
169
Figures 8.8 and 8.9 Details of concrete facades in the shopping centre, photographed by Sune Sundhal in 1969
state-backed housing providers stepped in. In 1940 private companies were responsible for 75 per cent of new housing construction, but in 1950 only 35 per cent.56
This meant that the all-round building contractor, who both owned and maintained
the houses, largely disappeared, leaving room for more specialized businesses. Because
of their experience in large-scale structures, road and construction engineering rms,
who were used to thinking on a large scale, became involved in housing production.57
In 1959 a debate erupted over what were called building troubles. It was initiated
by the building industry, which argued that state regulations made the process of
building too complicated. The result was that some of the largest national building
companies pushed through a simplication, ensuring that technical evaluations should
be similar in all Swedish municipalities. In 1967 a type-approval unit was set up at
the National Board of Planning, which meant that one building detail or building
type could be approved nationally, and the possibility for local variations ended. This,
in turn, paved the way for massive centralized housing production that characterized
the million programme.58
The building industry also put pressure on the official Investigation of the
Industrialisation of Buildings (19651971). As a result of the investigation, in order to
maintain continuous building production and employment the state adopted a policy
of signing ve-year contracts with construction companies. New factories for prefabricated concrete elements were set up by the industry to full these contracts and to
meet the demand created by the million programme. But before the end of the 1960s
the million programme was already running into problems, with apartments standing
empty; yet because the contracts could not be broken, large-scale house-building
operations continued into the early 1970s.59
170
Helena Mattsson
Public debate and the role of architects

In the late 1960s and early 1970s the critique of consumer society in Sweden coincided
with the critique of welfare state architecture and its large-scale programmes.
Architecture became a target in the general questioning of the welfare state and the
Swedish model.60
The critical narrative about the suburbs, as the new locus for the welfare state, told a
story of inhabitants caught in a misanthropic architecture that destroyed human individuality. These dystopian images of a society with totalitarian architecture could be seen
as an early example of a change in discourse that later shifted Swedish political ideology
towards neoliberalism. The debate that followed the inauguration of Skrholmen
mirrors these tendencies in the critique of the welfare state and its architecture.
As mentioned earlier, an article in the daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter on
10 September 1968 launched the debate.61 This text is almost emblematic in its
description of Skrholmen, and has later become the standard negative image for
the large-scale suburb. It described how a visitor entering Skrholmen perceives the
skyline as a stage set surrounding a suburban centre that despises human beings, [it is]
a belated import from American planning from the end of the 1940s [that was] already
out of date then. On the day of the inauguration, the author of the article watched as
a young man in the corner of the square read out a manifesto, declaring Where is the
space for human beings?. People stopped to listen to him and applauded enthusiastically. In the middle of all the noise people realized that it was the slum of the 1970s
that was being inaugurated. The article ends: the only thing you can use Skrholmen
Centrum for (once the shops are closed) is for rolling disused bottles in, so the sound
echoes alarmingly between the walls. Tear it down!62
This article triggered the rst important public debate on welfare state architecture, and it was almost uniformly negative. In the daily press almost 30 articles
were published during the three nal months of 1968.63 Criticism was directed at
the lack of public transport, the explosion of consumerism and motoring, the dead
environment that produced alienated inhabitants, and the segregation of the poor and
those without cars. The architects were also attacked. It was said that if the architects had been interested in peoples everyday lives the architecture would have been
different, and not regulated by cars and consumption.64 Reading these articles today
it seems as if the planning and decision-making processes were not apparent. The
comments did not really hit on any sensitive spots and, despite the passion aroused,
one gets the feeling of an attack missing the real targets. As in the preceding planning
process, the architects voice was absent.
However, one voice in this debate did pinpoint some important conditions: that
of the prominent author and member of the Swedish Academy, Lars Gyllensten. He
argued that democracy was being side-stepped and that the natural control mechanisms were not working in urban planning and architecture.65 He identied two main
reasons for this: the absence of a free market and the undemocratic nature of a planning
system ruled by bureaucracy and economic interests. He also said that powerful lobby
groups and large resources were used to manipulate the planning process.
The environmental movement, of which Gyllensten was part, was a new voice in
the discussion of urban planning and architecture. The question of the environment
Figure 8.10 Skrholmen Centrum, photographed by Sune Sundhal in 1968 (Collections of The Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design).

171
172
Helena Mattsson
transgressed the ordinary positions of left or right. Thus, the housing issues often so
easily connected to politics (mainly social democracy) were intertwined in a much
more complicated political web. Or, as Gyllensten stressed, the issues relating to the
built environment were not considered as political issues at all. In his view Skrholmen
was just a symptom of larger problems of democracy, and the answer to the questions
raised in the debate on Skrholmen was to put these issues back into the political
domain where they belonged.
Gyllensten identied a key issue for architects and architecture: the fact that
planning and designing society, in other words architecture, was located outside
politics. This also had the consequence that the architectural profession lost its power
to make decisions. In the planning of Skrholmen, the vision of the architects working
on the project was formulated through drawings and documents directly related to
the scheme, but the city planning offices archive contains no response or communication from the Swedish Association of Architects or similar interest organisations.
As a group, architects had no institutional channel in the corporatist decision-making
process.
In the design of Skrholmen the project architects entered late in the process. It
was only after the decision on the nal General Plan had been taken in 1963 that
Boijsen & Efvergren were commissioned by Svenska Bostder to develop the plan, in
collaboration with the city planning office. In other words the role of the architects
was to elaborate a plan already settled, to materialise what already had been planned,
but not to engage in the political and societal questions which to a large extent determined what was designed.
Even while architects, politicians, and business agreed on the need to industrialize
the building and housing sector, complaints were made about the cost of architectural services. In the press it was stated that the architects had top wages. In 1964
the business freedom ombudsman (Nringsfrihetsombudsmannen) inspected the fee
structure for architects and other consultants and stated: It cant be defensible to
allow an expensive work force to continuously do new drawings for almost identical
buildings.66 The report had a damaging effect on architectural practice. Those
commissioning buildings began to demand that the architects add or similar approved
on their drawings so the architects specications would not limit the purchase of
alternative (usually cheaper) products and components.67 This, of course, was to
downgrade the drawing and the architects work price, not design, would determine
the nal result.
In conclusion, the Swedish welfare state is often portrayed as a society where social
democracy, through the state and together with the architects, planned the everyday
life of its citizens. This standard narrative, however, has to be modied. The corporatist character of the Swedish system meant that organised interests played a crucial
role in the policy process. In Skrholmen consumer and motoring organizations, as
well as the building industry, were essential in the planning process. Certainly, architecture, in the form of drawings, models and plans, was an important tool in making
a consensus between the different interests and pressure groups. But the architect was
only one of many players and by no means the most powerful.
Notes
1 The standard narrative of modernist architects as builders of the Swedish welfare state is
to be found in, for example, C. Caldenby, J. Lindwall and W. Wang (eds) 20th Century
Architecture. 4, Sweden, Munich: Prestel, 1998. For critical discussions of the narratives of the
Swedish Welfare state see Scandinavian Journal of History, vol. 34, no. 3, 2009, Special Issue:
Images of Sweden and the Nordic Countries; and U. Lundberg and M. Tydn, In search
of the Swedish model: Contested historiography, in H. Mattsson and S-O. Wallenstein
(eds) Swedish Modernism: Architecture, Consumption, and the Welfare State, London: Black Dog
Publishing, 2010.
2 This is further investigated in the on-going research project run by H.Mattsson and
C. Gabrielsson, Architecture of deregulations: Politics and postmodernism in Swedish
building 19751995, supported by the Swedish Research Council.
3 G. Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990.
4 Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, p. 3.
5 See, for example, N. F. Christiansen, K. Petersen, N. Edling and P. Haave (eds) The Nordic
Model of Welfare: A Historical Reappraisal, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2006;
K. Petersen and N. F. Christiansen (eds) Scandinavian Journal of History, vol. 6, no. 3, 2001,
Special Issue: The Nordic Welfare States 19002000.
6 H. Mattsson, Designing the reasonable consumer: Standardisation and personalisation in
Swedish Functionalism, Swedish Modernism: Architecture, Consumption, and the Welfare State.
7 K. mark, Hundra r av vlfrdspolitik: Vlfrdsstatens framvxt i Norge och Sverige, Ume:
Bora, 2005, p. 67.
8 J. Andersson and K. stberg, Sveriges historia 19652012, Stockholm: Norstedts, 2013, p. 29.
9 The treaty signed by the Swedish Trade Union Confederation and the Swedish Employers
Association in Saltsjbaden outside Stockholm in 1938 The Saltsjbaden Agreement
has become a symbol of the Swedish corporative policy. Torsten Sverenius claims that the
Saltjbaden agreement was to last for three decades, until 1968, until it fell apart in its
components. T. Sverenius, Vad hnde med Sveriges ekonomi efter 1970?, Statens Offentliga
Utredningar 1999 no. 150, Stockholm: Fakta info direkt, 2000, p. 115.
10 Harpsund is a Swedish mansion, donated to the state, where the government held meetings
with, among others, representatives of trade and industry.
11 One of the most well known researchers on modern corporatism is Phillippe Schmitter.
See, for example, P. Schmitter, Still in the century of corporatism, The Review of Politics,
vol. 36, no. 1, 1974, pp. 85131; P. Schmitter, Reections on where the theory of
neo-corporatism has gone and where the praxis of neo-corporatism may be going, in G.
Lembruch and P. Schmitter (eds) Patterns of Corporatist Policy-Making, London: Sage, 1982.
12 J. Hermansson, T. Svensson and P. O. berg, Att pverka demokratiska beslut, in J.
Hermansson (ed.) Avkorporativisering och lobbyism: Konturerna till en ny politisk modell, Statens
Offentliga Utredningar 1999 no. 121, Stockholm: Fakta info direkt, 1999, p. 11.
13 J. Hermansson, T. Svensson and P. O. berg, Medborgarna, intressena och transportpolitiken in Hermansson (ed.) Avkorporativisering och lobbyism, p. 187238.
14 The Investigation on Industrialisation of Building (Byggnadsindustrialiseringsutredningen)
published three committee reports: Upphandling av stora bostadsprojekt (Purchasing of
Large Housing Projects), Statens Offentliga Utredningar 1968 no. 43, Stockholm: Esselte
AB, 1968; Rationellt smhusbyggande (Rational Building of One Family Houses), Statens
Offentliga Utredningar 1969 no. 63, Stockholm: Esselte AB, 1969; Byggandets industrialisering (Industrialisation of Building), Statens Offentliga Utredningar 1971 no. 52,
Stockholm: Esselte AB, 1971.
15 H. Mattsson, Designing the reasonable consumer: Standardisation and personalization in
Swedish functionalism, in Mattsson and Wallenstein (eds) Swedish Modernism.
16 Y. Hirdman, Att lgga livet tillrtta: Studier i svensk folkhemspolitik, Stockholm: Carlssons,
1989, p. 94.
17 In 1953 the car density in Sweden was the fourth highest in the world. P. Blomkvist, Den
goda vgens vnner: Vg- och billobbyn och framvxten av det svenska bilsamhllet 19141959,
Stockholm & Stehag: Symposion, p. 18.
18 See, for example, G. Inghe and M.-B. Inghe, Den ofrdiga vlfrden, Stockholm: Tiden/
Folksam, 1967; T. Michlsen, Rd Gubbe: Anteckningar om makten och miljn, Stockholm:
173
174
Helena Mattsson
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
Aldus Aktuellt, 1969; Lginkomstutredningen: Svenska folkets inkomster, Statens Offentliga

Utredningar 1970 no. 34, Stockholm: Esselte, 1970.
Lucy Creagh points at the differences between planning in rsta and Vllingby in L.
Creagh, From acceptera to Vllingby: The discourse of individuality and community in
Sweden (19311954), Footprint, vol. 4, no. 2, 2012, p. 18.
Uno hrn made the plan fr rsta Centrum and the buildings were designed by Erik and
Tore Ahlsn. For a discussion on rsta Centrum, see M. Ferring, Dionysos p rsta torg:
Frgfrgan i svensk efterkrigsarkitektur, Stockholm: Royal Institute of Technology, 2006.
G. Lindahl, Stadsplanering i det bl, Dagens Nyheter, 21 August 1951, cited in M. Ferring,
Dionysos p rsta torg: Frgfrgan i svensk efterkrigsarkitektur, p. 96.
Sven Markelius made the plan for the area and Backstrm & Reinius designed the
buildings.
Creagh, From acceptera to Vllingby, 18.
Skrholmens centrum invigt med fyrverkeri och barngrt, Dagens Nyheter, 9 September
1968.
Skrholmens centrum invigt med fyrverkeri och barngrt.
Skrholmens centrum invigt med fyrverkeri och barngrt.
L.-O. Franzn, Riv Skrholmen, Dagens Nyheter, 10 September 1968.
Reillys law on retail from the 1930s states that larger centres, cities or places will have larger
spheres of inuence than smaller. The law was questioned in the 1960s, by for example
Melvin Webbers theory of a Non-Place Urban Realm. See Miodrag Mitrainovic, Total
Landscape, Theme Parks, Public Space, Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing, 2006, pp. 5354.
Aina Andersson interviewed by Anders Hedve. A. Hedve, Jag lskar Skrholmen, in
Skrholmens Centrum 25 r, Skrholmen: Skrholmens hembygdsfrening, 1993, p. 34.
Skrholmen, Stockholm: AB Svenska Bostder, 1968, p. 7.
Skrholmen, p. 5. In 1969 Svenska Bostder and the architects Boijsen & Efvergren
published a catalogue as a proposal for a community center: W. Boijsen and D. Efvergren,
Allaktivitetshus i Skrholmen? En debattinledning, Vllingby: AB Svenska Bostder, 1969.
The archives used for this article are The Collections of The Swedish Centre for
Architecture and Design (Arkitektur- och designcentrums samlingar, Stockholm), The
Stockholm City Planning Office (Stockholms stadsbyggnadskontor), and the Minutes of
the Stockholm City Council (Stockholms stadsfullmktige).
Skrholmen, p. 3.
P. Lundin, Bilsamhllet: Ideologi, expertis och regelskapande i efterkrigstidens Sverige, Stockholm:
Stockholmia frlag, 2008, p. 166; B. Bergman, Handelsplats, shopping, stadsliv, Stockholm &
Stehag: Symposion, 2003, pp. 166167.
Stockholms stadsbyggnadskontor [SBK], Byggnadsnmndens arkiv [BA], PL 5009, Frslag
till Generalplan fr Stra Egendom, 2 September 1960 (Proposal to General Plan for Stra
Egendom).
Gsta Boman later became leader for the Swedish Conservatives (19701984).
SBK, BA, PL 5009, Stockholms stads och lns kpmannafrbund, Skrivelse till Stockholms
stads stadsbyggnadskontor, 3 October 1960, p. 3 (p. 164) (Review statement to Stockholm
City Planning Office by Stockholm Merchants Association).
Stockholms stads och lns kpmannafrbund, Skrivelse, p. 3 (p. 165).
SBK, BA, PL 5009, Stockholms handelskammare, Skrivelse till Stockholms stads stadsbyggnadskontor, 7 October 1960, p. 4 (p. 138) (Review statement to Stockholm City
Planning Office by Stockholm Chamber of Commerce).
SBK, BA, PL 5009, N.S. Lagerstedt et al., Angende Generalplan fr Stra, 24 September
1960 (Regarding the General Plan for Stra).
SBK, BA, PL 5010, L. Rydn, I. Lindberg and L. Person (Stockholm School of Economics),
Skrholmens Centrum, 1963, pp. 370406.
Blomkvist, Den goda vgens vnner, pp. 1819; E. Lindgren, Samhllsfrndring p vg:
Perspektiv p den svenska bilismens utveckling mellan 1950 och 1970, Ume: Institutionen fr
ekonomisk historia, 2010, p. 19.
Skrholmen, p. 8.
46 Principles for urban planning with respect to road safety: The Scaft guidelines 1968, Stockholm:
The National Road Administration and the National Board of Urban Planning, 1968.
47 Lundin, Bilsamhllet, p. 33.
48 It is telling that one of the most inuential lobby groups in Europe European Roundtable
of Industrialists was initiated in 1983 by the former CEO of Volvo Pehr G. Gyllenhammar.
49 Blomkvist, Den goda vgens vnner, p. 19.
50 Blomkvist, Den goda vgens vnner, p. 238.
51 See, for example, A. Smithson (ed) Team 10 Primer, London: Studio Vista, 1968, p. 99; M.
Risselda and D. van den Heuvel (eds) Team 10, Rotterdam: NAi Publisher, 2005. In an
interview in 2000 Peter Smithson argued that by and large, the interest in communication
systems among the Team 10 members was rather limited. Except for Alison and Peter
Smithson it was mainly Jaap Bakema who had that interest. Interview with Peter Smithson,
made by the author, 19 July 2000.
52 A. Smithson and P. Smithson, Mobility: Road systems, Architectural Design, October 1958;
L. Costa, A. Korn and D. Lasdun, Capital cities, Architectural Design, October, 1958; A.
Smithson and P. Smithson, Scatter, Architectural Design, April 1959.
53 Skrholmen, p. 22.
54 Nationalization has never been an issue in Swedish social democracy, and in practice the
Social Democrats have always rejected all forms of socializations of private companies.
Andersson and stberg, Sveriges historia 19652012, p. 32.
55 In fact, the large-scale production of housing had already started before the one million
programme. In 1965 90,000 apartments were produced. But the programme was a way to
secure the production and the large economical subvention over a longer period. Lisbeth
Sderqvist has argued that the million program is a myth that never existed, because it
was a development that started much earlier. L. Sderqvist, Programmet som inte nns,
Arkitekten, September 2008.
56 K. Grange, Arkitekterna i byggbranschen: Om vikten av att upprtta ett kollektivt sjlvfrtroende,
Gteborg: Chalmers University of Technology, 2005, p. 54.
57 Grange, Arkitekterna i byggbranschen, p. 54.
58 M. Hedenmo and F. von Platen, Bostadspolitiken: Svensk politik fr boende, planering och
byggande under 130 r, Karlskrona: Boverket, 2007, pp. 6566.
59 M. Hedenmo and F. von Platen, Bostadspolitiken: Svensk politik fr boende, planering och
byggande under 130 r, p. 69.
60 For a discussion on architecture and resistance in Swedish architecture in the 1970s
see Christina Pech, Arkitektur och motstnd: Om skandet efter alternativ i svensk arkitektur
19701980 (Stockholm: Makadam frlag, 2011). For a discussion on the reorganization
of Swedish governmental building as a respons to the crises around 1970 see Erik Sigge,
Challenged Practice: Transformation of Swedish Governmental Building around 1970,
Alexandra Brown and Andrew Leach (eds) Proceedings of Society of Architectural Historians,
Australia and New Zeeland: 30, Open (Gold Cost, Qld.: SAHANZ, 2013), vol. 2, p.
249259.
61 L.-O. Franzn, Riv Skrholmen, Dagens Nyheter, 10 September 1968.
62 L.-O. Franzn, Riv Skrholmen, Dagens Nyheter, 10 September 1968.
63 L. Sderqvist, Att gestalt vlfrd: Frn id till byggd milj, Stockholm: Formas, 2007, footnote
536, pp. 307308.
64 As pointed out by Tom Avermaete and Dirk van der Heuvel the architects were considered
trailblazers of the welfare state that was too bureaucratic, too much one-size-ts-all, and too
reformist. T. Avermaete and D. van der Heuvel, Obama, please tax me! Architecture and
the politics of redistribution, Footprint, vol. 5, no. 2, 2011, p.2.
65 L. Gyllensten, Riv Skrholmen eller avskeda stadsplanerarna?, Dagens Nyheter, 12
September 1968. Gyllensten published two additional articles in Dagens Nyheter 24
September 1968, and 10 October 1968.
175
Figure 9.0 Part of the Long Lament residential slab block by Ren Gags and Volker Theissen, begun 1964,
photographed by Florian Urban in 2009.
9
THE MRKISCHES VIERTEL IN
WESTBERLIN
Florian Urban
The Mrkisches Viertel in West Berlin is a high-rise estate that was built in 19631974
with more than 30,000 inhabitants. It was the most conspicuous result of the West
German welfare states short-lived love-match between architecture and social policy,
and at the same time the most debated. This article will show how this showcase
development became a symbolic battleground for a struggle over the values of the
modern city. It will also show that these debates had surprisingly little to do with
the actual buildings, but much more to do with the urban situation and criticism of
top-down planning, and most of all to do with longstanding cultural traditions.
At the centre of the debate

At rst, the Mrkisches Viertel was a straightforward success. The scattered towers and
slabs, according to an article in Die Welt in 1966, formed an expressive composition
that embodies a will to art and a sensible and not only mechanistic spatial order.1
Another writer called the new neighbourhood a symbol of hope for designers in
many European countries.2 The so-called Post Bridge, a concrete building that
housed the local post office and stretched across the main road Wilhelmsruher
Damm, was compared to the great urban design tradition of the Brandenburg Gate.3
The triumph, however, was short-lived. Only three years later, in 1969, the same
buildings were scorned as a depressing mass of monotonous slabs and realization of
a dismal science-ction movie.4 Journalists also spoke of a textbook example of rigid
uniformity and sterile monotony.5
Hardly any German housing development experienced ercer debate than the
Mrkisches Viertel, and the controversy was emblematic of the rise and fall of 1960s
welfare-state architecture in West Berlin and in Germany as a whole. The Mrkisches
Viertel comprised more than 17,000 apartments in tower blocks with ten to 14
storeys (Figure 9.2) currently they house about 36,000 inhabitants.6 The architects, Georg Heinrichs, Werner Dttmann, Oswald Mathias Ungers, Ren Gags
and others, belonged to the international architectural elite of the time and were
178
Florian Urban
Figure 9.1 Mrkisches Viertel (built 19631975): high-rise slab blocks by Georg Heinrichs and Hans
Mller, photographed by Florian Urban in 2009.
generally satised with their design. One of them, the Chinese architect Chen Kuen
Lee (19152003), even spent his old age in one of the tower block ats he designed.7
Shanghai-born Lee had been living in Germany since 1931 when he was only sixteen
and in the late 1930s began to work for Hans Scharoun; the organic villas that he
designed from the 1950s onwards were widely acclaimed.8 The French architect
Gags (19212008) had become famous with his tower blocks in Bron-Parilly, which
he built in the late 1950s. He would later become mainly associated with his unloved
railway station in Lyon-Perrache (opened 1978), which became widely known as la
verrue (the wart) and suffered from an equally poor reputation as his building in the
Mrkisches Viertel.9 Ungers (19262007) had already made his reputation through
highly original late modernist school buildings such as his Niederrhein Kolleg in
Oberhausen (1953) and his student residence (now Hygiene Institute) at Cologne
University (1956) and at the time was the dean of the Faculty of Architecture at Berlin
Technical University. In Berlin he would later acquire renown for his perimeter block
residences on Ltzowplatz (1979, designed for the International Building Exhibition
or IBA, demolished in 2013). The poor reputation of his buildings in the Mrkisches
Viertel nonetheless persisted.
Like other Grosiedlungen (great settlements) in Germany the Mrkisches Viertel
was deemed a legitimate heir of the Weimar Republic tradition of publicly subsidized
housing, which was connected with great names such as Bruno Taut and Martin
Wagner. This approach found a new form in the post-war era, which was rst tested
Figure 9.2 Mrkisches Viertel, plan (Florian Urban).
The Mrkisches Viertel in WestBerlin

179
180
Florian Urban
at a small scale in the internationally acclaimed Hansaviertel (1957) tower blocks

in a park-like environment, built in connection with facilities such as schools, shops,
youth clubs, and playgrounds. In the 1950s and 1960s they were part of a new policy
which in West Germany and many other countries attempted to alleviate the housing
shortage and the widespread substandard dwellings of the working classes once and
for all. As a result, between 1949 and 1970 state-subsidized construction rms built
approximately 2.6 million ats. Initially they were built to form small developments of
no more than 200 ats. From the 1960s onwards, however, modernist Grosiedlungen
of 20,000 to 50,0000 ats became increasingly popular the high-rise block became
the paradigm for social housing. The Mrkisches Viertel was a textbook example, and
rst widely applauded.
In 1968, however, the project suddenly fell from grace. The Mrkisches Viertel
became the focal point of a debate that went far beyond architectural circles and was
felt in large parts of the population. The parameters of this debate on the one hand
a protective welfare state that claimed to act in the best interest of its citizens, and on
the other hand a citizenry that increasingly perceived these policies as inefficient or
intrusive were essentially the same as in other countries and led to similar discrediting
of modernist housing schemes. They accounted for the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe
homes in St Louis (1972) in the same way as for the discontinuation of the French
zones durbanisation prioritaire (ZUP) programme, (1973), the British Comprehensive
Development Areas (CDA, 1970s), or even the covert criticism of the monotonous
slabs in East Germany and other socialist countries.
A look at the details shows, however, that despite the numerous similarities in
what Christopher Klemek termed the transatlantic collapse of urban renewal, local
differences seem to have been decisive in the shaping of future policy towards the
tower blocks and their reputation to date.10 In all those countries there were struggles
between national government, municipal authorities, builders, residents, activist
groups and to a certain extent private business. But the inuence of the various
actors turned out to be very different. It also seems that the parameters of policy and
architecture played out in highly localized ways because they were conditioned by
numerous cultural specicities.
A sudden swing in public opinion

The sudden swing in public opinion started with a celebration of the citys urban
renewal programme, the fth Bauwochen (Building Fair) in 1968. The city authorities
decided to complement the official programme with an exhibit in which architecture
students were asked to present their visions of a better Berlin. The city subsidized
the show Diagnosis of construction in West Berlin with a grant of 18,000 deutschmarks (a considerable amount of money, equalling approximately fteen years of
rent payments for a two-bedroom at at the time) and in return received merciless
criticism of its own construction policy.11 The Mrkisches Viertel was presented as a
textbook example of modernist hubris that entailed both ugly architecture and bad
planning. The associations can be read from the swastika aesthetics of the exhibits
poster (Figure 9.3). Berlins government, the building companies and speculators
were accused of forming a syndicate exerting totalitarian rule over the city.
Figure 9.3 West Berlin in the grip of speculators poster shown at the Anti-Building-Fair organized
by architecture students at Berlin Technical University in September 1968. The swastika is constituted by
architects, speculators, senate (West Berlin government) and (charitable city-owned) housing associations.
The exhibit was equally provocative. In a clever juxtaposition the students

unmasked the vanity of designers intentions by contrasting their statements with those
of the inhabitants. Next to a picture of Ren Gagss residential slab, which witty
critics later gave the epithet Der Lange Jammer (The Long Lament) for its gigantic size
and repetitiveness (Figure 9.4), were placed the following captions:
The form of the outside facilities and the garden design follows the characteristic constructive intentions and supports them. The two complexes penetrate
each other and there is no primacy of one design factor over the other in the
hierarchy of values.
architects Ren Gags and Volker Theissen
Approaching the building is every time a blow in the face. It feels like being
clobbered over the head, it all looks like a barracks, these endless rows, there is
no way to be nice to each other in such an environment.
resident12
Some of the organizers had previously formed the group Aktion 507 (named after
the number of the university room where they met) and in 1968 published a wellresearched Manifest Die ffentliche Ermordung einer Stadt (Manifesto The public murder
of a city) in which they attacked the local authoritys housing policy. Based on a radical
Marxist analysis and a strong prejudice against private landownership, the authors
condemned any type of housing subsidies. In their eyes, housing subsidies were objectionable, because they increased demand, boosted real estate prices, and eventually
beneted a minority of property owners at the expense of a majority of tenants.13
The manifestos signatories included a number of people in their early thirties, who a
decade later would play important roles in Berlins architectural scene. None of them
181
182
Florian Urban
Figure 9.4 The Long Lament residential tower by Ren Gags and Volker Theissen, begun 1964,
Figure 9.5 Buildings at the Mrkisches Viertel by Oswald Mathias Ungers, begun 1964, photographed
by Florian Urban in 2009.
would later express similarly radical positions on landownership and private prot.
These included the future IBA director Josef Kleihues (19332004), architects Jrgen
Sawade (born 1937), and Hinrich Baller (born 1936) and future editor-in-chief of
the journal, ArchPlus, Nikolaus Kuhnert (born 1937). Among the signatories were
four of the architects of the Mrkisches Viertel contributors to the very policy that
the manifestos authors so vigorously condemned: Hasso Schreck, the designer of
the Thomas Mann secondary school and the multi-purpose hall in the Mrkisches
Viertel, Finn Bartels (born 1933), the designer of a nursery, Gnter Plessow (born
1934), the architect of a primary school and community centre, and Volker Theissen
(19342000), a collaborator on Ren Gagss Long Lament.14
The criticism of the students and their supporters would probably not have had
such an enormous impact had it not been taken up by Germanys most eminent news
magazine Der Spiegel. Left-leaning and generally supportive of the very welfare-state
policies that had yielded the Mrkisches Viertel, the magazine nonetheless saw the
time as right for an attack on an increasingly unpopular urban form. In a six-page
article in September 1968 the Mrkisches Viertel was condemned as the bleakest
product of concrete architecture and called a grey hell!15 Five months later, in
February 1969, Der Spiegel followed this up with a cover-story, quoting frustrated
inhabitants: I feel like Im in a prison camp, I will die in this monotony and Every
night when I come home I curse the day we moved into these barracks.16 The
polemic spread like wildre, and soon the name of the Mrkisches Viertel resounded
throughout the land as the place where already four-year-olds are condemned to
spend their future lives as unskilled labourers and where housewives, apparently for
no reason, become alcoholics.17
How did one of the most celebrated architectural projects become so abhorred?
How did the epochal project of housing the poor come to be perceived as a policy of
terror? The fall from grace of the Mrkisches Viertel, as well as much of Germanys
welfare-state housing, had little to do with the architectural form of the buildings, but
more with the schemes urban qualities, even more with demolition and displacement
as side effects of bureaucratic top-down planning, and a lot to do with a symbolic
economy of images and attributions for which the architects were barely responsible.
The battle over the Mrkisches Viertel came with a pre-history; although a surprise
to the architects, the clash did not come like a bolt from the blue. Since the early
1960s, Germanys intellectuals had attacked the destructive aspects of urban modernization. Notable were the publication of psychologist Alexander Mitscherlichs Die
Unwirtlichkeit unserer Stdte (The Inhospitability of our Cities, 1965) and of journalist Wolf
Jobst Siedlers Die gemordete Stadt (The Murdered City, 1964) as well as the German
edition of Jane Jacobss Death and Life of Great American Cities (1963) only two years
after its rst publication in English. Similar anti-urban-renewal protest had been
voiced in France and the U.S. since the late 1950s, and West Germany was following
suit.
Next to the indictment of inhospitable modern space there was a new culture of
protest. The 1968 generation rebelled against those authorities which their parents,
who were educated under the Nazi regime, and grandparents, who were educated
under the Wilhelmine Empire, had accepted. Decisions by urban planners and
other experts, even those who claimed to promote the public good, were no longer
183
184
Florian Urban
accepted as gospel. Berlins tenants showed an increasing awareness of citizens rights

and capabilities.
That it was the Mrkisches Viertel that sparked the debate, however, was largely
coincidental. Other Grosiedlungen (great settlements) suffered from a diminishing
reputation in the 1960s and 1970s but received far less media attention than the
Mrkisches Viertel. These included the other two West Berlin Grosiedlungen,
Falkenhagener Feld (begun 1962, designed by Hans Stefan) and Gropiusstadt (1962
1975, Walter Gropius, Wils Ebert and others), and similar developments all over
West Germany which have a simlar size to the Mrkisches Viertel. These include
Frankfurt-Nordwestadt (19631968, Walter Schwagenscheidt and Tassilo Sittmann,
25,000 inhabitants), Cologne-Chorweiler (1960s, Gottfried Bhm and others, 20,000
inhabitants), Hamburg-Mmmelmannsberg (19701980, 19,000 inhabitants) and
Munich-Neuperlach (19631978, Bernt Lauter and others, 50,000 inhabitants).
The welfare state as the bogeyman

Particularly interesting are the political dividing lines. The most vociferous debates
took place not between leftists and conservatives but between different factions of
the left. The college students who demanded more participation stood in radical
opposition to the social-democratic local authority. This was evident in the swastika
Figure 9.6 Residential towers on Senftenberger Ring at the Mrkisches Viertel by Chen Kuen Lee (left
and right in the foreground) and by Heinz Schudnagies (middle in the background), all begun 1964,
poster the welfare state was the bogeyman. Its evil allies were the large building
companies (which had close links to the labour unions and the Social Democratic
Party), private speculators, and, somewhat surprisingly, (modernist) architects. At
the same time the students were supported by bourgeois traditionalists such as Wolf
Jobst Siedler, who decried the destruction of the old city and equally opposed chopdown urban renewal and tower block construction. In the battle over the Mrkisches
Viertel, neoliberal positions went largely unheard, and calls for greater involvement
of the market, which would dominate the debate two decades later, were conspicuously absent.
These unexpected coalitions at least from a contemporary point of view can be
explained by the socio-political context. Although prepared by left-leaning politicians,
West Berlins post-war construction policy was not rst and foremost seen as a leftist
project, but to a certain extent stood beyond partisanship. All over Germany welfare
state housing was supported by voters of all political parties. Most large cities had
suffered immense destruction during the Second World War. West Germany alone
had to cope with the inux of eight million ethnic German refugees from the areas
ceded to Poland and the Soviet Union (16.5 per cent of the population in the early
1950s),18 as well as several million migrants from the German Democratic Republic.
The housing shortage was thus acute for all social groups and not a problem of only
the working class. This is reected by the fact that in the early 1950s almost 70 per
cent of the West German population, both working and middle class, was considered
needy enough to qualify for state-subsidized housing.19
This blurring of traditional alignments was reected in press coverage. Many of the
positive accounts of the housing projects in the mid-1960s appeared in the newspapers
Die Welt and BZ, which were owned by the conservative publishing company Axel
Springer. Conversely, Der Spiegel, which generally supported the Social Democrats,
had no qualms in ring one broadside after the other at the governments most
conspicuous housing project.
Fervent criticism also came from radical leftists. One of the most determined critics
was Ulrike Meinhof (19341976), a journalist and social activist in the Mrkisches
Viertel who a few years later famously became a protagonist of the terrorist group
Red Army Faction. In Vorluges Strategie-Papier Mrkisches Viertel (Preliminary
Strategy Paper, Mrkisches Viertel, ca. 1968) Meinhof depicted the main protagonists
in the battle over the Mrkisches Viertel as two factions of the Left: one the workingclass inhabitants; the other, the state-operated landowner and developer Gesellschaft
fr Sozialen Wohnungsbau (GESOBAU, Corporation for Social Housing) which was
closely tied to the Social Democratic Party.20 She and her colleagues did not question
state planning; rather, they attacked moderate state officials for their insufficient
pursuit of the tenants real needs. In line with Marxist theory they interpreted the
conditions in West Berlin as a struggle between proletarians and big capital aligned
with the dominant political groups only that big capital was now embodied by the
large housing companies such as GESOBAU.
What about the tenants? Their views remained ambiguous. They were unhappy
about infrastructural deciencies in the area, such as the lack of shops, unnished
park spaces, long bus rides, etc. But at the same time they valued the advantages that
the modern, self-contained ats offered compared to the substandard tenements in
185
186
Florian Urban
which they had lived before. They often felt uneasy about newspaper reports that
depicted them as criminals, or, at best, as helpless victims of inhuman architects.21
Their concern was less with concrete walls and lack of amenities than with the high
rent.22 In November 1970, Der Spiegel summarized their problem with painful clarity:
Many come from cellars, garden plot sheds, and tenement ats that were cold,
damp, dark, or sometimes fairly well preserved. They used to pay 80 marks
per month. Now they pay 300 [The Mrkisches Viertel] houses people who
work hard every day and nonetheless are unable to afford the lifestyle that our
society demands from them. They know it as well and it makes them suffer.23
Despite subsidies and rent control the owner, GESOBAU, was by 1970 owed half
a million marks in outstanding rent payments, and regularly evicted families into
homeless shelters.24 It seems that even in one of Europes richest countries Social
Democratic policy was unable to offer modern standards at a price that the working
classes could actually pay.
A non-architectural controversy
Against this wider background it is not surprising that the controversy was largely
non-architectural. Hardly any journalists or commentators at the time talked about
the formal and programmatic features of the development. Those were the aspects that
in the eyes of the designers were to contribute to a better society. The Mrkisches
Viertel was a typical modernist compound based on the concept of the self-sufficient
neighbourhood unit propagated by pre-war theorists such as Clarence Perry, Moisei
Ginzburg or Le Corbusier. Imbued by a belief in progress and modernization, it was
based on strict top-down planning, which aimed to meet the scientically calculated
needs of a dened population. At the same time, it was the outcome of a particular
version of modernism. In the 1950s new housing had been mostly built in small
compounds of 34 storey buildings, a concept called the structured and dispersed
city after the famous 1957 book by Gderitz, Rainer and Hoffmann.25 But in the
1960s this changed and a new paradigm emerged, urbanity through density,26 which
yielded large developments of mass-produced tower blocks. These developments
included facilities for all basic features of life, including shops, crches, playgrounds,
schools, youth club, football pitches, ice rink, post office and nursing home, with most
of the services provided by the city. In this respect the Mrkisches Viertel belonged to
a paternalistic welfare state that provided for the needs of its citizens. Although architects and politicians at the time would have strongly denied it, the approach was quite
similar to the large estates of Plattenbauten (slab buildings) that were built in East Berlin
at the time, and which also shared many formal characteristics with the Mrkisches
Viertel: for the German Democratic Republic, like other socialist countries, followed
the most comprehensive version of welfare policy, which aimed at providing for all
basic needs, including housing, even though the results frequently fell short of the
rulers pretensions.
The architects of the Mrkisches Viertel also had lofty ambitions. Ironically, they
had consciously attempted to avoid some of the key features they were later blamed
for. They rejected continuous rows of houses and repetitive building types to counter
visual monotony. They separated car and pedestrian traffic, but unlike other planned
neighbourhoods at the time they put a strong focus on public transport. They created
sophisticated landscaping to avoid the appearance of a concrete jungle. They took
great pains in designing youth clubs, playgrounds, sports facilities and market squares
to foster community life.
A considerable amount of space was dedicated to parks and articial lakes, such as
the Segelluchbecken, which were easy to build on the boggy ground. The idea of the
interior garden loomed large, and could be experienced in Shadrach Woods buildings
in the same way as in Oswald Mathias Ungerss and Georg Heinrichss (Figure 9.8).
The extended backyards, where the inhabitants were unaffected by traffic, were
aimed at both children and adults and were often combined with playgrounds.
Building designs specically aimed to counter the monotony of the tenements.
Colourful facades as in Karl Fleigs Papageiensiedlung (Parrot Scheme) and semi-circular
or jagged plans as in Karl Schudnagiess blocks were an explicit counter-proposal
to the boring street blocks of Berlins nineteenth-century neighbourhoods. The
modernist promise of light and air was also answered by the abundance of balconies.
Ren Gagss Long Lament building took advantage of a strict north-south division
to afford the inhabitants cool, north-facing kitchens and sunny, south-facing living
rooms and balconies. Ungerss point blocks, otherwise unspectacular, were nonetheless
built on sophisticated plans that gave all rooms sufficient daylight while at the same
time sheltering balconies from the neighbours views (Figure 9.5). If any of the
criticism at an architectural level was justied, it was about substandard workmanship
rather than the design per se.
The fact that the designers attempted to improve functionalist planning was not
lost on the rst reviewers. One journalist commended the rejection of the modernist
dormitory town27 and applauded the use of felicitous stylistic devices from pre-war
architecture such as rounded corners and corner windows, which mitigate the dictatorship of the right angle, one of the characteristic evils of post-war architecture.28
Observers also commended the meaningful overall composition in which the
different architectural volumes were combined to form a harmonic built landscape.
Descriptions such as plastic strength29 and inventive structuring of faades30 echo
the interest in city image and city perception that followed the publication of Kevin
Lynchs 1960 classic The Image of the City in 1960, translated into German in 1968
amid growing concerns about the city as a meaningful and readable environment.31
Once public opinion turned against the Mrkisches Viertel, however, these
architectural qualities became insignicant. Architectural form was either ignored
or grossly misrepresented. For example, an article in Die Welt in December 1968
compared the Mrkisches Viertel not only to the high-rises in the black neighbourhoods of Manhattan but also to the Stalinallee in East Berlin; given that the
latter is composed of ornamented, neo-classical buildings along a central boulevard,
it has nothing in common with the tower blocks of the Mrkisches Viertel, other
than that both were disliked by West German critics.32 Articles that compared the
Mrkisches Viertel to other high-rise (but architecturally much lower quality) schemes
such as the Gropiusstadt on West Berlins southern periphery built at the same time,
made no distinction between the architectural quality of the two.33
187
188
Florian Urban
The fevered criticism of inadequate and incomplete facilities at the Mrkisches

Viertel was unjustied in the sense that nurseries, transit lines and shops were under
construction at the time but had simply not been completed.34 Some allegations were
factually incorrect, for example, the charge that there were no schools, no pubs,
no cinemas planned or that there is no owering tree or bush.35 Particularly the
unnished landscaping, which resulted in a lack of playgrounds and a visual ubiquity
of concrete, was interpreted as a programmatic defect and savoured by contemporary
photographers. In light of such inammatory reporting the attribute new slum seems
to be a clear misrepresentation. For all its shortcomings the Mrkisches Viertel was
still well integrated and not impoverished, at least compared to high-rise projects in
British, French, or American cities at the time.
Being blamed for generating precisely the kind of social distress that they had
sought to remove was particularly hurtful for the architects. They mostly cherished
leftist ideas, they conceived modernist architecture as a means for social betterment,
and they thought of themselves as the good guys. For example, in 1963 Oswald
Mathias Ungers had railed against the dictatorship of self-proclaimed experts and their
obsession with function.36 Only seven years later he found himself being targeted
as precisely one of these de-humanizing functionalists. In an article entitled Life
like in an anthill children sat in refuse bins against the background of his high-rise
towers.37 This was a blow from which he did not recover for 15 years, and which
did not particularly encourage his desire to return to Germany after having accepted
a position at Cornell University in 1967.38 Ungers eventually returned to Berlin in
1979 for the International Building Exhibit (IBA), which would mark the rejection
of modernist urban design and a return to small-scale block perimeter buildings for
the city centre.
Forced resettlement and charity under attack

The rejection of the Mrkisches Viertel had a lot to do with the urban redevelopment
policy to which it was connected. In 1963 the West Berlin government passed
the First Urban Renewal Programme, initiating a strategy that was soon dubbed
Kahlschlagsanierung (total chop-down remodelling) by its critics. The programme
aimed at fullling the modernist promise by demolishing the overcrowded workingclass homes and relocating the inhabitants to modern ats on the periphery.
Approximately 56,000 dwelling units in the inner-city districts of Neuklln,
Kreuzberg, Schneberg, Tiergarten and Wedding were slated for demolition; 140,000
West Berliners ten per cent of the population were to be resettled. In the long run
the city was to be ridded of its late-nineteenth-century tenements.
This urban renewal programme was prepared and propagated by the Social
Democratic Party (SPD), which in elections in West Berlin regularly received the
majority of the votes and in 1963, under the charismatic mayor Willy Brandt (later
West German chancellor and Nobel Peace Prize winner), secured 63 per cent, its
all-time high. Given these numbers it is hard to say that the policy was debated.
Rather, it seems that the working-class Berliners who were affected by the relocation
the great majority were SPD voters initially accepted their lot pragmatically as
a price for modernization. In the early phase of the Urban Renewal Programme
there is little evidence of protest or reluctance to leave the tenements, but widespread
obedience towards the municipal authorities who were trusted to act in the tenants
best interest.39
Soon, however, it dawned on the relocated population that their new homes
in the outskirts did not mean only a quiet environment but also isolation and long
commutes, and, most importantly, signicantly higher rents. They realized that
relocation brought about the disruption of social structures that had sometimes
been in place for three generations. They saw repetitive forms, such as in the Long
Lament building, as monotonous.40 They perceived ample park spaces as dangerous
at night, and the clear designation of traffic, residential, and recreational spaces Play
Forbidden signs abounded as oppressive.
Another disruptive aspect was not mentioned at the time and is largely forgotten
today. The Mrkisches Viertel was built on an area of allotments. Approximately
10,000 people had (mostly illegally) used these plots as permanent dwellings and lived
in partially self-built huts. Nearly all of them were evicted during the 1960s some
found new homes in the towers.41 Their struggle to keep their homes was silenced by
the broadly shared enthusiasm for modern housing.
From a contemporary point of view some of the criticism at a policy level seems
misdirected, since leftist politicians were accused of promoting precisely what they had
sought to prevent. When radical protesters equated the large housing companies with
big capital in the Marxist sense they red a broadside against what social democrats
had deemed the great achievement of the welfare state: the end of rent speculation
through a transfer of the housing market into public authorities.
The GESOBAU was a typical example of the West German model of nancing
social housing through gemeinntzige Wohnungsbaugesellschaften (charitable housing
companies). The rm had been incorporated in 1949. The majority of its shares
were owned by the local authority, which also organized the site planning.
GESOBAU, like scores of similar housing companies at the time, was registered as a
charitable organization and thus proted from ample tax advantages. The charitable
status also gave the local authority the right to select the tenants and impose rent
control. This rather substantial restriction of ownership rights did not cause any
debate at the time. Despite being a nominally capitalist country, Germany has not
had a free housing market since 1918. Under the Weimar Republic as well as under
the Nazi regime and the Federal Republic of Germany, state authorities retained the
right of tenant allocation for both public and private properties. Until 1968, when
the respective regulations were lifted in West Germany, all rental contracts had to
be approved by the municipal Wohnungsmter (housing offices), although since 1953
private owners were usually no longer forced to accept tenants whom they had not
selected themselves.42
The charitable housing companies became major actors in West Germanys big
cities and inuential players in the building industry. Their position of power made
them prone to irregularities, but only in exceptional cases did corruption reach
the level of the Hamburg-based company Neue Heimat, which was owned by the
Organization of Labour Unions, and which in 1982 went into administration after
its board members had been accused of having embezzled millions of marks.43 The
GESOBAU was never involved in such scandals. Judged by their original intentions
189
190
Florian Urban
most charitable housing companies operated rather successfully. They provided large
numbers of ats with modern standards and let them at rents, which although apparently challenging for tenants, were restricted.
Persistent cultural images

The negative image of the Mrkisches Viertel was surprisingly similar in conservative
and leftist papers. The media reaction can be summarized as follows: There was
comparably little attention to architectural features. There was considerable attention
to the attitudes that underlay architectural practice, such as top-down decision making
and expert planning. There was much criticism of urban features, such as peripheral
location and unnished facilities. Most importantly, there was a socio-political
dynamic unrelated to architecture but projected upon it.
One of the distinctive characteristics of the German debate was the strongly-felt
dichotomy between old and new, as embodied by the opposition between tower blocks
and tenements. The Mrkisches Viertel was a showcase project for a housing policy
directed against the city of the past that was connected to the political oppression of
the Wilhelmine Empire and the Nazi regime and to the squalor and overcrowding of
the industrial quarters.44 In Berlin, as in other large German cities, most old neighbourhoods were composed primarily of the despised Mietskasernen (rental barracks)
Figure 9.7 Late-nineteenth-century tenement or Mietskaserne (rental barracks) on Schnieer Strae,

Prenzlauer Berg. The photograph shows a building that was renovated in the 1990s. Photographed by
Florian Urban in 2006.
late-nineteenth-century tenements of ve-storeys, with ornamental stucco faades,

and courtyards with barns and workshops in the inner parts of the block (Figure 9.7).
Despite wartime destruction, the tenements still comprised more than two thirds of
Berlins urban fabric.45 They epitomized the downside of the citys early industrial
past. Planners, designers and large parts of the population considered them an architectural cause of social and psychological misery.46
From the beginning, the tenets of modernist architecture, such as light, air, and
the absence of ornamentation, were derived from the rejection of the tenement type,
particularly the gloomy backyard.47 Before 1970, tenement neighbourhoods were
deemed unhealthy, because of their overcrowded apartments and their insufficient
sanitary facilities, monotonous because of their standardized height and repetitive
stucco ornaments, and as chaotic because of their backyards and the mixture of
residential and commercial spaces.
The media image of the Mrkisches Viertel in 1968, ironically, reproduced the
undercurrent of physical determinism inherent in the texts of modernisms most
fervent advocates. As in earlier decades, architecture was blamed for causing social
conditions, only now the values were reversed. Now the Mrkisches Viertel was called
unhealthy because of its concrete facades and paved yards, monotonous because of
its repetitive geometry and unadorned facades, and chaotic because of its lack of a
recognizable block structure.
Journalists also scorned the towers as a modernist backyard and the outcome of
greedy speculators.48 The latter is particularly bizarre. Freewheeling real estate speculation in the nineteenth century had been the standard explanation for the unhealthy
structure of Berlins tenements. In 1960s West Berlin it was a clear misinterpretation
of the current conditions: state control over matters of construction was stronger than
at any time before, and proteers whether charitable housing companies or private
owners receiving subsidies for tenement demolition gained from state commissions
rather than from speculation on market conditions. The use of these terms therefore
conrms the persistence of nineteenth century images and ways of thinking.
The protests against the Mrkisches Viertel had a noticeable effect on Germanys
construction policy. Many of the great settlements had long been struggling with
administrative difficulties. From the early 1970s, such developments were no longer
planned and those already under construction were downscaled. Also, the Mrkisches
Viertel, which originally had been planned for 50,000 inhabitants, stopped at
approximately 30,000. At the same time, the chopdown policy was slowly revised.
In the 1970s tenement demolitions and forced relocations decreased. In 1974 West
Berlins Second Urban Renewal Programme was passed. Instead of total chopdown
the principle was now coring, with only the buildings in the inner part of the
tenement blocks to be demolished; the buildings on the block perimeter, which in
the nineteenth century had been designed for wealthier tenants than those in the
backyards, were now to be renovated. Hence the street block system and the historic
aspect of the neighbourhood were preserved.49 However, it took until 1982 before
the Berlin government eventually passed the Principles of Careful Urban Renewal,
outlawing tenement demolition. Now conservation and modernization of nineteenthcentury residences became the principles of municipal policy, and tenements became
an increasingly desired building type.
191
192
Florian Urban
Also the storm against the Mrkisches Viertel slowly waned. Shops, schools and
recreational facilities were completed, and the growing trees in the park spaces made
the concrete walls less visible. Leaking roofs and decient insulation were xed in the
early 1980s and the inhabitants made their peace with the new environment. Also
journalists began to write more and more positively about them.50 They applauded
the rich street life, the many playgrounds and the civic spirit the latter, ironically,
enhanced by the common ght for renovation of the crumbling walls and roofs.51
In statistical terms, the Mrkisches Viertel was anything but a ghetto. The inhabitants (approximately 36,000 by the early 2000s) belonged to Berlins poorer strata, but
the unemployed and marginalized were in the minority. According to a 1985 survey,
only 13 per cent of the inhabitants were on social welfare.52 By 2004, the number had
only marginally risen to 14.5 per cent (Berlin average: 8.1 per cent).53 The number
of unemployed was high at 17 per cent, but not much higher than the Berlin average
of 13 per cent.54 The number of immigrants was quite low. In 2006 the percentage
of residents with a non-German passport stood at 9.3 per cent (2.5 per cent of the
inhabitants were Turkish). This was low compared to the Berlin average of 13.8 per
cent (3.6 per cent Turkish), and to the 39.5 per cent in one portion of the Kreuzberg
district in Berlins inner city (26.5 per cent Turkish).55 According to statistics, most
inhabitants were content with their neighbourhood. A survey from the 1980s showed
that 69 per cent were pleased or very pleased with their residential situation, and 85
per cent would like to stay in the neighbourhood.56 In retrospect, the negative media
response of the late 1960s was a gross misrepresentation.
An ambivalent heritage
Today poverty and deprivation receive far less media attention than in the 1970s.
Ironically, however, the gap between the rich and poor is much wider and keeps
widening. The housing situation is more and more critical for societys lower strata
since in 1988 the West German state institutions gradually began to retreat from
the housing market.57 In 1990, the collapse of the East German regime ended state
responsibility for housing in the East as well. Since that time, the amount of statesubsidized and rent-controlled units has been shrinking.
Along with the discontinuation of social housing programmes, German municipalities increasingly privatize their housing stock. The new policy is not related
to shortcomings in the buildings or their maintenance. City-owned buildings are
generally well kept and much sought after. But local authorities are often mired in
debt, and elected officials have discovered that selling the buildings is a convenient way
to generate short-term income during their term in office. In the years between 2000
and 2006, for example, the city of Berlin sold 100,000 city-owned ats to private
investors such as Cerberus or Oaktree.58 The consequences have been rent increases
and lower levels of maintenance for the cheaper ats. The Mrkisches Viertel so far
has been largely spared from this trend and is still mainly owned by the municipal
company GESOBAU. In this respect, it is a safe haven for Berliners who otherwise
would be subject to soaring rents.
The Mrkisches Viertel constitutes an ambivalent heritage. On the one hand it
stands for the largely successful enterprise of overcoming the housing shortage and
Figure 9.8 Housing at the Mrkisches Viertel by Shadrach Woods with an interior garden, photographed
by Florian Urban in 2009.
providing modern amenities for large parts of the population. On the other hand it
came to symbolize the disenfranchisement connected with top-down-planning and
forced relocation, disrespect for the existing city, and the deciencies of cheaply built
one-size-ts-all architecture.
The symbolic battle over the Mrkisches Viertel was the result of a strange
coalition. Radical students of the 1968 generation sided with bourgeois traditionalists against an establishment of Social Democratic politicians. What was at stake
was nothing less than the modernist promise of development and progress. While
the disciples of the new modernist city were increasingly perceived as pretentious
and oppressive, some of their values were upheld even by their strongest critics.
These included strong state intervention and the goal of equal living standards. This
is particularly noteworthy if one compares the row over the Mrkisches Viertel with
later debates. In 1968, housing activists denounced state officials as evildoers who
bulldozed beautiful tenements and locked their inhabitants into concrete ghettos but
they did not question the regulation of the housing market by local authorities and
other state institutions. Forty years later left-leaning protesters cry for more state intervention to stave off soaring rents connected with increasing privatization, and they
call for rent-controlled and well-kept housing that is, precisely the qualities that the
Mrkisches Viertel has to offer.
The analysis of the media rage in the 1960s shows that the criticism was much
more about policy, site layout, amenities, and location within the city than about
architecture. Architectural form had comparably little inuence. Even at the height of
the controversy critics frequently lauded design aspects. The Mrkisches Viertel was
also largely successful with regard to the original goals of building a neighbourhood
193
194
Florian Urban
where otherwise underprivileged people could live in comparatively good conditions.

The Mrkisches Viertel only failed with regard to its implementation. The inated
municipal bureaucracy was inefficient in meeting the needs of their constituency;
citizens were regarded as numbers rather than partners and the new urban paradigm
was built on the large-scale destruction of the inner city.
Architects and politicians also underestimated the power of cultural images and
conceptions. Negative views in the late 1960s were conditioned by largely unchanged
conventions of preceding decades. These included the widely held conviction that
a city-dwellers life was determined by the physical characteristics of his or her
residence, as well as the perception of nineteenth-century tenements as chaotic,
monotonous, and unhealthy. The new architecture became a screen on which such
long-lasting patterns were projected. The Mrkisches Viertel is therefore as much a
monument to the ambivalent success of welfare state policy as it is to the architects
limited inuence on public opinion.
Notes
All translations by the author.
1 A. Teut, Huldigung an die stdtebauliche Tradition, Die Welt, 8 November 1966, p. 13.
2 Hoffnungsschimmer fr die Stdtebauer in halb Europa, BZ (West Berlin), 19 October
1967.
3 Teut, Huldigung an die stdtebauliche Tradition, p. 13.
4 Der Tagesspiegel, 3 October 1969, quoted in A. Wilde, Das Mrkische Viertel, West Berlin:
Nicolai, 1989, p. 127.
5 Frankfurter Rundschau, 20 January 1969.
6 2006 statistical data of the Berlin government, available online at www.stadtentwicklung.berlin.
de/planen/basisdaten_stadtentwicklung/monitoring/de/2006/index.shtml (accessed May 2013).
7 S. Strauss, Zwei Zimmer im 14. Stock, Berliner Zeitung 22 January 2003.
8 G. Khlert, Organische Architektur von Chen Kuen Lee, Architektur und Wohnen 5
(2012).
9 G. Allix, Ren Gags [obituary] Le monde, 17 February 2008.
10 For a comparative history of urban renewal approaches see C. Klemek, The Transatlantic
Collapse of Urban Renewal, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.
11 Slums verschoben, Der Spiegel 22 n. 37, 9 September 1968, pp. 134138. See also T.
Schrder, Diagnosen zur Architektur [summary of the exhibit], ArchPlus (West Berlin) 1
n. 3 (1968), pp. 6364.
12 H. Lange, I. Rakowitz, C. Rath, H. Reidemeister, H. Rickmann and I. Schwester, eds.,
Wohnste sozial, haste die Qual jetzt reden wir Bewohner des Mrkischen Viertels, Reinbek:
Rowohlt, 1975, pp. 3233.
13 Aktion 507 [no individual authors specied], Manifest, West Berlin: Rump, 1968,
15. The manifesto is also available online at http://issuu.com/textraum/docs/aktion_507manifest?e=7005999/2871121 (accessed May 2013). See also T. Schrder, Aus der Arbeit
der Aktion 507, ArchPlus 1 n. 5 (1968), pp. 7778.
14 Aktion 507, Manifest, p. 2.
15 Slums verschoben, Der Spiegel 22 n. 37, 9 September 1968, p. 138.
16 Es brckelt, Der Spiegel n. 6, 3 February 1969, 38.
17 Frankfurter Rundschau, 20 January 1969, Allgemeines Deutsches Sonntagsblatt, 22 June 1969,
Stuttgarter Zeitung, 16 May 1970, all quoted in Wilde, Das Mrkische Viertel, p. 127.
18 Statistisches Bundesamt, ed., Statistisches Taschenbuch ber die Heimatvertriebenen in der
Bundesrepublik Deutschland und West-Berlin, Wiesbaden: Statistisches Bundesamt, 1953, and
G. Reichling, Die deutschen Vertriebenen in Zahlen, Bonn: Kulturstiftung der deutschen
Vertriebenen, 1986.
19 G. Wagner, Sozialstaat gegen Wohnungsnot, Paderborn: Schningh, 1995, p. 33.
20 U. Meinhof, Vorluges Strategie-Papier Mrkisches Viertel, reprinted in Lange et al.,

Wohnste sozial, p. 95.
21 Ibid. p. 130.
22 Ibid., 114115. See also H. Bodenschatz, Platz frei fr das neue Berlin!, West Berlin: Transit,
1987, 246.
23 H. Funke, Da hilft nur noch Dynamit, Der Spiegel 24 n. 45, 2 November 1970, p.233.
24 Ibid.
25 J. Gderitz, R. Rainer and H. Hoffmann, Die gegliederte und aufgelockerte Stadt, Tbingen:
Wasmuth, 1957 [The structured and dispersed city].
26 E. Salin, Urbanitt, in Deutscher Stdtetag, ed., Vortrge, Aussprachen und Ergebnisse der 11.
Hauptversammlung des Deutschen Stdtetages, Augsburg: Kohlhammer, 1960; or H. P. Bahrdt,
Die moderne Grostadt, Hamburg: Wegner, 1961.
27 Leo [abbreviation], Der Abend (West Berlin) October 31, 1967 reprinted in Presse und
Informationsamt des Landes Berlin, ed., Das Mrkische Viertel, West Berlin: Presse- und
Informationsamt des Landes Berlin, 1971, p. 53.
28 Ibid.
29 E. Schulz, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 13 January 1968.
30 Stuttgarter Nachrichten, 11 November 1965.
31 K. Lynch, The Image of the City, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1960 translated as Das Bild
der Stadt, Gtersloh: Bertelsmann, 1968.
32 Die Welt, 22 December 1968.
33 H. Funke, Da hilft nur noch Dynamit, Der Spiegel 24, n. 45, 2 November 1970, p.233.
34 W. Kinnigkeit, Mit den Husern wuchs die Kritik, Sddeutsche Zeitung, 2 November 1974.
35 C. Menzel, Allgemeines Deutsches Sonntagsblatt, 22 June 1969.
36 O. M. Ungers, Inaugural lecture as a professor at Berlin Technical University, 1963,
reprinted in E. Mhlthaler, ed., Lernen von Oswald Mathias Ungers, Berlin: Technische
Universitt Berlin, 2006, p. 31.
37 K. Wolber, Leben wie im Ameisenhaufen, Stern (Hamburg) 23 n. 3, 19 July 1970,
pp.6277.
38 J. Cepl, Oswald Mathias Ungers: eine intellektuelle Biographie, Cologne: Knig, 2007, p.248.
39 This is evidenced by the obedient style in which tenants who were subject to forced
relocation wrote to municipal authorities. See quotations in J. F. Geist and K. Krvers, Das
Berliner Mietshaus, vol. 3, 19451989, Munich: Prestel, 1989, pp.585595.
40 G. Ullmann, Kritischer Zwischenbericht ber das Mrkische Viertel, Sddeutsche Zeitung,
10 June 1970.
41 B. Hildebrand and K. Schlickeiser, Abschied von der Laube, West Berlin: Grokopf, 1990.
42 A. Grajek, Das Ende der Wohnraumbewirtschaftung und der bergang zum Weien
Kreis, Kommunalpolitische Beitrge 6 n. II/29, 13 December 1968.
43 See, for example, Das Geld lag auf dem Acker Der Spiegel 20 (17 May 1982), 3747.
44 See J. Dobberke, Mrkisches Viertel, Star der Bauwochen, Berliner Leben n. 9 (1966), Welt
am Sonntag, 3 July 1966, Die Welt, 30 August 1966, Berliner Morgenpost, 30 August 1966,
and Wilde, Das Mrkische Viertel, p. 126. For an account of the bad reputation of Berlins
tenements see Bodenschatz, Platz frei fr das Neue Berlin!
45 G. Peters, Gesamtberliner Stadtentwicklung, Berlin: Hochschule der Knste, 1992, p. 22.
46 H. B. Reichow, Organische Stadtbaukunst, Braunschweig: Westermann, 194, pp.355.
47 The negative image of the backyard as a cancer is summarized in H. Bodenschatz,
Krebsgeschwr Hinterhof , Bauwelt 79 (March 1988), pp. 506513. A very late example
for the trope of the deceptive stucco ornament can be found in the East German magazine
Architektur der DDR: D. Krause, U. Klasen and W. Penzel, Rekonstruktion im Stil der
Jahrhundertwende. Husemannstrae in Berlin, Architektur der DDR (East Berlin) n. 10,
1987, pp. 1417. For the new view on the backyard in East Berlin, see, for example, J.
Schechert, H. Vetter and H. Mller, Vom Milljh zum Milieu Modernisierungsgebiet
am Arkonaplatz Berlin, Architektur der DDR no. 4, 1984, pp. 196200, and in reunied
Berlin, see, for example, the state-sponsored publications on tenement renovation:
Senatsverwaltung fr Bau- und Wohungswesen, Urban Renewal Berlin. Experience, Examples,
Prospects, Berlin: Senatsverwaltung fr Bau- und Wohnungswesen, 1990.
48 Ibid., p. 138.
195
196
Florian Urban
49 Bodenschatz, Platz frei fr das Neue Berlin!, p. 207. See also Architekten- und Ingenieurverein
zu Berlin, ed. Visionen einer besseren Stadt: Stdtebau und Architektur in Berlin 19491999,
Berlin: AIV, 2000 (exhibition catalogue).
50 By 1979, the amount of Mrkisches Viertel tenants moving out of their homes had gone
down to the West Berlin average of 4 per cent per year. G. Gethke, Frher verschrien,
heute begehrt: Wohnungen im MV, Der Nord-Berliner (West Berlin), 6 July 1979. Similarly,
observers detect a growing attachment to ones home district. Wilde, Das Mrkische Viertel,
1989, p. 140. See also Ein Stadtteil berwand seinen schlechten Ruf , Der Tagesspiegel, 3
August 1980.
51 Ein Stadtteil berwand seinen schlechten Ruf , Der Tagesspiegel, 3 August 1980, T. Schardt,
Hochhausstadt besser als ihr Ruf , Berliner Morgenpost, 31 January 1986, G. Gethke, Frher
verschrien, heute begehrt: Wohnungen im MV, Der Nord-Berliner, West Berlin, 6 July
1979.
52 The welfare rate here refers to recipients of so-called Wohngeld, a direct rent subsidy for
poor tenants. Institut fr Markt und Medienforschung, Mrkisches Viertel, West Berlin, 1986
[results of two representative surveys among residents, taken in June of 1985 and January
of 1986]. See also T. Schardt, Hochhausstadt ist besser als ihr Ruf , Berliner Morgenpost, 31
January 1986.
53 Census data from 2005, Senatsverwaltung fr Stadtentwicklung, available online at www.
stadtentwicklung.berlin.de/planen/basisdaten_stadtentwicklung/monitoring/de/2006/index.shtml,
p. 214 (accessed May 2013).
54 Census data, Senatsverwaltung fr Stadtentwicklung, available online at www.stadtentwicklung.
berlin.de/planen/basisdaten_stadtentwicklung/monitoring/de/2006/index.shtml (accessed May
2013).
55 Census data from 2004 for Berlin (p. 191), for the neighbourhood Mrkisches Viertel
(p. 191), and for the neighbourhood Mariannenplatz (p. 188), both published by
Senatsverwaltung fr Stadtentwicklung, available online at www.stadtentwicklung.berlin.de/
planen/basisdaten_stadtentwicklung/monitoring/de/2006/index.shtml (accessed May 2013). The
numbers of course do not include nationalized foreigners or German nationals with foreign
parents.
56 Institut fr Markt und Medienforschung, Mrkisches Viertel, West Berlin, 1986 (survey
results).
57 Gesetz zur berfhrung der Wohnungsgemeinntzigkeit in den allgemeinen
Wohnungsmarkt [law on the transfer of charitableness of housing into the general housing
market], 25 July 1988, Bundesgesetzblatt I (1988), pp. 1093 and 1136.
58 Ausverkauf an Groinvestoren, Focus (Munich), 20 October 2006, available online
at www.focus.de/immobilien/kaufen/wohn-privatisierung/staedtische-wohnungen_aid_25539.html
(accessed May 2013).
Figure 10.0 Icosa: la tortue qui cause de construction, U.V. Rdaction exprimentale, Dpartement
durbanisme, Universit de Paris VIII 1973 (courtesy Jean-Paul Jungmann).
10
ALTERNATIVES TO WELFARE STATE:
SELF-BUILD AND DO-IT-YOURSELF
Unlike the United States, most European countries undertook a major programme
of public housing, which lasted from the 1950s to the 1970s.1 In France increasing
nancial resources enabled a continual growth of public housing completions between
1953 and 1972. The H.L.M. (habitations loyer modr) and the Logeco (logements
conomiques et familiaux) accounted for more than half of all domestic housing
output from 1953 onwards.2 This product of centralized planning and state control
began to reduce rapidly after 1979, albeit much less markedly in France than in some
other European countries.
The role of the architect was profoundly changed by the development of public
housing programmes. Architectural practices in the 1960s had to learn to work
quickly, dealing with large schemes incorporating hundreds of dwellings and working
to strict cost yardsticks.3 Most of the estates were built using reinforced concrete frame
construction.4 Debates focused on industrialization, prefabrication, mechanization
and the rational organization of the workplace.5 Increasingly, after 1945, prefabrication using precast concrete panels became the norm.6 In this context of technical
prociency, many French architects looked to the United States for guidance, in many
cases registering for masters programmes in American schools of architecture. They
were fascinated by high-rise, high-density housing in American cities and the sophistication and organization of the American construction industries.7
For young French architects, the comparison between American practice and the
highly functional and cost-effective projects they were expected to work on in France
was frustrating. Many believed that high quality design was impossible in these conditions. Thus, Jean Fayeton, a new recruit to teaching as Professor of Construction
at the School of Architecture in Paris warned his colleagues in 1964 of the very
real dangers threatening the profession of architecture, and especially in the eld of
school building, where whole projects were carried out by industrial builders.8 It was
only the oil crisis of 1973, triggering the wider economic crisis of the 1970s, which
brought a halt to the boom in industrialized building.
200
In this context, many French architects became disillusioned, a dissatisfaction

exacerbated by the failure of the architectural education system to reform itself. The
Beaux-Arts, with its studio system which reinforced the role of drawing and a natural
conservatism derived from the studio masters, was in crisis in the 1960s. The events
of May 1968, after which the cole des Beaux-Arts was dissolved, created a new
crisis of conscience among many French architects who saw no future in practicing
architecture and preferred to engage in political discourse.
Before the collapse of public housing and industrialized building programmes,
some young French architects turned to the United States less for technical prociency than for more complex cultural reasons. It was the alternative architecture
of the counterculture, with its emphasis on sustainability, self-build, and autonomy
from both the big cities and conventional architectural practice, which caught their
attention. It must be stressed that admiration for the United States was not easy in
the 1960s and 1970s. The politicized youth in Europe saw the U.S. as the heart
of capitalism and commercial and military imperialism. The robust foreign policy
followed by the French state at this time, with its resistance to NATO and its insistence
on an independent nuclear deterrent, was also part of this context. But the American
counterculture was also engaged against the American state the war in Vietnam,
the military-economic complex and the waste of materials and energy involved in
the building industry. American pragmatism, making your own shelter with your
bare hands and recycled materials, struck a chord among French architects. Interest
passed from an America of power, efficiency and modernity to one of individual
independence, spontaneity, resourcefulness and sustainability. As a French newspaper
critic reviewing the 1975 exhibition Marginal Architecture in the United States at the
Muse des Arts dcoratifs in Paris remarked:
These marginal constructions are the graffiti of the architectural sphere every
desire rejected by the official builders and planners is given full rein, heart and
soul, here. Do-it-yourself takes its revenge on advanced technology.9
Inuential journals like Architectural Design in Britain at the end of the 1960s published
a series of North American experiments demonstrating the possibilities of self-organisation, off-grid solar energy and self-build construction. In its Cosmorama section,
the journal touched on any news related to architecture or materials, discussing everything from wood structures and recycled materials, through dome construction and
inatables, to books by Buckminster Fuller and strange communities in New Mexico
or Colorado10. It was from AD and other journals that French architects learned
of what was going on in America. The spread of interest in alternative architecture
became a signicant component in the critique of state planning, public housing and
the consequences of the welfare state for architecture.
Employing a blend of documentary research and oral history, I have been investigating a group of people, among them inuential French architects (chief editors
of architectural magazines, publishers and lecturers in schools of architecture, etc.)
who were suspicious of architectural modernism (both American and European)
and the welfare state but who found in the American alternative experiment a
liberating force, free both of the taint of American capitalism and of high investment
Alternatives to Welfare State
Figure 10.1 Stewart Brand (ed.), Cover of Whole Earth Catalog, Fall 1968 (courtesy Stewart Brand).
201
202
technology. Taking advantage of the travel made possible by cheap air fares, they
saw highly innovative low cost technical and structural systems placed in the service
of collective forms of living which represented a critique not only of professional
architectural practice but also of the housing developments they were called on
to design in their professional capacity in France. Although there is not space to
discuss it here, some also encountered, and were inspired by, forms of architectural
and urban practice advocacy planning and participatory action which were
very different from those prevailing in France.11 How did these discourses affect
their integration (or not) into the real world of the welfare state in France? My
argument is that an appreciation of the counterculture from the U.S. provided a
critical alternative to the state institutions and centralised building industry of the
French welfare state.
France and the American counterculture

While the focus of this chapter is on the French-American transatlantic experience
of alternative architecture, it should be said at the outset that the countercultural
phenomenon was not conned to France. Among others, Britain, the Netherlands,
Germany, Italy and even the East European countries saw the spread of the countercultural wave, which gained momentum during the U.S. governments extensive
military intervention in Vietnam. The background was a heady mixture of the
political the civil rights movement (Civil Rights Act, 1964), the free speech
movement (19641965), the New Left (a term popularized in the U.S. in an open
letter written in 1960 by the American sociologist C. Wright Mills, entitled Letter
to the New Left12), the anti-war movement (which began in the U.S. with demonstrations in 1964), feminism and environmentalism (the celebration of Earth Day
for the rst time on 22 April 1970) and the cultural hippies, psychedelics, the
sexual revolution, alternative media, avant-garde art and anti-art, music, lm and
technology, etc. For young French architects, men and women, reading books and
magazines, listening to music and travelling to the United States (usually from east to
west, following well-dened paths promoted by popular literature), were experiences
which allowed them to discover and adopt, adapt or reject this culture. Do-ityourself with its tools the advice leaets, manuals and guide books, exposition
and retail catalogues, newspaper reports had been part of the war economy, as
well as post-war austerity13 but in the 1970s it became related to self-expression.
Experiencing the alternative architecture in the United States in the 1960s and the
1970s communes, Buddhist Economics, the bricolage aesthetic of adhocism in the
early 1970s was a way to think about self-organization: How to build by yourself?
How to deal with waste? How to cope with solar energy? How to organize a lifestyle
far from consumerism? Rare were the people in France really involved with this
kind of thinking.
Self-build and do-it-yourself, products of American pragmatism, characterized
most alternative constructions realized in the United States during the late 1960s
and 1970s. This approach was highly appreciated in some American university
programmes. For example, at Yale, a programme was set up in 1967 by the chairman,
Charles Moore, proposing a learning experience based on a hands-on approach. The
Yale Building Project was a compulsory part of the rst year architecture course in
which students designed and built their own structure.14 Built in some of the poorest
areas of the United States, the programme exposed students to a kind of poverty that
many had not encountered before. In contrast, French architecture schools, from
the cole des Beaux-Arts to the cole Spciale dArchitecture, had little to offer
in the way of apprenticeship in manual construction. For the French philosopher
Paul Virilio, who was active in the cole Spciale dArchitecture during the 1960s
and joined the professional staff, along with Anatole Kopp and Bernard Granotier,
in 1972, self-build and, more generally, control of ones own space, constituted a
recovery of individual power:
To talk of self-build is, above all, to rethink the distribution of space and to try
to discern the causes of the obscurantism [that prevails] in questions of space and
environment, in the analysis and management of land, which always seems to
escape our grasp, thanks to an educational system which refuses to contemplate
space strategically.15
Virilio was unusual in recognizing self-build practice as critical of the capitalist system
of production and its control of space and territory. The failure to take self-build
seriously, for Virilio, resulted from political failure to address problems of redistribution of land and space.
Two American publications bore witness to the fashion for self-build construction:
the Whole Earth Catalog (WEC) edited by Stewart Brand, a trained biologist from
Stanford, and Shelter, edited by Lloyd Kahn, a carpenter in California.16 First published
in 1968, the Whole Earth Catalog, with its short book reviews as well as commentary
on tools and materials, provided practical knowledge needed for survival outside the
normal professional and contracting system (Figure 10.1).17 It also offered an array
of eclectic and philosophical ideas from the likes of Ivan Illich, Gregory Bateson and
Buckminster Fuller. In Shelter (1973), readers could nd an explanation of how to
build a timber-frame home, accompanied by precise details of construction, or could
be informed about the recycling of materials and the preservation of heat, including
a variety of solar heating systems (Figure 10.3). As well as presenting a history of
the use of astonishing forms of construction in vernacular dwellings, Shelter offered
a repertoire of typical countercultural constructions: domes, zomes18 and handmade
houses. These American publications found their way to a large audience: they were
distributed, interpreted and adapted for use in the French context. It was not only the
textual and iconographic content of the counterculture that was important, but also
the underlying assumptions and attitudes.
Self-build in France
The notion of self-build was not easily incorporated into French construction
due to a culture not accustomed to the notion of autonomy and the principle
of learning on the job. Nevertheless, a growing enthusiasm for wood shacks was
evident among some French architects. Georges Maurios built himself such a house
in the Forest of Rambouillet in 1975 while Pierre Lajus chose the Pyrenees for his
203
204
Figure 10.2 Garbage Housing, Architectural Design, February 1971.
wooden framed house at Barges, built in 1966.19 For Lajus, the principal reference
was Sea Ranch,20 a strip of the Pacic coastline 160 kilometers north of San
Francisco developed by a group of promoters, architects and landscape designers,
reacting against the suburbanization phenomenon in the United States. An entire
generation of architects was inspired by the way the Sea Ranch designers rooted
their project in the site, respecting local materials, handling the silhouettes of the
buildings and sensitively managing the succession of spaces. The designers of Sea
Ranch Lawrence Halprin, Joseph Esherick, Charles Moore, Donlyn Lyndon,
William Turnbull and Richard Whitaker were inspired by the barns that existed
on the site prior their project.21
For Georges Maurios, the reference was Shelter the original American edition
which offered a set of precisely detailed examples to follow.22 Maurios had been
familiar with both the East and West Coast since 1959. He had planned to use the
balloon frame construction he observed in the United States and was initially denied
a building permit for his Rambouillet house on the grounds that the cabin was too
Californian in style. The house, comprising 63 square meters of liveable space, was
built in Droue-sur-Drouette near Rambouillet. On a foundation of unrendered
breeze-block, the house was built entirely of wood projecting out at right angles. The
construction was simple and the services were virtually non-existent. As Maurios
explained: There was neither water nor electricity. I could not afford to pay for the
supply of electricity It was some way from the village. So I collected rainwater.23
The rainwater was ltered and stored in a cistern; lighting was achieved through the
use of propane gas.
The photographs of the interior of Maurios shack recall the hand-built constructions illustrated in Shelter. Maurios, however, denied having any particular design
reference in mind:
I gave up any attempt at aesthetic culture or stylistic reference. My starting
point was purely practical Perhaps it is not very beautiful, in the sense
that I abandoned the aesthetic premises of the International Style Building
enabled me to acquire greater understanding than if I had worked only in plan.
Following in the steps of a builder, I was able to evolve and achieve a more
intellectual level of architecture.24
Paradoxically, it was precisely the aesthetic the warm and lived-in character of the
interiors illustrated in Shelter as well as the wooden construction details and the
number of examples of vernacular architecture, which maintained the popularity of
Shelter in France as well as in the United States. The taste for wooden shacks declined
sharply after 1978, however, and the spirit of experimental construction lightweight
structures, solar houses, etc. dwindled with it. With the gradual stabilisation of oil
prices in the 1980s, the urgency of grappling with environmental issues diminished.
In all, 185,000 copies of Shelter were sold. While the majority of sales was in
the United States, the existence of its French version and the success in France
of the rst volumes of the French equivalent of the Whole Earth Catalog (WEC),
Le Catalogue des ressources, are all indicators of the impact of the countercultural
phenomenon on this side of the Atlantic. Shelter was translated and adapted in 1977
Figure 10.3 Lloyd Kahn, spread from Shelter, Bolinas, 1973 (courtesy Lloyd Kahn).
205
206
by the French publisher Alternative et Parallles under the title Habitats: Constructions
traditionnelles et marginales. Pierre Gac, who took charge of the publication, explained
that the text had to be adapted for the French public and that the work was a record
of experience which should give you condence in your manual skills rather than
being a construction manual.25 The American experience could not be transferred
to Europe, and particularly to France, without a certain adjustment of the economic
and cultural heritage, which was heavily inuenced by traditional and vernacular
architecture. For example, Gac emphasized that although American builders relied on
up-to-date chemical products like silicone and polyurethane foam, French builders
drew from a vast range of traditional building techniques, passed down through several
generations of carpenters and thatchers. Gac noted that even American proponents of
dome construction, who had presented domes as a miraculous solution to the housing
problem, were now changing their minds and reverting to simpler construction
techniques, based on natural materials and traditional methods.26
Gacs observation was a fair criticism of a contradiction in American alternative
architectural thinking, where the claim of self-sufficiency and autonomy from the
industrialized economy was undermined by the reliance on industrially manufactured
materials, automobiles and mechanical tools.
Habitats was not the only publication produced by the Alternative et Parallle
publishing company. In 1977 it launched a triennial review whose double issue 3/4
Figure 10.4 Grard Aim, Patrice Aoust and Philippe Bone, Le catalogue des ressources (1977), Vol.
III. Paris: ditions Alternatives (courtesy Patrice Aoust).
La Maison autonome (The Autonomous House) was edited by Robert Chareyre and
sold 20,000 copies. From the 1980s, the publisher continually featured works on the
theme of self-build in its An Architecture collection. In the book Construire en bois
(Building in wood, 1980), co-authored by Annie and Pierre Shasmoukine, the merits of
rst-hand experience as opposed to simply being an expert were once again underlined. The Shasmoukines emphasized that they were neither architects nor experts in
wood construction. Their ideas and advice were valuable because they were based on
trial and error experience.27 Conceiving the book as a guide to building in wood,
the authors described the tools needed for trimming, surfacing, levelling, mounting,
cutting, scraping, sawing and notching. The characteristic of each tool is explained
in a table under the headings name, use, date of purchase, and observation. A
double-page spread featured 11 such descriptions of this kind and as many photographs
of tools and their accessories with captions.28 Some drawings of tools completed the
layout. A clear passion for the right tool, characteristic of the craftsman, is expressed.
The WEC had also devoted a section to tools. Author Denis Couchaux who wrote
Habitats nomades (Nomadic Habitats, 1980) provided clear and precise sketches for the
catalogue, which were printed as line drawings.29 His illustrations did not share the
childlike underground characteristics of those in the American cookbooks.
The other major French publication, Le Catalogue des ressources (19751983),
derived both its tone and the type of information it presented from the Whole Earth
Catalog and Shelter.30 This French publication differed from its American precedents,
however. From 1968 to 1972, the WEC ran two editions per year, in spring and
autumn, to which were added, every two months, an additional publication the
Supplement which included corrections and suggestions by the readers. In contrast,
Le Catalogue des ressources was published in four volumes, the rst of which was
released in 1975. This rst volume contained four chapters: Food, Clothing,
Transport and Dwelling. Volume II appeared in 1976 and was also divided into four
sections: Social, Education, Media and Creation. Volume III came out in 1977,
again following the four-chapter format: Health, Sexuality, Psychic development
and Mind expansion. Volume IV was not published until 1983 but, as it focused on
dwellings and the recurring theme of energy resources, it is of greatest interest for our
purposes. Le Catalogue des ressources was also different from the American publications
in another respect. Whereas the WEC was a real catalogue from which readers could
order books and products, Le Catalogue des ressources did not have this commercial
aspect. The WECs role was not only as an intermediary but also as a supplier. Le
Catalogue des ressources supplied its readership with information, but its role stopped
there.
The editors of Le Catalogue des ressources Grard Aim, Patrice Aoust and Philippe
Bone have remained committed to their principles to this day. Like the editors
of the WEC, they cite Diderots Encyclopdie as a model for the manual, covering
many different sectors affecting human beings, their dwellings, their nourishment,
their labour and leisure. The Catalogue is a heterogeneous mix of different recipes,
hundreds of addresses, practical instructions, organizational references and bibliography. One hundred thousand copies of the Le Catalogue des ressources were sold during
its printrun.
207
208
Figure 10.5 Grard Aim, Patrice Aoust and Philippe Bone, Le catalogue des ressources, Vol. IV,
energies/habitats, Paris: ditions Alternatives/Institut rural dinformations, 1983 (courtesy Patrice Aoust).
Volume IV of Le Catalogue des ressources

Published in 1983 and focusing on dwellings and energy sources, this was a
co-production with the Institut rural dinformations (Rural institute of information).31
Less successful than the other volumes in terms of sales, this publication registered
the changes in thinking in France after the end of the oil crisis. The charisma of
American lightweight structures domes, zomes and inatables had given way to a
more practical approach. The availability of cheaply available rural houses and barns,
abandoned by a population driven off the land by the industrialization of agriculture,
had created a new industry, converting and rehabilitating these buildings as second
homes (for foreign visitors as the metropolitan middle class) and providing a eld ripe
for experimentation by young architects. Volume IV drew together various methods
of construction and gave references to publications and reports, providing the names
and addresses of builders and manufacturers. It adopted a different formula from the
other volumes of the catalogue, following more closely the editorial practice of the
WEC short book reviews and addresses as well as Shelter, with its descriptions
of lived experience. For example, the rst part of the volume was devoted to houses
in stone: the text explaining the building methods was complemented by a technical
illustration of limousinage, the art of building stone walls with mortar as Limousin
craftsmen did in the nineteenth century.32
The illustrations demonstrated various construction processes, both good and bad,
with corresponding labels: What to do on one side, But watch out on the other,
followed by two lists of suggestions. In a chapter entitled How to restore and adapt
a peasant cottage, there was a list of useful addresses for the restoration of vernacular
dwellings as well as workshops in restoration and maintenance of rural buildings,
for the most part organized as a real construction projects, thus uniting theory and
practice.
The introduction was written by the Hungarian-born French architect Yona
Friedman. Here he discussed the impulse behind the search for a new way of living
and related it to the changed economic conditions of the day:
Only now are we realizing that a new lifestyle can only be created under the
pressure of penury. In fact, penury makes one inventive, and the discoveries
made to alleviate poor housing conditions, lead naturally to a new lifestyle.
In other words, the roots of invention are in an understanding of poverty and
the failure of institutions to adapt. Those who are fearful of innovation the
conservatives deny poverty: for them, everything is ne. So it is, after all, the
feeling of penury that prompts innovation.33
Friedman thus saw ecological dwellings as a possible solution to limited resources
in energy and raw materials. Such dwellings also met the requirements of a difficult
economic market and dependence on it. He also touted the human benets of
ecological dwellings: It could help to resolve the problem of a lack of self-esteem,
everyone being able to achieve a respected position within their little group.34
Friedman also championed the idea of recipe houses, with freely available plans
and building instructions, removing technical information from the control of the
specialist. He warned against the new technocrats:
It seems that the best solution for eco-dwellings might be to forget about
specialists. Architects, biologists, archi-biologists and bio-architects are the
new technocrats. They may well be useful but only after the most important
inventions have already been perfected. In the meantime, it would be best for
everyone to work with recipe-houses, just like housewives do with their home
cooking.35
The publication also provided information on building with ferro-concrete, taking
the example of Jol Unal who built a house for himself in the Ardche, using
parabolic arches. Both the house and the model of the house were illustrated with
ve photographs in black and white. Unal had already written about his experience
of building from a design provided by the architect Claude Hasermann-Costy.36
Unals book, Pratique du voile de bton en autoconstruction (Practice of reinforced concrete
in self-build, 1981), is a narrative account of the project, which includes discussion
of the difficulty of the enterprise. This was presented in Volume IV in characteristic
manner:
209
210
Le Catalogue des ressources did not hesitate to draw attention to the difficulties
and obstacles encountered by those who took on self-build projects. There was
continual research into lowering the costs of construction for example, building
a house with ferro-concrete without hiding the successes and failures on site.37
The catalogue did not give serious consideration to the professional architect but,
rather, to the notion of concept-design-build. The concept-design-builder was not a
professional inscribed in the Ordre des Architectes (the French architects association),
required to pay subscriptions and restricted to xed forms of production. This type of
professional architect was looked down upon in the countercultural context. Instead,
emphasis was placed on the initiatory value of individual experience, on the struggle
to discover and to innovate by trial and error. Despite this movement away from the
professional realm, the addresses of more than 20 architects and designers were listed
in Volume IV, thus establishing a network of those who might give assistance in
construction and design albeit along non-standard lines to amateur builders.38 This
network was completed by a set of addresses related to equipment, such as machine
rental and manufacturers of cement guns or special grills.
The volume also included a section on rammed-earth houses (built with a mixture
of earth, sand or gravel and clay, which is kneaded and then compacted) and another on
wooden buildings. Only three double-page spreads were given over to domes and zomes:
In France, domes and zomes have not enjoyed the same success as they did in
the United States. What has become accepted for ten years across the Atlantic
remains here at the level of quasi-revolutionary experimentation. Some
pioneering groups, like the technologues doux (gentle technologists) have
been experimenting for several years, in particular with the construction of a
thirty square meter ellipsoid (the zapoche) which displays an accrued sophistication in relation to classic domes due to the multiplication of angles and the
length of the ribs.39
The reference here was to the work of Jean Soum, one of the most ardent evangelists
of the so-called hut mentality and alternative architecture. As a lecturer at the UP
(Unit pdagogique darchitecture) in Toulouse, as a member of GRECO laboratory
research group (which specialized in renewable energy), and as a practitioner and
consultant on self-build projects, Soum devoted himself to advocating autonomous
construction practices. In 1979 he had published, at his own expense, the book
Vibrations solaires (Solar vibrations), distributed by the publisher Alternative.40
In Volume IV, Soum acknowledged the impact of American alternative construction
on his work:
After having read accounts of the rst American experiments with geodesic
domes, I tried my hand at various kinds of lightweight structures. Was this a
quick, agreeable and low cost solution for building a home? A lightweight form,
exible and adaptable to a new way of life? A way of building where intelligent
assemblage replaces abundance of heavy materials? These were the questions I
tried to answer.41
Soum was fascinated by the geometry of domes and the idea of self-build; he described
the process of creating his alternative constructions as a terric experience.42 He
believed architecture should be removed from the exclusive domain of specialists
builders or architects and brought into the popular realm, as he had observed in his
visits to various communities in the United States.
A number of zomes were built under Soums guidance. Their cost, though
modest, was difficult to calculate since most of them were self-built. Soum stressed
the difficulties of obtaining building permissions, due to the rigidities of the French
administrative system, which he contrasted with the more exible arrangements in
the United States at this time. He claimed that a dozen zomes were built in southwestern France, serving a number of functions such as pigeon-lofts, beehives, barns,
meditation spaces and games rooms, as well as houses.43
In addition to stationary buildings, the publication also explored mobile homes,
reiterating the best advice that could be obtained from those who had experienced
nomadic life and built their own dwellings. Another uniquely American system of
construction, inuenced this time by Native American culture, was explained in another
article, Some advice for building your tepee. Once again, a list of relevant addresses
accompanied a series of rsthand accounts. Visits to the sites were also encouraged.44
The transmission of alternative culture between 1970 and 1980 was mainly
achieved through the narration of lived experience. First-person accounts were circulated with the intention of passing on critical information and sharing the difficulties
and successes of the practice of self-build construction. Despite adapting to a specically French context for example, featuring many abandoned stone houses which
could be transformed into new habitats the French publications were nevertheless
largely inspired by American exemplars.
Other dimensions: environmentalism and comic books

If transmission of the American self-build movement mostly affected architects, only
a few of whom would go on to put the principles into practice, the counterculture
also had a more diffuse impact on the politicized professionals of the big cities.
Environmental pollution was an appropriate metaphor for the decline of late capitalism
and a useful stick with which to beat the establishment. It is characteristic that this
form of expression was expressed in the visual language of youth protest: Americanstyle cartoons, earthy humor and heavy irony. American underground culture had a
certain inuence on magazines like La Gueule ouverte (The Open Mouth), an ecological
monthly, whose rst issue was published by Pierre Fournier in November 1972. This
journal which announces the end of the world as the subtitle45 was generated far
from the capital, which at the time was despised as a symbol of pollution. Nevertheless,
its readership was largely metropolitan. Based in Outrechaise near Ugine (Savoie),
the founders of La Gueule ouverte made a conscious decision to reject the centrality
of Paris, while adopting a humorous approach to the return to ecological methods.
This attitude was illustrated by a caption for a sketch in the Dictionnaire des ides reues
cologiques: The only real means of combatting societys suicidal tendencies is to live in
completely autonomous communities, with gentle technology, turning our backs on
the world.46 Fournier had begun discussing ecology in 1969, by way of comic strips in
211
212
the weekly magazine Hara-Kiri, which became Charlie-Hebdo later in 1969. The name
Charlie-Hebdo was intended as a reference to Charles M. Schulzs character Charlie
Brown in Peanuts. Charlie-Hebdo tackled nuclear issues, pollution, the destruction of
the countryside and the world the technocrats were creating.47
One of the ways in which American underground culture penetrated official
French culture was through comic strips. After 1970, the political protest magazine
Actuel (Now) regularly published drawings by Robert Crumb and Ron Cobb.48
Their work published as caricatures and posters or collected into albums greatly
contributed to awareness among readers of the larger ecological themes, especially
drawing attention to the damage produced by the waste products of consumer
society. Caricatures by Crumb and Cobb were later adopted by less provocative
and Leftist magazines, such as Le Sauvage from 1973.49 Le Sauvage, an ecological
monthly, was published by Nouvel Observateur, and met the need of the moderate Left
attuned to the times. The rst issue in April/May 1973 ran a sensationalist headline:
1973: Lutopie ou la mort (1973: utopia or death), written in white letters over a
cityscape composed of skyscrapers and factory chimneys belching out red smoke. Le
Sauvage ceased publication in 1981, as if the presidential election of socialist Franois
Mitterand were enough to diffuse journalistic protests.
Magazines such as Actuel, La Gueule ouverte and Le Sauvage adopted a certain
typographical style, rhetoric and iconography that placed them at the margins
of the underground movement. These were not specialist architectural journals.
Nevertheless, they dealt with issues related to energy (solar and renewable
energy), which were just as interesting to professionals as to the public at large.
Illustrators such as Jean-Marc Reiser crossed cultural boundaries and reached
the varied publics of magazines like La Gueule ouverte and Le Sauvage, depicting
technology-related subjects in comic strips and caricatures. The application of
solar energy systems to domestic architecture, for example, had been given a
humorous slant in La Gueule ouverte since the magazines rst issue in 1972, and
later, in Le Sauvage.
In his book Lnergie, cest vous (Energy, its you, 1974), Philippe Lebreton also
known as Professor Mollo-Mollo linked energy with architecture, discussing the
specics of solar energy as applied to the individual house.50 Like the magazines
mentioned above, Lebretons book was not aimed at architects, but a much broader
audience. Architectural options based on energy choices were no longer the exclusive
domain of specialists. The idea was to provide those lacking technical or architectural
education with the means to venture into the use of solar energy through helpful
instruction manuals. Architects and technicians gradually saw themselves losing their
authority because non-specialists could do without them. A transfer was taking place
between the domain of technical specialization and general information.
Colourful, cheaply produced and well-illustrated publications, derived from
American comic books, also became a pedagogic model for some teachers in the
Parisian schools of architecture. They supported the conviction that the architect
should not only be a builder but also a citizen, capable of sharing his expert knowledge
and making it accessible to the public.
Jean Aubert who was a member of the group Utopie and a colleague of Jean-Paul
Jungmann during the brief existence (19691971) of the Unit denseignement et
de recherche de lenvironnement (UERE) was very interested in the world of

publishing and dedicated a seminar in 19721973, at the Institute of Urbanism at
the University of Vincennes, to the notion of self-build. As Jungmann said: What
could we teach? We were not particularly keen to teach architecture, so we devoted
ourselves to publication.51 According to Aubert, preparation of this seminar consisted
of gathering together all available sources of information, most of which were Englishlanguage documents, including academic or semi-professional publications, specialized
architectural journals and pamphlets documenting self-build experiments.52 After this
preliminary work on the sources, Auberts second-semester students produced a
book entitled Icosa, la tortue qui cause de construction (Icosa, the tortoise who chats about
construction). Icosa, named after the icosahedron, was represented as a tortoise, whose
shell becomes a dome. This work included an album made up of a number of pieces
like a jigsaw puzzle which, once assembled, created the tortoise.53
Both Aubert and Jungmann approached the subject of do-it-yourself, recycled
materials, communal life, and renewable energy resources more from the point of
view of imagination than in terms of construction. As Jungmann recalled:
Over there [in the United States] all this was built but, for us, it was not an
experience that we could transfer over here. We were not as pragmatic as they
were. They built polyhedrons. We made designs, but we didnt build them.54
The gap remained between the can do culture in the United States facilitated by
the endemic enthusiasm for do-it-yourself, which was widely present in the 1960s
and French culture, highly inuenced by Marxist ideology and accustomed to the
dominance of the intellect over manual work.
Conclusion
Lightweight construction, self-build, hands-on: all were signs of a resistance to the
model of state control and planning developed in France during the Trente Glorieuses.
From a European perspective, the possibilities of self-organization, learning by doing
and social engagement in the United States provided important lessons.
The language and imagination of the American counterculture played an
important role in the articulation of French protest between 1968 and the election of
the socialist President Franois Mitterrand in 1981. Although the American model
of off-the-grid, self-build houses was implemented by few architects in France, the
ideas were soon adapted to French conditions. In the 1970s, participation by French
architects in the widespread conversion of rural structural into second homes offered
some real experience of self-build and practical craftsmanship, and this back-tothe-land phenomenon opened the path for experiments on solar and wind energy
devices. In 1975 under the title Architecture Douce (Soft Architecture) LArchitecture
dAujourdhui presented a panorama of alternative architecture based on a number of
case studies employing reclaimed materials; there were also articles on the restoration
of rural houses.55 But from the end of the decade the relative fall in oil prices removed
the urgency for bioclimatic research and the last volume of Le Catalogue des ressources,
published in 1983, was a not a sales success.
213
214
French interest in the American alternative architectural movement took place

within the context of politicized student protest and dissatisfaction with current
professional practice. The government was agile enough to respond to the fuel crisis
by initiating a number of research projects; some of these, such as the CRATerre
rammed-earth research laboratory at the Unit Pdagogique dArchitecture at
Grenoble (1979), proved extremely successful and continue to provide international
leadership to this day.56 But it was above all as a metaphor of the widespread disaffection with industrialized building practices endemic in the French welfare state at
this period, and indeed as a form of political protest against capitalism in general, that
the American counterculture had its most pervasive effect in France.
Notes
1 See S. Magri and C. Topalov, Reconstruire: lhabitat populaire au lendemain de la Premire
Guerre mondiale. Etude comparative France, Grande-Bretagne, Italie, Etats-Unis, in
Archives europennes de sociologie, t. XXIX, no 2, 65, 1988.
2 For example, 73,194 HLM dwellings out of a total of 140 610 in 1953, See S. Magri,
Logement social Encyclopaedia Universalis. www.universalis.fr/encyclopedia/logement-social/
ressource
3 E. Roy, Andrault Michel (1926) et Parat Pierre (1928), Encyclopaedia Universalis. www.
universalis.fr/encyclopedie/andrault. The author considers 1300 dwellings in Saint-OuenLaumne, 1972, built by the architects Andrault and Parat and the 2000 dwellings which
these architects built at Evry between 1972 and 1981.
4 F. Dufaux, A. Fourcaut (ed.), Le monde des grands ensembles. France, Allemagne, Pologne, Russie,
Rpublique tchque, Bulgarie, Algrie, Core du Sud, Iran, Italie, Afrique du sud. Paris: Editions
Craphis, 2004.
5 Y. Delemontey, Le bton assembl. Formes et gure de la prfabrication, 19471952,
Histoire urbaine, 3, no. 20, 2007, pp. 1538.
6 Ibid.
7 See J.-L. Cohen, Scenes of the World to Come: European Architecture and the American Challenge,
18931960, Paris: Flammarion, 1995.
8 J.-L. Violeau, Les architectes et mai 68, Paris: Recherches, 2005, p. 27.
9 P. Schneider, A propos de lexposition, LExpress (December 1975), Pompidou Center
Archive, File 94033/072. For this exhibition, see C. Maniaque-Benton, French Encounters
with the American Counterculture19601980, Burlington: Ashgate, 2011.
10 Libre, Architectural Design (December 1971), 728729. See also Lama Foundation,
Architectural Design (December 1971), 743752.
11 See P. Colboc, Advocacy Planning: chec ou ralit de la dmocratie directe, LArchitecture
daujourdhui, n. 153 (December 1971January 1972), 3437.
12 C. Wright Mills, Letter to the New Left, New Left Review, n. 5 (SeptemberOctober
1960). www.marxists.org/subject/humanism/mills/letter-new-left.htm
13 P. Atkinson, Do It Yourself: Democracy and Design, Journal of Design History, vol. 19,
no.1, 2006.
14 See R. W. Hayes, The Yale Building Project: the First 40 Years, New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2007. A part of the programme at Yale University for example, dealing with hand-on
is described in J. Ockman and R. Williamson (eds), Architecture School: Three Centuries of
Educating Architects in North America, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2012.
15 See P. Virilio, Ltat durgence ou lautogestion de lespace(1968), in Increvables anarchistes.
Histoire (s) de lanarchisme, des anarchistes et de leurs foutues ides au l de 150 ans
du Libertaire et du Monde Libertaire, vol .9 1968/1975, Paris: Bruxelles 2001, pp. 3839.
See C. Maniaque-Benton, French Encounters with the American Counterculture 19601980,
Burlington: Ashgate, 2011.
16 S. Brand (ed.), Whole Earth Catalog, Fall 1968. Lloyd Kahn (ed.), Shelter, Bolinas: Shelter
Publications, 1973. Two issues of the Whole Earth Catalog were published annually, as well
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
as a supplement containing letters from readers. The nal edition of the catalogue in its
original form was published under the title, The Last Whole Earth Catalog (1971).
S. Sadler, An Architecture of the Whole, Journal of Architectural Education, vol. 61, no. 4, (May
2008); 108129. See also F. Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole
Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
Zomes are geometric volumes composed of lozenges arranged in a double spiral. The word
zome was coined in 1968 by Steve Durkee, combining the words dome and zonohedron.
One of the earliest models ended up as a large structure at the Lama Foundation, designed
by American inventor/designer Steve Baer. See Steve Baer, Zome Primer. Albuquerque:
Zomeworks Corporation, 1970.
P. Lajus, Barges. Un chalet prfabriqu, A Vivre, (December 2007), 2643.
P. Lajus, interview with the author, Paris, May 2000.
The rst publication after construction, and the most comprehensive journal coverage on
planning and design at the Sea Ranch, was Ecological Architecture: Planning the Organic
Environment, Progressive Architecture (May 1966): 120137.
G. Maurios. Interview with the author. Paris. 14 January 2002.
G. Maurios. Interview with the author. Paris. 14 January 2002.
G. Maurios, as quoted in M.-Ch. Gangneux, Les espaces de larchitecte, LArchitecture
daujourdhui, no. 182 (November/December 1975), 51.
P. Gac in L. Kahn, trans. P. Gac, Habitats. Constructions traditionnelles et marginales, Paris:
Editions alternative et parallles, 1978, p. 5.
P. Gac in L. Kahn, trans. P. Gac, Habitats, p. 4.
A. and P. Shasmoukine, Construire en bois, Paris: Editions alternative et parallles, 1980, p.7.
Shasmoukine, Construire en bois, pp.7677.
See D. Couchaux, Habitats nomades, Paris: Editions alternative et parallles, 1980.
See G. Aim, P. Aoust and Ph. Bone (eds), Le Catalogue des ressources, Paris: Editions
Alternatives, 1975.
G. Aim, P. Aoust and Ph. Bone (eds), Le Catalogue des ressources, vol. IV, Paris: Editions
Alternatives/Institut rural dinformations, 1983, p. 6.
In addition to designating the practice of building stone walls with mortar, limousinage (or
limousinerie) also denotes by extension the art of wall construction no matter what the
material or technique.
Y. Friedman, Habitats, Le Catalogue des ressources, vol. IV, p. 183.
Friedman, Habitats, Le Catalogue des ressources, vol. IV, p. 183.
Friedman, Habitats, Le Catalogue des ressources, vol. IV, p. 183.
See J. Unal, Pratique du voile de bton en autoconstruction, Paris: Editions Alternatives, 1981.
On page 196, Unals house in Ardche realized by C. Hasermann-Costy is described
in an article entitled, Un uf la coque ou une maison baromtre?
Le Catalogue des ressources, vol. IV, p. 194.
Among the practicing architects listed in the catalogue were P. Hasermann, C.
Hasermann-Costy, J.-L.Chanac, Antti Lovag, W. Kalouguine, V. Mauzit, P. Mousset,
T.Valfort and B. Lebe.
Le Catalogue des ressources, vol. IV, p. 215.
J. Soum and LAssociation plantaire des technologues doux, Vibrations solaires, Paris:
Technologues doux, 1979.
J. Soum, Dme ou zme?, Le catalogue des ressources, vol. IV, Paris: Editions Alternatives/
Institut rural dinformations, 1983, p. 216.
J. Soum, Interview with the author. Toulouse, 19 June 2001.
Ibid.
Quelques conseils pour construire son tipi, Le Catalogue des ressources, vol. IV, Paris:
Editions Alternatives/Institut rural dinformations, 1983, p. 226. The article mentions that
R. and G. Laubins book, The Indian Tipi. Its History, Construction and Use (New York, 1975)
is available at Brentanos bookshop on 37, avenue de lOpra in Paris.
La Gueule ouverte 1 (November 1972).
P. Fournier, ditorial, La Gueule ouverte 1 (November 1972), 1.
E. Laurentin, La gueule ouverte (19721980), le journal qui annonait la n du monde, La
fabrique de lhistoire, France Culture, radio broadcast, 20 July 2006.
215
216
48 Robert Crumb came to live in France.

49 Le Sauvage (19731981) began as a monthly, became a quarterly, until nally becoming a
monthly again. It changed format in September 1977 and was renamed Le Sauvage: Nouvel
Observateur Ecologie. The editorial team comprised J. Daniel, J. Deshayes, H. de Galard,
A. Herv, C. Perdriel and P. Viannay.
50 See Professor Mollo-Mollo (P. Lebreton), Lnergie, cest vous, Paris: Stock, 1974.
51 J.-P. Jungmann, Interview with the author. Paris, 8 December 2001.
52 J. Aubert. Interview with the author. Paris. 3 July 2002.
53 Ibid.
54 J.-P. Jungmann. Interview with the author. Paris. 8 December 2001.
55 S. Van der Ryn, Lavnement du Natural Design, LArchitecture dAujourdhui 179 (May
June 1975), 2834.
56 The CRATerre laboratory quickly established an international reputation and their activities
allowed for the introduction of a post-graduate teaching program and the introduction of a
two-year advanced diploma entitled Architecture de Terre (Earth Architecture), accredited
by the government (Ministre de lEquipement) in 1984.
PART III
Figure 11.0 ATBAT presentation on so-called conomie Technique in urban projects, 1952 (cole
Nationale dArchitecture Rabat, Morocco).
11
FROM KNOXVILLE TO BIDONVILLE:
ATBAT AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF
THE FRENCH WELFARE STATE
Tom Avermaete
In France the welfare state (Ltat-providence) is best understood as a particular contract

between civil society, politics and industry.1 The building industry acted as a major stakeholder and had an important role in the elaboration and articulation of the tat-providence
introducing en passant a new-fangled role for the architect and an innovative denition
of architectural design. These new conceptions of design and designer did not emerge
ex nihilo. The denitions, approaches and instruments of French welfare state architecture emerged in close relation to two external processes: the American involvement
in European reconstruction (amongst others through the 1948 Marshall Plan) and
the decolonization of North Africa. A good way to illustrate the resulting particular
character of French welfare state architecture, as well as the related new denitions of
architecture and positions of the architect is by looking at the practice of ATBAT the
so-called Atelier des Btisseurs (Builders Workshop) that was initiated by Le Corbusier
in 1945 and in which well-known architects such as Vladimir Bodiansky, Andr
Wogensky, Georges Candilis and Shadrach Woods played a leading role.
The story of ATBAT starts before 1945 in close affinity with the North African
territory. It was within the context of the Algerian resistance against the Vichy
regime that Le Corbusier, joined by the future French minister of reconstruction
Eugne Claudius-Petit, developed the ASCORAL (Assemble de constructeurs pour
la rnovation architecturale or Constructors Assembly for Architectural Renovation)
in 1943.2 The stated aim of this research association was to develop an architectural and urban basis for the reconstruction of France after the Second World War.
Echoing everyday planning practice in the North African French colonial territories,
ASCORAL made a strong plea to gather expertise from different domains in order
to develop in a fast and encompassing fashion the blueprint for a modern and new
society. Its goal was to have the actors of modern tasks, the manufacturers of
new times, work side by side.3 Besides political, social and economic knowledge
it was mainly architectural and engineering expertise that was brought together
in the connes of ASCORAL. Le Corbusier and fellow members such as Roger
Aujame believed that gathering these different elds of expertise in collaborative and
220
Tom Avermaete
Figure 11.1 ATBAT architects Shadrach Woods, Victor Bodiansky and Georges Candilis on the roof of the
Unit dhabitation in Marseille, under construction, around 1950 (Woods Archives, Columbia University).
innovative design teams was the best way to provide an innovative blueprint for the
reconstruction of the country.
The lesson from Tennessee: a comprehensive approach to the territory

In 1945 the ASCORAL blueprint for the modernization of the French territory was
presented to the newly installed French government, but it was not welcomed with
great enthusiasm. It was considered too radical and too extreme for the French state,
which opted with its new Minister of Reconstruction Raoul Dautry for a much more
pragmatic approach.4 As a result of this lack of political resonance, in 1945 Le Corbusier
decided to start a new organization, the Atelier des Btisseurs, which became best known
under its acronym ATBAT. One of the main goals of this new organization, in which
engineer Vladimir Bodiansky and architect Andr Wogensky also became heavily
involved, was to develop the idea of a new kind of cooperation between the elds of
architecture, engineering and quantity surveying.5 Surprisingly, the immediate inspiration for the concrete elaboration of this interdisciplinary working method came not
from earlier French planning experiences in the colonies, where different specialists
had been collaborating on the colonization of the territory.6 Rather, it was the practice
of the American Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) that inspired Bodiansky and Le
Corbusier. This federally-owned corporation was created by congressional charter in
May 1933 to modernize the Tennessee Valley, a region of the United States particularly affected by the Great Depression.7 The TVAs objective of modernizing the
territory through infrastructural, urban and architectural intervention had gained an
international reputation and corresponded closely to the intentions of ATBAT.
From Knoxville to Bidonville
Figure 11.2 The arrival in New York of the French Mission dArchitecture et dUrbanisme to the United
States from September 1945 to April 1946. Participants included Le Corbusier, Eugne Claudius-Petit,
Andr Sive, Michel Ecochard and Vladimir Bodiansky (Ecochard Archive, IFA Paris).
It was at the occasion of the famous French Mission dArchitecture et dUrbanisme to

the United States from September 1945 to April 1946 that the participants, including
Le Corbusier, Eugne Claudius-Petit, Andr Sive, Michel Ecochard and Vladimir
Bodiansky, were offered a close encounter with the realisations of the Tennessee Valley
Authority. Le Corbusier wrote:
We go to Knoxville by train in a dirty western wagon. We want to know the
president [David E. Lilienthal], appreciate the man before crossing the vastness
of the developed areas, the rivers that were domesticated by impressive and
powerful dams, and before seeing the reclaimed eroded land, the rebuilt farms,
the replanted forests. A masterful lesson of planning the territory!8
The French Mission visited the TVAs urban experiments in places such as Norris,
Tennessee, and the workers village at Fontana Dam.9 However, it was the TVAs
approach to the modernization of the territory that made the largest impression on
Vladimir Bodiansky and Le Corbusier. An important characteristic of this approach
was the interdisciplinary design process. Indeed, the TVA used a version of design by
committee to tackle the issue. For each project a group of specialists was gathered,
including engineers, lawyers, economists and architects. The belief was that such a
committee, or design team, would be able to make integrative design decisions that
221
222
Tom Avermaete
would respond to the various and often conicting requirements in the different
elds that the specialists represented.
Another aspect that attracted the attention of the French visitors was the broad
reach of the TVA projects, often dealing simultaneously with issues of infrastructure,
urban planning, structure and architecture.10 Many of the projects combined the
development of infrastructure (dams, canals, roads) with the planning of new
housing neighborhoods and single buildings. The interdisciplinary approach of the
TVA projects, as well as its focus on different domains and scale levels of the built
environment, resulted in a comprehensive approach to the planning of the territory
that strongly appealed to Bodiansky and Le Corbusier.11
The TVA and its comprehensive approach became the model for the organizational structure and approach of ATBAT. In 1946, on his return from the Mission
dArchitecture et dUrbanisme, Vladimir Bodiansky took the leadership of ATBAT and
started to develop the organization.12 ATBAT was conceived as a research centre in
which architects, engineers and other technicians worked jointly on design projects.
Echoing the TVAs design committee it was based on collaborative project teams of
engineers, architects and quantity surveyors that could offer immediate feedback on
the implications of design decisions in their respective elds, as well as on different
stages of the realization process. ATBAT soon became known as the rst centre of
interdisciplinary studies, architectural and technical, in France. In periodicals such as
Figure 11.3 Two members of a TVA design committee visit the construction site of the Fontana Dam,
1944 (Walter Creese, TVAs Public Planning: The Vision, the Reality, Knoxville: The University
of Tennessee Press, 1990).
Figure 11.4 Axonometric of a Two-Cell house by Tennessee Valley Authority House, 1942 (Walter
Creese, TVAs Public Planning).
Figure 11.5 Two-Cell houses at Fontana Dam Village by Tennessee Valley Authority (Walter Creese,
TVAs Public Planning).
223
224
Tom Avermaete
LArchitecture dAujourdhui and LHomme et larchitecture advertisements appeared that

claimed: The consultant architects and technicians of ATBAT investigate, perform
and conduct all works of architecture and urban planning, according to the most
modern techniques.13 These advertisements clearly echoed the comprehensive design
perspective of the TVA, spanning the entire process between study and realization and
combining infrastructural, technical, urban and architectural concerns.
The rst demonstration of this comprehensive approach came with the construction
of the celebrated Unit dhabitation in Marseille, which was initiated by the office
of Le Corbusier in 1946 as a prototypical housing block designed for the reconstruction and modernisation of France under a fully edged tat-providence. The Unit
was considered the prime element of a so-called vertical garden city or Cit-jardin
Verticale.14 It was conceived as a synthesis of the two urban models that had dominated
Europe since the nineteenth century: the peripheral garden cities and the metropolis.
From the garden city came the individual character of the dwelling and its strong
relation to the territory. From the metropolis the notion of urban density, as well as
the relation between dwelling and collective functions, were carried over. For the
development and realization of this new urban model, Le Corbusier relied on the
team of ATBAT. Under the leadership of Vladimir Bodiansky, Georges Candilis and
Shadrach Woods (who were connected to Le Corbusiers office) a team was asked to
Figure 11.6 ATBAT developed the Unit dhabitation in Marseille as a reinforced concrete platform supported by
stout pilotis often referred to as raised soil and containing the main technical systems of the building (Candilis
Archive, IFA Paris).
design the basic allotment for the Cit-jardin Verticale (Figure 11.1). The ATBAT team
proposed to give this vertical allotment the form of a reinforced concrete platform
supported by stout pilotis often referred to as raised soil and containing the main
technical systems of the building (Figure 11.6). On top of this a reinforced concrete
frame was positioned. This frame not only functioned as a scaffolding for the entire
top part of the building, but also as a gigantic bottlerack that could accommodate
the bottles that formed the 337 apartments.
It is typical for the ATBAT approach that the design of the Unit was conceived not
so much as simply a building, but rather as a large infrastructure that engaged simultaneously with economic, technical and constructional requirements, and offered a
particular view of the functioning of the dwelling environment. Indeed, in the Unit in
Marseille the basic structure of raised soil and concrete frame suggests an idea about
dwelling as something that is permanently constructed and re-constructed throughout
time. The Unit is the expression of an infrastructure that supports a laboratory of
dwelling (laboratoire de lhabiter).15 As with the TVA projects, the Unit dhabitation
was the outcome of a close collaboration between engineers, architects and technicians
resulting in a project that mediated between a territorial and an architectural scale.
The anthropological turn of ATBAT-Afrique

Although the experiences with the Unit were positive, the further elaboration of
ATBATs comprehensive approach did not take place in France. On the contrary,
in 1949 ATBAT re-directed its focus towards North Africa and more specically to
the countries that France controlled in the Maghreb, Morocco (protectorate) and
Algeria (colony). In 1949, Vladimir Bodiansky founded an official ATBAT branch
in Casablanca (Morocco) under the name of ATBAT-Afrique, and named Georges
Candilis as the director. Shadrach Woods joined him some months later to become
the daily leader of the office. The office carried out structural and technical research
for Marcel Lods and other French architects but also undertook the design, development and extension of infrastructure, neighbourhoods and buildings. Some of
the ATBAT architects became active members of GAMMA (Groupe dArchitectes
Modernes Marocains or Modern Moroccan Architects Group), which was formed
after Vladimir Bodiansky and Marcel Lods lectured in Casablanca at the invitation of
Michel Ecochard in November 1949.16
For the ATBAT-Afrique leaders, Candilis and Woods just as for many French
architects in the early 1950s North Africa became a eld of experimentation and
investigation. As Alison Smithson remarked at the time, the North African part of
the French empire was characterized by a degree of freedom that allowed for testing
architectural and urban approaches developed in the metropolis:
A modern France, full of hope appeared in North Africa: One did not see any
deviations towards the modern movement that were so typical for the intermediate European generations. In Africa there was plenty of espace and soleil, and in
the neighbourhoods the white cubic volumes, the verdure and the private spaces
that were related to the dwelling symbolised the clarity of the partis: the four
functions [of the Charter of Athens] counted and made some kind of sense.17
225
226
Tom Avermaete
However, it was not only the freedom of Africa that attracted the attention of the
ATBAT architects, but also the grave urban problems. In a report for the United
Nations, Michel Ecochard, leader of the Service de lUrbanisme (Urbanism Service)
of the French protectorate of Morocco between 1947 and 1952, claimed that some
North African cities could be considered as the forerunner of an urban condition that
was emerging all over the world, marked by:
A mass of individuals that the industrialization of cities, or the articial creation
of a new capital, has caused to collect in the suburbs. This phenomenon exists in
many countries around the world, with very different populations: the shanty
towns of North Africa, the slums of major American cities, the compounds of
South Africa and the slums of our major European cities.18
As Alfred Wells noted, this problem was assuming massive proportions in North
African cities such as Casablanca, where bidonvilles [shanty towns] were gathering
about 300,000 inhabitants.19 It comes as no surprise that the ATBAT architects and
Michel Ecochard pronounced that habitat for the greatest number (lhabitat du plus
grand nombre) is the capital problem.20 Finding architectural and urban models to house
large numbers of people in acceptable spatial and hygienic conditions within a limited
nancial framework became the prime question for the ATBAT-Afrique collaborators
in the early 1950s.
It is against this background that the ATBAT architects would further develop the
comprehensive approach to the architecture of the territory, by widening it with an
anthropological dimension. For this, they could rely on the expertise that the Service
Figure 11.7 GAMMA (Groupe dArchitectes Modernes Marocains), Habitat for the Greatest Number Grid,
CIAM 9, 1953. Esprit panels depict the bidonville as an urban environment that stands out because of
the symbolic power of private decoration and collective life (cole Nationale dArchitecture Rabat, Morocco).
de lUrbanisme had developed earlier.21 In 1947 the Service de lUrbanisme had set up a
research programme in which a mobile unit (atelier ambulant) travelled through rural
areas to investigate dwelling culture in an ethnological fashion.22 Detailed knowledge
of rural dwelling practices and conditions was registered in texts, charts and drawings.
This elaborate method of anthropological analysis was redirected by the ATBAT
architects towards the urban environment of the bidonville. While contemporary
periodicals such as LArchitecture dAujourdhui discussed the bidonvilles of North Africa
as the present danger, Candilis and Woods believed that a detailed analysis of the
shanty towns of Casablanca provided the basis for a new approach to urban and architectural models.23 Over a short period (19491954) ATBAT undertook an impressive,
if fairly general, reading of the forms, practices and meanings of the bidonvilles, using
drawings, photography and interviews.
In 1953, the result of this analysis was presented as the so-called GAMMA Grid
at one of the gatherings of the modern movement in architecture: the 9th meeting
of Congrs Internationaux dArchitecture Moderne (CIAM) in the French city of
Aix-en-Provence (Figure 11.7). The ATBAT architects emphasized in this grid that
the built environment of the bidonville represented a radical departure from traditional
dwelling conditions. Simultaneously, however, they underlined the persistence of
traditional dwelling practices within the modern urban environment of the bidonville.
This contemporaneous presence of traditional and modern elements led the ATBAT
architects to believe that the dwelling and building practices of the bidonvilles could
deal with the tensions between tradition and modernity. This perspective, in which
the built environment is viewed as both result and frame of dwelling practices which
have a mediating capacity would inform ATBATs comprehensive approach of the
territory.
Habitat: widening and developing the comprehensive approach

The concept that came to epitomize most clearly the widening of ATBATs comprehensive approach was the habitat for the greatest number (habitat du plus grand
nombre). Georges Candilis wrote about this notion:
The habitat of the greatest number a concept without scale, implies a novel
way of thinking. Numbers are replaced by facts.24
The term habitat was introduced into the international architectural discourse by Le
Corbusier at CIAM 7 in Bergamo, Italy (1949) who, at the occasion of the opening
ceremony, made the cryptic statement that: CIAM 7 will have as its objective the
drafting of a Charter of Habitat.25 Though the new term attracted a lot of attention
and raised a lot of questions, neither in the subsequent discussions at CIAM 7 nor in
those of CIAM 8 (Hoddesdon, 1951) was habitat given a clear denition or meaning.26
Only at the preparatory meeting for CIAM 9 held in Sigtuna, Sweden in 1952 was the
issue of habitat thoroughly discussed and elaborated. Architects working in Morocco
with ATBAT such as Michel Ecochard, Victor Bodiansky and especially Georges
Candilis played an important role in the denition of habitat during this meeting.27
Candilis argued:
227
228
Tom Avermaete
Housing has already been discussed in several previous congresses: Frankfurt,

Brussels, Paris, etc. Today we are dealing with something analogous. HABITAT
is an extremely important new concept. It is possible that the CIAM establishes
this new concept.28
At the Sigtuna meeting Candilis demonstrated, through interventions and a drawing
on a blackboard, that his denition of habitat encompassed a wider domain of dwelling
practices. In his drawing, Candilis brought to the fore a concept of habitat that encompasses the dwelling (logis) as well as the immediate vicinity of the dwelling (environment
immediate) and the wider urban environment (environment urbanistique) resonating
strongly with the engagement with the different scale levels by the TVA. Moreover,
habitat appears not as a concept conceived by specialists, but rather as a matter of lived
spaces at different levels of scale: Habitat is without dictionaries and without specialists.29
Candiliss intervention at the Sigtuna meeting set the tone for a continuing involvement
of architects working in Morocco in the denition of habitat within CIAM.30
The contribution of Candilis to the Sigtuna discussion was not only based on the
role model of the TVA, but also on earlier French architectural and urban design
experiences in Morocco and Algeria. As early as 1936, the French colonial administration in Morocco had envisaged a large-scale programme of construction under the
title of habitat or habitat adapt.31 The French administrators had borrowed the notion
of habitat from geographers and sociologists. For the former, it meant mankinds
Figure 11.8 Scheme of Habitat by ATBAT architects (Lhabitat du plus grand nombre, LArchitecture
dAujordhui, 1953).
inscription in geographical space and land; for the latter it represented mankinds
connection with civilization. Hence, already in the Moroccan architectural debate of
the mid-1930s the concept of habitat was meant to indicate that newly constructed
dwelling environments were adjusted to t geographically and culturally dened
dwelling practices. The distinction was made between the population of European
origin requiring a European-style habitat and the Arab population that was accustomed to a habitat of special layout and construction.32 After 1945, with the changed
political climate in North Africa, this idea of a culturally adapted habitat (habitat
adapt) became central to government policy.
ATBAT conformed to this culturally dened notion of the dwelling and as such
took a critical distance from earlier modernist notions such as dwelling unit or cell
with a clear universalist undertone. In the article Lhabitat du plus grand nombre
(Habitat for the greatest number), written by Candilis, Woods, Bodiansky and others
and published in 1953 as a supplement to LArchitecture dAujourdhui, a grid was used
to illustrate the property of habitat to mediate between material and spiritual needs,
between the articial and the natural and between the social and the technical
(Figure 11.8).33 In the view of ATBAT this reconciliation was not a static given, but
rather was something that was constantly achieved, challenged and re-established.
Hence, the form of habitat is not stable, but is in constant development:
Today, forms and types of habitat and of housing reect the past of a lost society.
Only very timidly, new conceptions of method and responsibility reveal open
and unexpected forms of habitat for the society for the greatest number.34
The concept of habitat implied the search for a dwelling environment that was neither
completely modern nor completely traditional, but incorporates the tension between
both. Creating the urban and architectural conditions in which these ambivalent
characteristics could ourish became the main aim of the ATBATs comprehensive
approach, as one of the panels presented by the CIAM Morocco group at CIAM 9
(Aix-en-Provence, 1953) showed. The panel juxtaposed the traditional court-houses
of the medina of Fes with the dwelling typologies of the bidonville and the newly
constructed ATBAT dwellings at the Carrires-Centrales. Through this collage, the
group attempted to express how dwelling culture could mediate between traditional
ways of dwelling and modern ones. As Ecochard wrote, a habitat approach to the built
environment takes the progressive transformation of ways of living (la transformation
progressive du mode de vie) into full account.35
The ATBAT conception of the built environment as infrastructure, already found
in the design for the Unit dhabitation, seemed to comply well with an understanding
of the built environment as both frame and result of dwelling practices. Indeed, in the
projects of ATBAT-Afrique the role of the urban designer would be dened as the
provider of an infrastructure that would subsequently offer a basis for the unfolding
of dwelling practices. This perspective applied to both the larger urban environment
and the small scale of the single dwelling cell. In the ATBAT projects for the Carrires
Centrales in Casablanca (19491952) and the Terrade in Oran (Algeria) (19511952)
this conception of architecture as infrastructure would be applied both on the level of
the single dwelling cell and on the level of the collective areas and the city.36
229
230
Tom Avermaete
Figure 11.9 ATBAT presentation on newly developed housing projects in Morocco, 1953 (cole
Nationale dArchitecture Rabat, Morocco).
Migrations from North Africa to the French desert

By the mid-1950s, the struggle for colonial liberation in the Maghreb had begun to
trigger a migration from south to north. Not only was there a large-scale movement
of people from the former colonies to France; the same was also true of architectural and urban approaches. France, like other European countries, faced important
challenges in the development of its territory. In the 1947 book Paris et le dsert
Franais, the French geographer, Jean-Franois Gravier, argued that while Paris had
grown apace with modernization, many other parts of the country had stagnated
and were in urgent need of development.37 The colonies in the Maghreb appeared
to Gravier, just as to many engineers, administrators and urban planners, a virgin soil
on which new attitudes towards the modernization of the territory could be tested.38
That this architecture of the territory would rapidly move from the desert of
North Africa to that of metropolitan France was underscored by the coincidence of
two events in the mid-1950s: decolonization in North Africa and urbanization in
France. Faced with massive urban growth, fuelled by the immigration of people from
the Maghreb,39 from the mid-1950s France introduced a new politics of planning
epitomized in the nouvelle rforme (new reform) legislation of 1958, of which the villes
nouvelles (new towns), controlled by the state through the administration of the Caisse
des dpts et consignations, would become the most famous outcome.40 The large
white-collar workforce that was needed to implement the new system was largely
recruited from the colonies. Provoked by the turmoil in the Maghreb, large groups of
administrators, sociologists, ethnologists, civil engineers, architects and urban planners
returned from colonial lands to metropolitan France. They were immediately offered
key positions within the different administrations of the Caisse des dpts et consignations as well as in various consultancy rms and design offices, developing and
applying the planning approaches that they had developed in colonial lands.41
An example of this is the Compagnie Nationale dAmnagement de la Rgion du

Bas-Rhne Languedoc-Roussillon (National Company for the Management of the
Languedoc-Roussillon Region of the Lower Rhne) that was created by the President
of the Council of the Ministers (i.e. Prime Minister) Pierre Mends France in 1955 to
plan a vast area adjoining the Rhone river in the Languedoc-Roussillon region. For
the necessary expertise to pursue this enormous planning programme the chairman
of the Compagnie, Philippe Lamour, turned to the large group of professionals who
had returned from Morocco.42 As a result, the planning of the Languedoc-Roussillon
region was strongly modelled on the experiences of civil engineers, architects and
urban planners in Morocco. Infrastructural concepts and techniques that had been
applied in the regions of Casablanca or Rabat were transferred to the rough and
undeveloped regions in the south of France. Something similar happened when the
Compagnie had to construct the Canal de Provence in 1963, drawing on the planning
expertise and technical knowledge of an entire cohort of engineers, planners and
architects who had returned from Algeria in response to the tense conditions that
had led to Algerian independence in the previous year. This new class of returned
planners and designers would contribute to an important transition in the development of French society in which no longer industry, but rather infrastructures and
cities became the epitome of modernization.
As part of this process of repatriation, ATBAT architects Georges Candilis and
Shadrach Woods had already returned to France in 1953. They brought with them the
specic approach to dwelling environments that had been developed in North Africa.
In France the concept of habitat was used in the face of a dilapidated housing stock in
need of modernization and to offer housing to the large migrant populations in the
bidonvilles found at the edge of most large French cities.
It was especially through the Opration Million competition, launched in 1953
by the French Ministry of Reconstruction and Urbanism (MRU) with the aim of
creating new low-cost housing neighbourhoods, that the comprehensive ATBAT
approach re-entered French architectural practice.43 In this competition, teams of
constructors, engineers and architects were asked to develop innovative and economic
solutions for new dwelling neighbourhoods for the greatest number, which later
became known as villes nouvelles. The winning project by Candilis-Josic-Woods
explicitly used a comprehensive concept of habitat to structure the development
of new dwelling neighbourhoods. Dwelling units were conceived as infrastructural entities that relied on elaborate technical (mainly prefabricated) construction
principles and allowed for diverging and changing dwelling practices. The comprehensive ATBAT approach based on the design of infrastructure and the appreciation
of dwelling practices re-emerged here as a design strategy for what was considered as a
prototypical dwelling environment. Over the next 20 years, between 1953 and 1973,
the team of Candilis-Josic-Woods built more than 10,000 low-rent ats based on the
habitat principle, especially in the banlieues (suburbs) of cities such as Paris, Toulouse
and Marseille.44
Indeed, from the late 1950s the insights and concepts about habitat and habitat for
the greatest number that had been developed under colonial conditions found their
way into the urban planning of the French villes nouvelles. As Marion Tournon-Branly
noted, the comprehensive ATBAT approach to the architecture of the territory would
231
232
Tom Avermaete
become a leading principle for a whole series of young design offices working on
these new urban neighborhoods. Some of the ville nouvelles were explicitly developed
for North African immigrants that were living in the bidonvilles around large French
cities, after their emigration from North Africa. However, although these new housing
developments were often planned to replace the bidonvilles and were often built with a
labour force drawn from the shanty towns the inhabitants of the new housing estates
belonged mainly to the French lower-middle classes.45 It is only when the villes nouvelles
began to experience the exodus of their wealthier residents that the North African
inhabitants of the bidonvilles moved in, confronting directly the urban and architectural
concepts that had been originally developed in their North African home countries.
Shared stories
The history of the Atelier des Btisseurs reveals the multilateral, multidirectional and
multidisciplinary character of the architecture of the French welfare state.46 The work
of ATBAT in the 1950s shows how welfare state architecture in France emerged as
the result of a complex set of vectors that connected in concrete and unexpected ways
experiences in Europe, North Africa and North America. The encounters with these
different experiences occured under very different conditions. The architects meeting
with the TVA took place with the architects as invited visitors who were being
informed about American expertise in regional reconstruction and modernization. In
the context of Morocco and Algeria the encounter took the form of a conjuncture
with anthropological perspectives and instruments that had been developed by other
sciences within the French colonial regime. In the design method of ATBAT these
various encounters were brought together: the technical and infrastructural concerns
found in the work of the TVA were combined with the anthropological methods
encountered in a colonial situation, leading to a particular design approach. In the
work of ATBAT engineering viewpoints were combined with anthropological
perspectives on the territory, resulting in a specic urban and architectural approach
in which the notion of infrastructure plays a key role.
The story of ATBAT also reminds us that migration between western and
non-western contexts in the elds of urbanism and architecture is not necessarily a
matter of forms and images. What migrated in the case of ATBAT was a particular
approach to the design process and to the elaboration of projects that involved
different scale levels of the built environment. As such the case study of the Atelier
des Btisseurs offers a counterweight to those accounts in which migration is largely
discussed in terms of images, forms and composition.47 It demonstrates that as well
as this rst level of visual migration, there are many other levels of urban and architectural exchange between western and non-western contexts, including approaches,
methods, procedures and instruments.
The work of ATBAT illustrates how the migration of urban approaches was not
predominantly a function of geopolitical relations between France and its colonies,
but rather of similar territorial challenges resulting from such different conditions
as economic depression (Tennesee Valley), colonialism (North Africa) and postcolonialism (France). Against this background, the story of ATBAT invites us to
start imagining an historiography that problematizes categories such as western and
non-western, African and European, and instead offers a set of shared stories on
welfare state architecture.
Notes
1 J. S. Ambler, The French Welfare State: Surviving Social and Ideological Change, New York: New
York University Press, 1991.
2 ASCORAL was started by Le Corbusier in 1943 and had as its members, amongst others,
R. Aujame, G. Hanning, H. de Looze and M. Lods. For the story of ASCORAL see P.
Noviant LASCORAL in Le Corbusier: Une encyclopdie, Paris: CNAM, 1987 5051. For
the cooperation between Le Corbusier and Claudius-Petit see B. Pouvreau, La politique
damnagement du territoire dEugne Claudius-Petit, Revue du XXe sicle, no. 79
(2003/3), 4352.
3 Originally faire agir cte cte les acteurs des taches modernes, les constructeurs des
temps nouveaux. This programme was already set out in Le Corbusier, Sur Les Quatres
Routes, Paris: Gallimard, l94l. See also P. Saddy Bodiansky Vladimir: LATBAT, in Le
Corbusier: Une encyclopdie, 7677.
4 R. Baudou, Raoul Dautry 18801951. Le technocrate de la Rpublique, Paris: Balland, 1992.
5 A. Wogensky, The Unit dhabitation in Marseille in Le Corbusier, A. Brooks ed.,
Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1987, 117.
6 For an introduction to these earlier ventures see, for example, P. Rabinow, French Modern:
The Norms and Forms of the Social Environment, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
7 For an introduction to the Tennessee Valley Authority see W. Creese, TVAs Public Planning:
The Vision, the Reality, Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1990.
8 Nous partons vers Knoxville en train, dans un wagon sale de western. Nous voulons
connatre le Prsident [David E. Lilienthal], apprcier lhomme avant de parcourir
limmensit des espaces amnags, les euves domestiqus par des barrages impressionnants,
puissants et voir les terres rodes reconstitues, les levages recrs, les forts replantes.
Magistrale leon damnagement du territoire!. Le Corbusier, op cit. Pouvreau, La
politique damnagement du territoire dEugne Claudius-Petit, 47.
9 References to the enthusiast reactions to the mission can be found in Le Corbusier, The
Modulor: A Harmonious Measure to the Human Scale, Universally Applicable to Architecture and
Mechanics, Basel & Boston: Birkhuser (1954 and 1958), 2004, 9.
10 Creese, TVAs Public Planning, 72.
11 Creese, Chapter 5: Landscapes and Villages of Ephemeral Display in TVAs Public Planning.
12 He is joined by Andre Wogensky and Marcel Py that represented the office of Le Corbusier,
as well as by Lefebvre who was the main administrator.
13 Les Architectes-Conseils et les Techniciens de lATBAT tudient, ralisent et conduisent
tous travaux darchitecture et durbanisme, suivant les techniques les plus modernes. Op
cit. Bodiansky Vladimir: LATBAT in Le Corbusier: Une encyclopdie, 77.
14 For an introduction to this notion see Le Corbusier, F. de Pierrefeu, La maison des hommes,
Paris: Plon, 1942.
15 Le Corbusier, Latelier de la recherche patiente, Paris: Vincent & Freal, 1960, 160161.
16 J.-L. Cohen, The Moroccan Group and the theme of Habitat, Rassegna, special issue The
Last CIAMs, December 1992, 5867.
17 A. Smithson, Team 10 Meetings, New York: Rizzoli, 1992, 12.
18 Une masse dindividus que lindustrialisation des grandes villes, ou la cration factice
dune nouvelle capitale, est venue agglomrer dans les faubourgs. Ce phnomne existe en
un grand nombre de pays a travers le monde, donc avec des populations trs diverses
les bidonvilles dAfrique du Nord, les slums des grandes villes amricains, les compounds
dAfrique du Sud et les taudis de nos grandes villes europennes. M. Ecochard, Habitation
pour le plus grand nombre. Position du problme par rapport lHabitat normal,
Report United Nationsm, Conseil Economique et Social, Commission Economique pour
lEurope, Sous-comit de lHabitat, 2, in CIAM, gta/ETH, 1952 (42-JT12373/405).
19 A. Wells, Low-Cost Housing in Casablanca, Architectural Association Quarterly, vol. 1, no.
4, October 1969, 144153.
233
234
Tom Avermaete
20 Ecochard, Habitation pour le plus grand nombre 36. In Team 10 lhabitat du plus grand
nombre was generally rendered as housing of the greater number but for the ATBAT
architects it was such a key term that a more literal translation of the French original has
been adopted here.
21 Within the urban services of Morocco there was a major tradition in this type of research.
In the rst decades of the twentieth century, chief architect-urbanist Henri Prost based his
projects on meticulous studies of domestic and urban Moroccan culture carried out by his
collaborator Albert Laprade. See D. Pinson, Maroc: un habitat occidentalis subverti par
la tradition, Monde Arabe Maghreb-Machrek, no. 143 (1994), 190203.
22 For an introduction to this approach of rural areas see E. Mauret, Problmes de lquipment
rural dans lamnagement du territoire, LArchitecture dAujourdhui, no. 60, June 1955,
4245.
23 X, Le danger prsent. Bidonville Casablanca LArchitecture dAujourdhui, no. 46
(FebruaryMarch 1953), 9799.
24 Lhabitat du plus grand nombre notion sans chelle, implique une manire originale de
penser. Les chiffres sont remplaces par des faits. G. Candilis, Habitat, Encyclopaedia
Universalis, Paris, 1969, 193.
25 Compte-rendu de la sance plnire de la Ire commission, 27 juillet, Bergamo 105 A, in
CIAM 7 Documents, Bergamo: 1949.
26 E. Mumford, The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 19281960, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000,
192.
27 Ecochard and Candilis delivered important contributions to the discussion and Bodiansky
was the chairman of one of the commissions for the denition of habitat. See Rsums
des runions du congres de travail des CIAM Sigtuna le 2530 Juin 1952, in CIAM, gta/
ETH, (42-AR-X4), 16, and Mumford, The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 215225.
28 Lhabitation a dj t discut plusieurs congrs prcdents: Francfort, Bruxelles, Paris,
etc. Il sagit aujourdhui de quelque chose danalogue. LHABITAT est une conception
nouvelle extrmement importante. Il est possible que les CIAM tablissent cette conception
nouvelle, Rsums des runions du congres de travail des CIAM Sigtuna le 2530 Juin
1952, in CIAM, gta/ETH, (42-AR-X4), 3.
29 Voici lhabitat sans dictionnaires et sans spcialistes. Ibid.
30 In a letter to Giedion written in early 1952, ATBAT-Afrique indicates that the Moroccan
group will present important work sur le contenu de la Charte de lhabitat in the summer
of 1952 (Sigtuna). See ATBAT-Afrique letter to Sigfried Giedion, in: CIAM, gta/ETH,
(42-SG3740). After the Sigtuna meeting, within the CIAM sub-committee of Habitat,
there was a general consensus that the matter of habitat was of worldwide relevance and
that consequently the theme should be investigated outside of Europe. A groupe de travail
was installed that would have its rst meeting in Morocco (OctoberNovember 1953). See
letter from Victor Bodiansky to Jacqueline Tyrwhitt, dated 12/09/1952, in CIAM, gta/
ETH, (42-ST12420).
31 Monique Eleb points out that the magistrate A.H. Sabatir, head of the administration, was
the actual person to introduce the concept of habitat into the Moroccan discourse. M. Eleb,
An Alternative to Functionalist Universalism. Ecochard, Candilis, and ATBAT-Afrique,
in Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture, S. W. Goldhagen ed.,
Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2000, 5574.
32 A.H. Sabatier, Les habitations bon march au Maroc Urbanisme, no. 46, JulyAugust
1936, 292293.
33 G. Candilis, S. Woods, V. Bodiansky et al., Lhabitat du plus grand nombre, supplement to
LArchitecture dAujourdhui, no. 60, 1953.
34 Aujourdhui encore, les formes et les types de lhabitat et de lhabitation retent le pass
dune socite disparue; et, trs timidement, de nouvelles conceptions de mthode et de
responsabilit font apparatre des structures ouvertes et inattendues de lhabitat pour la
socit du plus grand nombre, G. Candilis, Habitat, 194.
35 Ecochard, Habitation pour le plus grand nombre, 3640.
36 For a more elaborate discussion of both projects see T. Avermaete, Another Modern: The
Postwar Architecture and Urbanism of Candilis-Josic-Woods, Rotterdam: Nai Publishers, 2005.
37 J.F. Gravier, Paris et le dsert franais, Paris: Le Portulan, 1947.
38 See for instance J.-C. Fredenucci, Lentregent colonial des ingnieurs des Ponts et Chausses
dans lurbanisme des annes 19501970, Vingtime Sicle, no. 79, JulySeptember 2003, 7991.
39 During the Trente Glorieuses (19451974), the countrys reconstruction and steady economic
growth led to labour immigration, when many employers found manpower in the south of
Europe and the Maghreb. This contributed substantially to the population growth of 1 per
cent per year, which France enjoyed in the 1950s and 1960s.
40 For this new development, see, for example, J.-F. Boudet, La Caisse des dpts et consignations,
Paris: Harmattan, 2006; L. Murard and F. Fourquet, La Naissance des villes nouvelles. Anatomie
dune dcision 19611969, Paris: Presses de lcole nationale des ponts et chausses, 2004;
B. Hirsch, LInvention dune ville nouvelle, Cergy-Pontoise, 19651975, Paris: Presses de
lcole nationale des ponts et chausses, 2000; and M. Debr, P. Delouvrier and B. Hirsch,
LAmnagement de la rgion parisienne (19611969). Le tmoignage de Paul Delouvrier, Paris:
Presses de lcole nationale des ponts et chausses, 2003.
41 Murard and Fourquet, La Naissance des villes nouvelles.
42 For more information on this recruitement, see, for example, S. B. Pritchard, Reconstructing
the Rhone: The Cultural Politics of Nature and Nation in Contemporary France,
19451997, French Historical Studies, no. 27, 2004, 765799; as well as M. F. Souchon, La
Compagnie nationale damnagement de la rgion du Bas-Rhne-Languedoc, Paris: ditions Cujas,
1968; and J.-J. Perennes, LEau et les hommes au Maghreb, contribution une politique de leau
en Mditerrane, Paris: Karthala dition, 1993.
43 G. Candilis, Une opration Million dans la rgion Parisienne, Travaux, no. 318, 1961,
176187. Here it has to be noted that Candilis and Woods worked for the Opration
Million competition under the name of their own office, Candilis-Josic-Woods.
44 J. Joedicke, Candilis, Josic, Woods: A Decade of Architecture and Urban Design, Stuttgart:
Krmer, 1978.
45 A. Fourcaut, Le Monde des grands ensembles, Paris: Craphis, 2004.
46 For the British case Murray Fraser offers an interesting view on this multilateral character,
see: M. Fraser and J. Kerr, Architecture and the Special Relationship: The American Inuence on
British Architecture Since 1945, London: Routledge, 2007.
47 This is for instance the case in U. Kultermann, New Architecture in Africa, New York:
Universe Books, 1963.
235
Figure 12.0 Lesley Martin and Patrick Hodgkinson, The Brunswick, London, completed 1974, part of east facade
to Brunswick Square, photographed by Martin Charles (Martin Charles/RIBA Library Photographs Collection).
12
HIGH DENSITY WITHOUT HIGH RISE:
HOUSING EXPERIMENTS OF THE 1950s
BY PATRICK HODGKINSON
Mark Swenarton
In the 30 years following the end of the Second World War, of the nine million new
dwellings built in Great Britain the state, in the form of local authorities, was responsible for constructing just over half.1 In terms of their architectural character, for the
rst half of the period the dominant model was mixed development, in which high
blocks containing ats were combined with low-rise (usually four-storey) buildings
containing maisonettes (two-storey units). But in the 1960s mixed development came
in for increasing criticism and gave way to a new format, high-density low-rise, as
most famously developed by Neave Brown and others at the London Borough of
Camden after 1965, which provided similar densities without building high.2
Figure 12.1 Exemplar of mixed development: London County Council, Loughborough estate, Brixton,
19521956, photo showing 11-storey slab blocks and low-rise maisonettes (Architectural Press Archive/
RIBA Library Photographs Collection).
238
Mark Swenarton
It is generally considered that the rst moves towards this new approach were
seen with two housing schemes from 1961: John Darbournes winning design in
the Lillington Street housing competition for Westminster council, unveiled in July
1961, and the Lesley Martin-Patrick Hodgkinson design for the redevelopment of the
Foundling estate in Bloomsbury, later known successively as the Brunswick Centre
and the Brunswick, which was submitted for planning approval in August 1961
(Figures 12.0 and 12.2).3 While medium rather than low-rise, both these designs
broke with the high-rise Corbusian model, replacing high slabs or towers set in space
with brick buildings set around a court or courts.
What then are we to make of two housing schemes that provided high density
without high-rise a decade before the breakthrough schemes of the 1960s? Both
were designed by the principal architect of the Brunswick, Patrick Hodgkinson
(born 1930): the rst while still a student at the Architectural Association in 1953
and the second, derived from his student project, in 19571958 while working in
the office of Leslie Martin. This latter project was published in Architectural Design in
full in 1959 but the student project remained unpublished for nearly 20 years.4 The
projects have been noted in the studies of the Brunswick by Melhuish and Swenarton
respectively but otherwise have been entirely overlooked by architectural historians.5
Taken together, they pose an intriguing question: should we locate the move towards
high-density low-rise in the early 1950s rather than early 1960s and, if so, what does
this tell us about the development of architectural thinking about housing in Britain
in the post-war period?6
When we look at the Hodgkinson designs, a further question arises, namely, of
the relationship between the indigenous (i.e. the British or English tradition) and
the imported (modernist ideas and forms derived from overseas and especially from
Le Corbusier). As we will see, Hodgkinson was attached to both. His two designs
therefore also shed light on the debate over national identity in architecture over the
Englishness of English architecture as William Whyte, following Nikolaus Pevsner,
called it that was taking place in the post-war period.7
From the outset one point about sources should be noted. Although Patrick
Hodgkinson became a prolic writer about his own work, all his signicant
pronouncements were retrospective; his rst signicant text (on the Brunswick) was
not published until 1968.8 In reading his accounts therefore we have to be careful
about the possibility of post-rationalisation and the fact that he was writing in a
changed context for a different audience. Moreover, in his memoirs Hodgkinson
could be cavalier about dates, and even sometimes about facts, so care needs to be
taken in this regard also.
The 1953 student project

Patrick Hodgkinson was born in 1930 to a well-off Norfolk landed family. Although
his businessman father was apparently vehemently opposed to art and refused to
support him in his desire to become an architect, through his mothers side the family
was well-connected in the design world, and at the highest level: for Hodgkinsons
aunt Toni was married to the famous designer Gordon Russell (18921980).9 As
Fiona MacCarthy states, Russell was a pivotal gure in twentieth-century British
Figure 12.2 Leslie Martin and Patrick Hodgkinson, Brunswick, rst scheme (revised), September 1962, sectional perspective (Patrick Hodgkinson Archive).
High Density without High Rise

239
240
Mark Swenarton
design, who provided a unique link between the arts and crafts movement and
design for industry and other government initiatives of the post-war period.10 From
his beginnings making furniture by hand in Chipping Camden (the Cotswold home
of C. R. Ashbees Guild of Handicraft), Russell went on to become a celebrated
furniture designer and manufacturer and a powerful public gure: appointed as
director of the Council of Industrial Design (later renamed the Design Council) in
1947, playing a prominent role in the Festival of Britain in the three years leading up
to 1951, and being knighted in 1955.11
Through the family connection with Russell, Hodgkinson was thus linked to
the English arts and crafts lineage descended from William Morris and Philip Webb
through the Cotswold school.12 Moreover, the choices that he made show that by
no means did he reject this heritage. While still at school, Hodgkinson was making
measured drawings of vernacular buildings and he worked for a time as assistant to
the picturesque landscape artist, Sir Arnesby Brown (18661955).13 His initiation
into the architectural world came through the Russell circle. Before starting at the
Architectural Association school in London in 1950, he spent a year working for the
architects Ward & Austin and, according to Melhuish, he continued to work there
part-time while studying at the AA to pay his way.14 Neville Ward (19221989) was
one of Russells favoured designers, working with him at the Council of Industrial
Design, contributing to the South Bank exhibition of the Festival of Britain in 1951
and going on to design the famous steel and glass faade of the Design Centre in the
Haymarket for Russell in 1956.15
The Festival of Britain was a key event for British architecture at this time.
Announced in the House of Commons in December 1947 by Herbert Morrison,
the Festival of Britain was conceived as a national display illustrating the British
contribution to civilisation, past, present and future and as a celebration of what the
Archbishop of Canterbury termed all that is best in our national life.16 In line with
this one of the buildings on the South Bank, the Lion and Unicorn pavilion, was
dedicated to the British character. The architects of the pavilion were R. D. Russell,
the brother of Gordon, and Robert Goodden, whose office was in the same building
as Ward & Austin. As Russell and Goodden recalled, the idea was that the pavilion:
would house an exposition of what came most often to be described as the
British character The Lion would stand for the more dependable traits in the
national character, the Unicorn for the more volatile.17
The Festival of Britain divided architectural opinion. To the advanced London
circle based around James Stirling and Reyner Banham, the Festival of Britain
was the symbol of what was wrong with British architecture a watered-down,
un-rigorous, prettied, whimsical and parochial modernism.18 Hodgkinson took the
opposite view. Melhuish tells us that Hodgkinson loved the Festival.19 As we will see,
the idea of Britishness that it celebrated was to play a formative role in his thinking.
The class that Hodgkinson entered at the AA in 1950 was a glittering one, with
classmates who included Neave Brown, Kenneth Frampton, Adrian Gale, David Gray
and John Miller the group that later came to be seen as the golden generation of the
post-war AA.20 According to his peers, even in this distinguished line-up Hodgkinson
was conspicuous: for Frampton he was the most talented and for Miller he stood out
as a star.21 But while like the rest of his cohort Hodgkinson idolized Le Corbusier
(Corbu was my hero early on), and Paris was his favourite city, as we have seen he
also had allegiances elsewhere.22
In Hodgkinsons account (1987) the origins of his 1953 housing project were as
follows. At the end of his rst year, in the summer of 1951, inspired by Le Corbusier,
he hitchhiked to Marseille to see the Unit dhabitation. While he was there he
found it inspirational but thinking it over on the way back decided that it was only
half-right:
as I hitched my way home on a goods train, it occurred to me that while the
message of the Unit was brilliantly clear-headed in the units themselves, the
way in which they were stacked and formed into a, somehow impenetrable, slab
was unacceptable for towns and society.23
Slightly later (1991) in an unpublished text on Le Corbusier he amplied the point.
Homeward-bound in an SNCF cattle-wagon I had jumped (force majeure), I
began to awake to the Medusa in Corbu; that he was throwing away with
the worst of the past its best; that to redesign the world on an envelope could
only be done through rationalisation by some authoritarian means close to that
which had just been vanquished.24
The opportunity to put this perception into effect arose in his fourth year (1953
1954) when as the autumn term assignment, in accordance with the structure of the
AA programme, his class was given a housing project to design.25 The site in Brixton,
south London, was that of the London County Councils Loughborough estate, then
in course of construction to a design by the LCC team led by Colin Lucas (of Connell
Ward & Lucas fame) with team members Alan Colquhoun, Colin St John Wilson and
Peter Carter. The LCCs design followed the mixed development pattern established
at the earlier Alton West and Bentham Road schemes, combining low-rise maisonettes with 11-storey slabs (Figure 12.1).26
To Hodgkinson these watered-down Units27 represented the worst sort of
unthinking cultural import. Hence when it came to the AA housing project, as
Neave Brown recalled, while everyone [else in the year] did slab blocks Patrick
did a linear scheme.28 Interlocking units disposed around a central access corridor
were contained within linear blocks ve storeys high, raised on pilotis and arranged
orthogonally around large open courtyards (Figures 12.3 and 12.4).
In overall section the blocks comprised three distinct parts: a rooftop level of one/
two storeys, with a roof garden protecting a covered route giving access to one- and
two-person dwellings (penthouses); the main portion (3.5 storeys), with crossover
units accessed from the corridor on the middle level, and at ground level, articulated
by the pilotis, covered car parking (Figure 12.5). Derived from Le Corbusier, this
threefold sectional parti, with its romantic suggestion of the roof level as a place of
liberation from the mundane world below, had also shaped Hodgkinsons third year
project for a seamens mission.29
241
242
Mark Swenarton
Figure 12.3 Patrick Hodgkinson, student design for Loughborough estate, Brixton, 1953, axonometric (Patrick
Hodgkinson Archive).
Figure 12.4 Patrick Hodgkinson, student design for Loughborough estate, Brixton, 1953, site plan at roof level
(Patrick Hodgkinson Archive).
Figure 12.5 Patrick Hodgkinson, student design for Loughborough estate, Brixton, 1953, detailed section; tone added
by author (Patrick Hodgkinson Archive).
243
244
Mark Swenarton
In terms of the main accommodation levels, Hodgkinson later said that he had
taken the Unit 3-oor pack and developed it to suit our climate and habits in a
way that produced the social mix of any traditional street.30 As in the Unit, the
crossover format allowed a central corridor or internal street to give access to
dwellings both above and below, i.e. one corridor per three oors. Hodgkinsons
dwellings were narrow (12 foot/3.7 metre) but double-aspect, with a tall living room
opening on to a balcony. But whereas Le Corbusiers section was a straight two-forone, with the living room double the height of the other rooms, Hodgkinsons was
more complex. The living-room/kitchen was 1.5 storeys high and it combined
with the two lower (bedroom) oors of the paired unit to create the 3.5 storey stack
(Figure 12.5).
The 1.5 storey space housed the living room/kitchen, with a smaller sitting room
(parlour) beyond accessed by a short ight of stairs and leading to the main bedroom
beyond (Figure 12.6). The tall space formed the crux in plan as well as section, with
the childrens bedrooms (which could vary in number between one and three) leading
into it from below (in the upper dwellings) or above (in the lower dwellings) (Figure
12.7). Unlike Le Corbusiers design, the change in level therefore operated not just in
cross-section but in long section also, with the alternating pattern of tall living-room
and lower bedroom storeys clearly legible in the elevation (Figure 12.8).
For Hodgkinson, the 1.5-storey living room was central to the design. Against the
LCC (Brixton) concept, where family life had to be sustained in a laboratory kitchen
not large enough for a decent table31, in Hodgkinsons design the activities of daily
life would take place in the main room, with a smaller (and lower) parlour reserved for
relaxation and Sunday best. This he said corresponded with the way that working
people lived in rural areas:
Similar arrangements could apply in towns because the people were the same.
Family life had always been sustained in the kitchen, the largest room, in front of
a range [i.e. coal-burning stove], with a small front parlour reserved for in-laws,
come Sunday.32
If this rooted the design in the common sense observations of the countryman, a more
learned justication was also offered. The concept of a central hall with lower rooms
opening off it also corresponded, he said, to the English tradition of house-making,
where from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries the double-height hall formed
the heart of the yeomans house as much as of the baronial hall.33
The internal planning of the units was notable not just for its sophistication, which
for a student project was remarkable, but also for its complexity, which in its adoption
of a stacked arrangement in longitudinal as well as cross-section exceeded that of
the Corbusian exemplar on which it was purportedly based. The idea of giving the
urban at something of the spatial richness of a mansion, with high-ceilinged living
halls connected to bedroom or service oors with lower ceiling heights, has a long
history in English architecture, with Norman Shaws Albert Hall Mansions (designed
in 1876) regarded as the paragon.34 A similar sectional idea, albeit with very different
associations, was explored in modernist projects of the 1920s, notably the Stroikom
F-type living unit of the late 1920s, as used at Moisei Ginzburgs Narkomn ats
Figure 12.6 Patrick Hodgkinson, student design for Loughborough estate, Brixton, 1953, axonometric of
upper unit above walkway showing arrangement with 1.5 storey kitchen/living room (Patrick Hodgkinson
Archive).
Figure 12.7 Patrick Hodgkinson, student design for Loughborough estate, Brixton, 1953, plans of upper
(left) and lower (right) units (Patrick Hodgkinson Archive).
245
246
Mark Swenarton
Figure 12.8 Patrick Hodgkinson, student design for Loughborough estate, Brixton, 1953, model showing
3.5-storey arrangement in long section (Patrick Hodgkinson Archive).
in Moscow (19281930), and Hans Scharouns apartment building for the Breslau
Werkbundsiedlung of 1929.35 The idea had been taken up with enthusiasm in London
in the 1930s by Wells Coates, whose Palace Gate ats (1939) in Kensington was based
on what he termed the three-two system, in which two living rooms are equivalent
in height to three ordinary rooms, but this time with the 3:2 relationship applied in
long as well as cross-section.36 Both the Scharoun and the Wells Coates buildings were
featured in Yorke and Gibberds inuential compendium The Modern Flat (1937; 1948;
1950); for both projects the cross-section, in which the 3:2 system is clearly visible,
was included, plus for the Coates project the east elevation, on which the 3:2 system
in long section is clear.37
Coates designed a number of buildings on the South Bank for the Festival of Britain
in 1951 but then returned to Canada and there is no record of any involvement at the
AA during Hodgkinsons period.38 But Felix Samuely, the engineer responsible for the
highly innovative (downstand-free) structure of the Palace Gate project, taught structures to the second year at the AA and it is possible therefore that through Samuely
Hodgkinson learned of the project.39 If Hodgkinson looked at the 1939 publication of
Palace Gate in the Architectural Review, the comment made there linking the 3:2 device
to traditional English house form a return to the character of the pre-Renaissance
house with its Great Hall dominating the low ceilinged solar and chambers would
only have increased its appeal.40
Writing about his student project when, for the rst time, it was published in
something approaching complete form in the retrospective Projects: Architectural
Association 19461971 (1972), Hodgkinson presented the design as the antithesis of
the LCCs Loughborough estate design.
The early fties saw the LCC using their eleven oor Roehampton slab blocks,
misinterpretations of the spirit and intent of Unit, alongside low houses for this
and similar locations. Desolate space, conicting scales and social segregation
produced soulless minimal homes.
Against this, his design drew on traditional precedents in layout.

Capable of as high a density within its ve oor terraced form, this project
related to nineteenth-century housing in garden squares. Double aspect
dwellings, stepped in half levels around a central street, used two 12ft bays to
offset the blinkered effect of narrow frontage. A tall family kitchen gave on to a
private terrace and separated parents and childrens rooms. One- to six-person
dwellings were included in a single repetitive building form. These ideas were
later developed in 1957 with Sir Leslie Martin.41
What of the urban arrangement of Hodgkinsons scheme the aspect on which he
considered the Unit to have failed? This was much less inventive than the internal
arrangement. The linear blocks, 300 feet (90 metres) or more in length, were
arranged at 90 degrees to each other, aligned north-south and east-west, forming
very large (four acre/1.8 hectare) incomplete court-like spaces, which were either
L- or U-shaped (Figure 12.4). These garden courts42 contained recreational facilities
(tennis courts, bowling green). Other communal facilities were provided either within
the blocks (shops on the ground oor of two of the blocks, roof caf on another) or
as separate buildings (community hall, nursery school, pub) within the courts. Roads
traversed the courts to give access to the buildings.
If we ask where did this type of layout originate, a possible source is Walter
Segals inuential book Home and Environment (1948; reprinted 1952). In discussing
layouts for mixed development (slab and maisonette) schemes Segal illustrated L- and
U-shaped courts of this kind, which he particularly recommended as a modern
successor of the Georgian square.43 This notion of the modern as a rediscovery of
the Georgian was not lost on the 1949 reviewer in the AA Journal, Judith Ledeboer:
Just as his [Segals] plan types derive from Georgian examples, so his appreciation of
the Georgian squares inspires the development of the L or U pattern of site layout.44
Hodgkinsons claim that his design related to nineteenth century housing in garden
squares thus belonged to an already established tradition.
But even if Segal was a source for Hodgkinson, this kind of layout, with linear
blocks arranged orthogonally to make large open courtyards, was not far removed
from mainstream modern exemplars. Le Corbusiers 1945 scheme for La Rochelle,
published in the same volume of the Oeuvre complte (volume four, 1946) as the Unit,
employed large open courtyards of this kind.45 A more immediate precedent for large
L-shape courts dened by linear slabs was Alison and Peter Smithsons design for the
Golden Lane competition (1952), presented in July 1953 at the ninth CIAM congress
at Aix-en-Provence and published in the Architects Year Book that year, which also
contained freestanding community facilities in the L-shaped court.46 The idea of
footbridges which cross the road and become part of the corridors on to which the
doors of the maisonettes open goes straight back to Le Corbusiers cellular housing
of the 1920s, as presented in The City of Tomorrow.47
Overall then, Hodgkinsons design was inspired in its internal arrangement by Le
Corbusiers Unit, but with signicant modications, notably in its much greater
sectional complexity. In terms of urban arrangement it was a lot less innovative, with
a lineage somewhat less distanced from Le Corbusier than Hodgkinson liked to think.
247
248
Mark Swenarton
The 19571958 St Pancras project

After completing the housing project Hodgkinson spent the remainder of his
fourth year away from the AA, working for Alvar Aalto (he recalled that he tried
Le Corbusier rst but when told that he would have to pay for the privilege transferred his attentions elsewhere) and submitting the remaining fourth year (spring
and summer term) projects from Finland.48 He then returned for his fth year in
19541955 to work on his thesis project, a university library for Cambridge, but at
the last moment I abandoned the idea because I could not make it stand up.49 As
things turned out, this was probably just as well, since the RIBAs external examiner
for that year, James Cubitt, took against a number of the submitting students, failing
Neave Brown, Kenneth Frampton and John Miller.50 Hodgkinson then worked for
what he termed various private architectural practices in London, as well as his
former tutor Felix Samuely, submitting his thesis project in 19561957 and being
awarded his AA Diploma in October 1958.51
By this time Hodgkinson was working for Leslie Martin in Cambridge. In
September 1956 Martin had left his position as LCC Architect to take up the chair of
architecture at Cambridge and set up his practice there. He rapidly secured a number
of commissions more than he could deal with himself and sought out talented
(often much younger) architects to lead the design work on each of the projects,
using the style Leslie Martin in association with to describe their authorship. Thus
for the Market Hill project for Kings College Cambridge (1956) the lead designer
was Colin St John Wilson (19222007) and for the College Hall project at Leicester
University (19561962) the lead designer was another former member of the LCC
architects department, Trevor Dannatt (b. 1920).52
For the St Pancras housing, Hodgkinson was the lead designer53. In terms of housing
policy and housing provision, St Pancras was one of the most go-ahead of the London
boroughs and the Gospel Oak redevelopment, which included the 18.25 acre (7.4
hectare) West Kentish Town area, was one of its largest schemes. Rather than having its
own in-house architects, St Pancras worked with a number of private practices and for
West Kentish Town the architect appointed was Thomas Sibthorp, a former employee
in the engineers department who for a time had held the position of chief architect.54
But Sibthorps design, comprising 11-storey point blocks as well as lower blocks of
ats and houses, was rejected by the LCC planners and to circumvent the problem the
council decided to offer Sibthorp an alternative project (Plender Street) and to appoint
a new architect for West Kentish Town. The new architect was Leslie Martin, who
was approached in March 1957 and whose appointment was agreed six months later.55
How Martin came to choose Hodgkinson for the project is unclear. According to
Hodgkinsons account, written after Martins death:
When I nally graduated in 1957, there arrived out of the blue a letter from
Leslie, whom I had never met, asking if I would consider working for him on
a low-cost housing job in St Pancras.56
Two possible conduits can be suggested. Martin was a member of the AA, although
not a particularly active one, and so might have learnt about Hodgkinsons housing
project through the AA.57 More plausibly the connection might have been through
Hodgkinsons former employer, Alvar Aalto. In April 1957, just when Martin had
been approached by St Pancras, Aalto came to London to collect the Royal Gold
Medal for Architecture and to deliver the RIBA Annual Discourse, and in his
position as RIBA Vice-President Martin chaired, and provided the introduction for,
Aaltos lecture. It is not inconceivable that at some point their conversation turned
to the student prodigy who had been Aaltos assistant and his remarkable housing
project.58
Whatever the circumstances of the appointment, the resultant design for St
Pancras was clearly based on Hodgkinsons student project. As he put it, penthouses
and pilotis went59: the most obvious sectional peculiarities of the 1953 design
the rooftop chequerboard above and the pilotis below were eliminated, so that
the building consisted of just the 3.5 storey accommodation arranged around the
centralcorridor (Figure 12.9).
The unit plan remained virtually unchanged, i.e. a double-aspect dwelling with an
L-shaped plan and section in which the 1.5 storey living kitchen acted as the fulcrum.
The main spaces (balcony, living kitchen, parlour, bedroom) were arranged in the
same fashion within the bay, with additional bedrooms in the adjacent bay and the
alternating pattern of living-room and bedrooms again clearly legible in the elevation.
The internal width of the bay was increased from by six inches (150mm) to 12 feet
six inches (3800mm) and to create a more usable living area the balcony was made
much deeper, 8 feet six inches (2600mm) as against 3 feet six inches (1070mm),
which emphasised externally the partial stepped section, but otherwise the design was
virtually unchanged.
In terms of urban arrangement, the scheme still consisted of linear blocks arranged
at 90 degrees around pedestrian precincts, delivering a similar density (136 persons per
acre/336 persons per hectare).60 But there was a clearer articulation of the blocks into
spine and limb and the courts were greatly reduced in scale (Figure 12.10). Instead of
vast open courts extending over up to four acres (1.6 hectares), the courts were much
smaller and more intimate, typically only 0.25 acres (0.1 hectare) in size.
It is hard not to see in this rearrangement the inuence of Martin and Wilsons
interest in the collegiate quadrangle as an urban generator, as recounted in the 1959
article The Collegiate Plan.61 The unbuilt 1956 Martin-Wilson design for student
accommodation for Kings College was based on a tight quadrangular form, with
a courtyard at rst-oor level over shops below and student rooms overlooking
the central space, using a stepped section. The Martin-Dannatt design for College
Hall at Leicester University (19561962, built) was based around a linked sequence
of courtyards but in this case in incomplete or open-ended form, which Martin
regarded as the indigenous (sixteenth-century) version of the typology. In other
words, while in most respects the St Pancras design derived from Hodgkinsons
earlier scheme, it seems clear that the tighter arrangement of the courts derived
from Martins interest in the collegiate court, and particularly the incomplete court,
as an urban typology.
The St Pancras design was presented to the housing sub-committee in June 1958,
accompanied by drawings and models and a report by Martin describing the design
and explaining how it differed from a normal (i.e. mixed development) scheme.
249
250
Mark Swenarton
Figure 12.9 Leslie Martin and Patrick Hodgkinson, West Kentish Town housing, St Pancras,
19571958, cross section as published in Architectural Design, July 1959. Key: 1 living room, 2
bedroom, 3 kitchen, 4 services, 5 terrace, 6 access gallery.
Figure 12.10 Leslie Martin and Patrick Hodgkinson, West Kentish Town housing, St Pancras,
19571958, layout model (Patrick Hodgkinson Archive).
Present conceptions of high density involve the use of tall and low blocks.
Whilst these conceptions have many merits they are also open to criticism on
several counts. The cost of tall blocks is high. Different sizes of family are segregated into high or low blocks. The spatial arrangements of individual dwellings
are limited by the forms of construction. The private open space given to
families is unevenly distributed: in tall blocks it is usually a balcony, which is
inadequate, and in low blocks a garden, which only a few families can enjoy.
In the proposals which are now presented we have attempted to provide
answers to some of these criticisms. We are satised that a density of over 125
people to the acre can be achieved by the use of blocks of buildings which do
not exceed 3 storeys in height.62
The response from the planning sub-committee was enthusiastic: we feel the scheme
to be a most ingenious and progressive one. But at the same time the proposal to
incorporate the kitchen working space within the general living space and the
question of ventilation of the kitchen were identied as potential problems.63 A few
months later the main committee reported:
The scheme proposed is for approximately 400 dwellings in blocks not
exceeding 3.5 storeys in height, together with garage and parking facilities, etc.
The density has been achieved at this height and at an estimated economic price
by designing the blocks so that the dwellings are approached by a covered access
gallery around which they interlock. This novel and ingenious scheme gives rise
to a number of unusual features, however, and we have had some doubts as to
whether they would be acceptable to Council tenants. For example, the various
rooms of each dwelling are on different levels, which necessitates the provision
of a number of short ights of stairs, and the sitting, living and kitchen spaces are
incorporated in one room, the kitchen portion being mechanically ventilated.64
Nevertheless, the council was sufficiently interested in the concept to want to build a
prototype to test it, and various sites were proposed. The problem was that, given its
reservations about the suitability of the dwelling type, the council was willing to offer
only a site for a small development; whereas Martin was determined not to prejudice
the proposal by an incomplete experiment and preferred not to build than to build
too small.65 The consequence was that the trial block of thirty-odd units trailed in
the Archiectural Design article in 1959 never materialized.66
This however was not the end of the story. The idea of the stepped-section collegiate quadrangle was given its fullest realisation by Hodgkinson and the Martin atelier
at Harvey Court, Cambridge (19581962) and then turned into a linear gure at the
Brunswick (19601974), the rst version of which was designed by Hodgkinson and
Martin in 19601961.67 The Brunswick also incorporated the interlocking dwelling
unit from the Brixton and St Pancras designs, albeit in a simplied form from which
the sectional complexity (both cross-section and longitudinally) was eliminated. The
unit was interlocking only in plan: it retained the linear arrangement of main spaces
within the structural bay from the earlier designs but replaced the maisonette with
a simpler single-storey format.68 This remained the dwelling type planned for the
251
252
Mark Swenarton
Brunswick until the Harvey Court-style system of loadbearing brick was replaced by
a quite different solution, a concrete A-frame, which ruled out the narrow throughunits inherited from the 1950s schemes. In their place single-aspect, wide-fronted
types were introduced and eventually, modied to meet the requirements of the
Ministry of Housing and Camden council, these were what was built (19671974).69
Conclusion
How then are we to understand the two Hodgkinson designs of the 1950s, in terms
both of broader housing history, especially the espousal of the high-rise model in the
1950s and its rejection in favour of high-density low-rise the following decade, and
the notion of Englishness in post-war architecture?
Of the two designs, the 1953 student design for Brixton and the 19571958 design
with Leslie Martin for St Pancras, the 1953 scheme was by far the more innovative.
It was medium-rise rather than low-rise but the core accommodation accounted for
only 3.5 storeys and so when the superuous elements (roof-level and undercroft)
were removed, as occurred at St Pancras, a low-rise design was the result. Leaving
aside the objections to the plans of the units made by the client, which meant that the
St Pancras design remained unrealised, we can safely say that as a student Hodgkinson
was in the vanguard of architectural thinking. He was, as Neave Brown put it, the
most prescient of his AA cohort.70
Hodgkinsons student design formed part of the early 1950s UK response to
Le Corbusiers Unit. Like the Smithsons with the Golden Lane competition of
1952, Hodgkinson took certain key ideas from the Unit and amended them. The
Smithsons extended the Unit footprint to make a double-T gure and moved the
access corridor from the centre of the building to the edge to create streets in the air.
Hodgkinson left the central corridor where it was and reduced the accommodation
core of the building from 15 storeys to 3.5, and so when in the St Pancras design the
section was topped and tailed, the transformation from skyscraper to groundscraper
was complete. Hodgkinsons idea was more radical than the Smithsons, in that their
11-storey slab retained the Corbusian vision of living high in the air, but his still
conceived the housing block as something detached from the city maybe not, as he
said of the LCCs schemes a total severance, as at Marseille, of continuity of space and
time but hardly continuous with the city either.71 With the building raised off the
ground by pilotis, and even the lower units accessed at second-oor level through an
access gallery/corridor, there was still a pronounced disjunction between the dwelling
and the city. It could scarcely be said that the ideal of continuity sought by the critics
of the functional city had been achieved.72
This severance from the city was partially addressed in the re-working of the
design for St Pancras, deploying the Leslie Martin idea of the collegiate court as an
organising principle for the site layout. But while sorting out the sectional anomalies
of the design, in other respects the St Pancras design did not move beyond the earlier
version, with the same 3-oor pack arrangement inherited from the Unit and
narrow unit types arranged around the fulcrum of the 1.5-storey living kitchen. Thus
when it came to designing the housing for the Brunswick, it was these unit types,
inherited from Hodgkinsons student design, that were proposed.
As Leslie Martins 1958 report on the St Pancras scheme indicates, the design
addressed many of the criticisms being made of the mixed development format
used by the LCC and other local authorities. Unlike the traditional street, mixed
development separated different kinds of household into different types of buildings;
privileged some households (principally those in the low-rise maisonettes) over those
in the slabs or towers; and did not provide adequate play space for children living
in the ats. These were all major themes in the critique of mixed development as
it developed in architectural and government circles after 1960.73 But compared to
the 1960s critique developed by Neave Brown and the Camden architects, one key
element was missing from Hodgkinsons designs, namely, the insistence on a direct
connection between the dwelling and the city. Brown demanded that every dwelling
should open directly, without any intermediate or transitional space, into the street
network of the city, and at Alexandra Road provided a battery of external stairs
expanded versions of the half-ight of stairs leading to the front door of a Victorian
terraced house so that the front door of every dwelling would connect directly to
the street.74
This idea of the front door opening onto the street was central to the Camden
schemes. But it was an aspiration not shared by Hodgkinsons designs, which inherited
the notion of the internal street from Le Corbusier and interposed a 90-metre-long
corridor between the front door and the world beyond. The vestige of this corridor
survived at the Brunswick, where separating the dwelling and the city is an enclosed
multi-storey access gallery 150 metres long. In this way the Brunswick as built
retained a gure derived from the Unit in the early 1950s.
Finally, how should we understand the role of Englishness in Hodgkinsons work?
Looking back in 2001, Hodgkinson attributed the value he placed on the national
tradition in architecture to the time he spent in Finland working with Aalto:
before I returned home, he persuaded me to look hard at Arts and Crafts architects like William Lethaby: Aalto considered that I should concentrate on being
English.75
But in reality this was more like a conrmation than a new direction, for this
attachment was already evident in Hodgkinsons thinking before his time in Finland:
maybe not to Lethaby per se but certainly to England and the arts and crafts tradition.
This was a powerful element in Hodgkinsons beliefs before he set foot in the AA.
Imbibed from his uncle Gordon Russell, it was evident in the schoolboy studies of
vernacular buildings, in the attachment to the landscape painter Arnesby Brown, in his
training with Neville Ward and his devotion to the Festival of Britain. Hodgkinsons
accounts of the Brunswick always locate it within the English tradition of street-based
architecture inherited from the Georgian city, and we can see this national affiliation
already in his readiness to represent the urban arrangement of his student scheme as
related to nineteenth century housing in garden squares.76
In part this emphasis on Englishness might be seen as product of Hodgkinsons
background, a wealthy country family, or from his somewhat contrarian character
(as he put it, Standing at a slight angle from the Universe, which I have generally
done).77 But more substantively it sprang from the arts and crafts lineage as
253
254
Mark Swenarton
represented by Gordon Russell and the celebration of the British character represented by the Festival of Britain. From these Hodgkinson imbibed a powerful sense of
the native genius, which as we have seen he contrasted with the Other as represented
alike by the Corbusian dream of the rational city and the totalitarianism of Hitler.78
The innovations of his 1950s housing designs combining modern and traditional,
Corbusian Unit dhabitation and English low-rise urbanism were the result.
Notes
1 Figures calculated from: S. Merrett, State Housing in Britain, London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1979, pp. 320321; S. Merrett with F. Gray, Owner Occupation in Britain,
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982, pp. 346347. Thanks go to the family of Patrick
Hodgkinson for assistance and access to his papers and to Nicholas Bullock, Barnabas Calder,
Neil Jackson, Simon Pepper and Dirk van den Heuvel for helpful comments on earlier drafts.
2 G. R. Owens, Mixed Development in Local Authority Housing in England and Wales
19451970 (unpublished PhD thesis, University College London, 1988), pp. 373411; L.
Esher, A Broken Wave: The Rebuilding of England 19401980, London: Allen Lane, 1981,
pp. 131136; M. Swenarton, Developing a new format for urban housing: Neave Brown
and the design of Camdens Fleet Road estate, Journal of Architecture, 2012, vol. 17, no. 6,
9731007.
3 M. Swenarton, Politics, property and planning: building the Brunswick 19581974, Town
Planning Review, 2013, vol. 84, no. 2, 197198.
4 Housing development, St Pancras, London NW, Architectural Design, 1959, vol. 29, no. 7,
279282; J. Gowan (ed.), Projects: Architectural Association 194671, London: Architectural
Association, 1972, p. 22.
5 C. Melhuish, The Life and Times of the Brunswick, Bloomsbury, London: Camden History
Society, 2006, p. 21; Swenarton, Politics, 204. See also C. Melhuish, Inhabiting the
image: architecture and social identity in the post-industrial city (unpublished PhD thesis,
Buckinghamshire New University, 2008).
6 Another advocate of high-density low-rise was A. Trystan Edwards, prolic author and
scourge of garden suburbs, who advocated a return to Regency-style urbanism based on the
terraced house, but there is no evidence of a connection with Hodgkinsons ideas. See, for
example, A. Trystan Edwards, Modern Terrace Houses: Researches on High Density Development,
London: John Tiranti, 1946.
7 W. Whyte, The Englishness of English Architecture: Modernism and the Making of a
Modern International Style, Journal of British Studies, 2009, vol. 48, 441465; N. Pevsner,
The Englishness of English Art, London: Architectural Press, 1956.
8 P. Hodgkinson, Redevelopment in Bloomsbury (London), Zodiac, 1968, vol. 18, 102103.
For a list of Hodgkinsons main writings see Swenarton, Politics, 224225.
9 Melhuish, Life and Times, p. 23; J. Myerson, Gordon Russell: Designer of Furniture, London:
Design Council, 1992, p. 47.
10 F. MacCarthy, Russell, Sir (Sydney) Gordon (18921980), in H. C. G. Mathew and Brian
Harrison (eds.), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004. www.
oxforddnb.com/view/article/31640, p. 1 (accessed 11 June 2012).
11 Myerson, Gordon Russell, p. 103.
12 A. Crawford, C. R. Ashbee, New Haven: Yale UP, 1985, pp. 107149; M. Greensted, The
Arts and Crafts Movement in the Cotswolds, Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1993, pp. 154166.
13 John Miller, telephone interview, 8 May 2012; Melhuish, Life and Times, p. 22; Artist
Biography: Sir Arnesby Brown 18661955, Tate: Art and Artists. www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/
sir-arnesby-brown-821 (accessed 6 June 2013). Melhuish provides an invaluable account of
Hodgkinsons family background and early life from interviews conducted with him in
20052006: Melhuish, Life and Times, pp. 2223.
14 Melhuish, Life and Times, p. 23.
15 Myerson, Gordon Russell, pp. 102103; G. Russell, Designers Trade: Autobiography of Gordon
Russell, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1968, p. 211; also H. Goodden, The Lion and the
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
Unicorn: Symbolic Architecture for the Festival of Britain, Norwich: Unicorn Press, 2011, p. 26.
Ward taught rst year studio at the AA when Hodgkinson was there.
A. Forty, Festival Politics in M. Banham and B. Hillier (eds.), A Tonic to the Nation; the
Festival of Britain 1951, London: Thames & Hudson, 1976, p. 27 and p. 35. Also H. Casson,
The 1951 Exhibition, RIBA Journal, vol. 57, no. 6 (April 1950), 207215.
R. D. Russell and R. Goodden, The Lion and Unicorn Pavilion, in Banham and Hillier,
Tonic to the Nation, pp. 9697.
M. Girouard, Big Jim: The Life and Work of James Stirling, London: Chatto & Windus, 1998,
p. 58.
Melhuish, Life and Times, p. 23.
Gowan, Projects, pp. 2931.
H. Foster, A Conversation with Kenneth Frampton, October, 2003, vol. 106, p. 35. D.
Sudjic, John Miller: Biographical Notes, in J. Miller, Custom and Innovation: John Miller +
Partners, London: Black Dog, 2009, p. 11.
Hodgkinson Archive, P. Hodgkinson, Heroes and Villains: Le Corbusier (unpublished
typescript, 1991), p. 1; P. Hodgkinson, My kind of town, Architecture Today, no. 10 (July
1990), 72.
P. Hodgkinson, A Handful of Homes: British Post-War Housing, A3 Times, 1987, no. 7,
19.
Hodgkinson, Heroes and Villains, p. 2.
Not a third year project as stated by Hodgkinson and repeated by Melhuish. See
Architectural Association Archives, AA Register, 4th Year, 19531954; also Architectural
Association School of Architecture, Abridged Prospectus for 1953 only, London: Architectural
Association, 1953, p. 22.
LCC housing Development at Loughborough Road, Lambeth, Architectural Design, vol.
22, no. 8 (August 1952), 237. See also Proposed LCC estate at Loughborough Road,
Lambeth, Architects Journal, vol. 116, no. 2997 (7 August 1952), 157158.
Hodgkinson, Handful of Homes, 19.
Neave Brown, interview, 6 August 2008. For John Millers scheme see Miller, Custom
and Innovation, p. 15. Low-rise precedents could be found in Le Corbusier, including the
1925 Cit Universitaire project (published in volume one of Oeuvre complte, 1929) and
the Sainte Baume and Roq et Rob projects of the late 1940s (published in volume ve
of the Oeuvre complte, 1953), but there is no evidence that these inuenced Hodgkinsons
design.
Gowan, Projects, p. 23.
Hodgkinson, Handful of Homes, p. 19.
Ibid., p. 20.
Ibid., p.19.
Ibid., p. 19.
A. Saint, Richard Norman Shaw (New Haven,: Yale UP, 2010) pp. 215221; also D. van
Gameren and C. Grafe, Mansion Flats and Middle Class Living, DASH: Delft Architecture
Studies on Housing: The Luxury City Apartment, Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2009, pp.
137155.
A. Kopp, Town and Revolution (London, Thames & Hudson, 1970), pp. 130144, and S.
Cantacuzino, Wells Coates: A Monograph (London, Gordon Fraser 1978), p. 64.
W. Coates, The Three-two Planning System, Architectural Review, vol. 85, no. 4 (April
1939), 178. See also W. Coates, Planning in Section, Architectural Review, vol. 82, no. 2
(August 1937), 5158. Cantacuzino, Wells Coates, pp. 6475.
F. R. S. Yorke and F. Gibberd, The Modern Flat (3rd edn., revised), London: Architectural
Press, 1950, pp. 9193 and 126128.
E. Darling, Wells Coates, London: RIBA Publishing, 2012, pp. 118127.
AA Archive, AA Register, 1st Year, Winter 1950; Melhuish, Life and Times, p. 23; Miller,
Custom and Innovation, p. 14.
Coates, The Three-two Planning System, 178.
Gowan, Projects, p. 22.
Hodgkinson, Handful of Homes, p. 19.
W. Segal, Home and Environment, London: Leonard Hill, 1948, p. 192.
255
256
Mark Swenarton
44 J. Ledeboer, Home and Environment. By Walter Segal, AA Journal, vol. 64, no. 728
(January 1949), 31. For modernism as a return to the principles of Georgian architecture,
see Whyte, Englishness of English Architecture, 452.
45 W. Boesiger (ed.), Le Corbusier: oeuvre complte, volume 4: 19381946, Zurich: Girsberger,
1946, pp. 166167.
46 A. and P. Smithson, An Urban Project, in T. Dannatt (ed.), Architects Year Book 5 (London,
Elek, 1953), pp. 4854. See also D. van den Heuvel and M. Risselada (eds.), Alison and Peter
Smithson: From the House of the Future to a House of Today, Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2004,
pp. 6269;, and E. Mumford, The CIAM Discourses on Urbanism 19281960, Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 2000, pp. 232236.
47 Le Corbusier (trans. Frederick Etchells) The City of Tomorrow, London: Architectural Press,
1929/1978, p. 216.
48 Hodgkinson, Heroes and Villains, p. 2; also AA Archives, AA Register, 4th Year,
19531954.
49 Patrick Hodgkinson on Leslie Martin, Architectural Research Quarterly, 2001, vol. 5, no. 4,
299; see also Architectural Association Journal, vol. 71, no. 793 (June 1955), 31.
50 J. Miller, Custom and Innovation, p. 15; Neave Brown interview, 23 August 2010.
51 RIBA Library, PG Hodgkinson Biography File, CV (September 1973), p. 1; AA Archives,
AA Council Minute Book 19551961, p. 290.
52 L. Martin, The Collegiate Plan, Architectural Review, vol. 126, no. 750 (July 1959), 4345;
Roger Stonehouse, Colin St John Wilson: Buildings and Projects, (London: Black Dog, 2007,
pp. 9093; College Hall, Knighton, University of Leicester, Architectural Design, vol. 32,
no. 4 (April 1962), 186189; Trevor Dannatt: buildings and interiors 19511972, London:
Lund Humphries, 1972, p. 5.
53 The project was credited Leslie Martin in association with Colin St John Wilson, but
Wilsons input appears to have been negligible, although he included it in his oeuvre,
to Hodgkinsons intense annoyance. See Stonehouse, Colin St John Wilson, pp. 108111.
Hodgkinson and Wilson disputed their respective roles in the Martin projects, including
Harvey Court and the Oxford Law Library. For Hodgkinsons attack on Wilson see P.
Hodgkinson, The two minds of architecture: the quick and the dead, Journal of Architecture,
1997, vol. 2, no. 4, 337354.
54 J. Kerr, The Formulation of a Post-War Housing Policy in the Metropolitan Borough of
St Pancras 19391949 (unpublished MSc thesis, University College London, 1984) p. 41.
55 Metropolitan Borough of St Pancras (hereafter MBSP), Planning and Housing Development
Committee (hereafter PHDC), 17 November 1955, 5 January 1956, 30 May 1957, 4 July
1957, 12 September 1957; Planning and Housing Development (Plans) Sub-Committee
(hereafter PSC), 15 December 1955, 15 March 1956, 14 March 1957. Planning decisions
were one of the responsibilities of the LCC Architect, the position that Martin held from
1954 to 1956.
56 Patrick Hodgkinson on Leslie Martin, p. 298. Hodgkinson also states that Martin had
seen my student housing scheme published but there is no evidence to support this and the
fact that elsewhere Hodgkinson listed the places of publication of his undergraduate project
but included nothing earlier than 1972 makes it highly implausible.
57 See AA Journal, vol. 70, no. 784 (JulyAugust 1954), 31.
58 The RIBA Annual Discourse, 1957, by Professor Alvar Aalto, RIBA Journal, vol. 64, no.7
(May 1957), 258.
59 Hodgkinson, Handful of Homes, 19.
60 Housing development, St Pancras, London NW, 280. 136ppa was the density set for the
inner ring of London under Forshaw and Abercrombies County of London Plan: J. H.
Forshaw and P. Abercrombie, County of London Plan Prepared for the London County Council,
London: Macmillan, 1943, p. 115.
61 L. Martin, The Collegiate Plan, 4248.
62 MBSP, PSC, 26 June 1958, Outline report to accompany Stage 1 proposals for the
development of West Kentish Town Re-develoment Area, St Pancras, p. 2. The factual
description of the project was included in the text accompanying the publication of the
project in AD in 1959.
63 MBSP, PSC, 26 June 1958.
64 MBSP, Report of the PHDC, 16 October 1958. The inuential housing manager at St
Pancras, A. W. Davey, amplied these criticisms in a text accompanying the 1959 publication of the project in AD.
65 MBSP, PHDC, 15 September 1960, Communication from Sir Leslie Martin. For the
committees view, see MBSP, PSC, 26 July 1960.
66 Housing development, St Pancras, London NW, 282.
67 Hodgkinsons earliest studies for the Brunswick site, a series of freehand sketches
exploring alternative typologies, survive in his papers: RIBA Drawings Collection, Patrick
Hodgkinson Papers, PB790/1/45-70. See also Swenarton, Politics, 204; Melhuish, Life
and Times, p. 31.
68 Published in P. Hodgkinson, Redevelopment of Part of the Foundling Hospital Estate,
Bloomsbury, London, Lotus, vol. 7 (1970), 278.
69 Swenarton, Politics, 210211 and 214; Melhuish, Life and Times, p. 36.
70 Neave Brown, interview, 6 August 2008.
71 Hodgkinson, Handful of Homes, p. 19. For the Smithsons Golden Lane scheme see note
46.
72 L. Molinari, Continuit: A Response to Identity Crises. Ernesto Nathan Rogers and
Italian Architectural Culture after 1945 (unpublished PhD thesis, TU Delft, 2008), pp.
187189; Swenarton, Developing a New Format, 987.
73 Owens, Mixed Development, pp. 373411; Swenarton, Developing a New Format,
975976.
74 Neave Brown, The Form of Housing, Architectural Design, vol. 37, no. 9 (September 1967),
432433; Alexandra Road: Housing, School and Community Centre, Camden, London,
Architectural Review, vol. 166, no. 990 (August 1979), 7692; Swenarton, Developing a
New Format, 986989.
75 Patrick Hodgkinson on Leslie Martin, p. 298. Hodgkinsons attachment to Lethabys
emphasis on making and not just designing stayed with him: see Hodgkinson, My Kind of
Town, 72.
76 Gowan, Projects, p. 22. For the Brunswick as continuation of Georgian urbanism see
Hodgkinson, Redevelopment in Bloomsbury and P. Hodgkinson, Foundling Conception,
Architectural Review, 1972, vol. 152, no. 908 (October 1972), 216.
77 Patrick Hodgkinson on Leslie Martin, 300.
78 Hodgkinson, Heroes and Villains, p. 2. Hence for Hodgkinson Le Corbusier was both
hero and villain, his heroism as villainous as his villainy was heroic: ibid., p. 1.
257
Figure 13.0 Carlo Aymonino, Building A2: perspective section with savage and young lady (Carlo Aymonino
Archive, Rome).
13
MATTEOTTI VILLAGE AND
GALLARATESE 2: DESIGN CRITICISM
OF THE ITALIAN WELFARE STATE
Luca Molinari
Throughout the twentieth century the relationship between the welfare system and
architecture in Italy has been a problematic issue in relation to the changing and
contradictory political situation.
With the exceptions of the Fascist regime and the Ina-Casa Law of 1949, the state
dened a unied policy on architecture for the lower class while delegating housing
development to governments at local and regional level under departments dealing
with health, education and public housing. The complexity and fragmentation of the
resulting output has led to research and publications being largely focused on local
phenomena, while the overall question of the relationship between the welfare state
and architecture in Italy has been neglected.
Public housing (Case popolare) was the area in which the architectural community
was most actively involved and offered the most interesting proof in the twentieth
century of the close relationship existing between the ideology of housing policies
and design choices.
Housing and the state in the twentieth century

The rst national law on public housing (Italian Law no. 251, 31.05.1903) was
introduced in 1903 by Luigi Luzzati,1 the nance minister who ve years earlier had
brought old age pensions to Italy.
The 1903 Act made it possible for any municipality to establish an Independent
Institute for Public Housing (Istituto Autonomo di Case Popolari) to provide for
the construction of better houses for the poor.2 The Istituto depended nancially on
national and municipal resources as well as private donors, but the ow of funds was
invariably irregular, making it difficult to create a long-term housing programme.
The land, typically located on the outskirts of the city, would be donated by
the municipality. The Istituto obtained credit from local banks and, partially, by the
State. Between 1905 and the early 1920s most of the major Italian cities supported
the construction of public housing which involved some of Italys most talented
260
Luca Molinari
designers, but the number of buildings always fell short of what was required to meet
demographic pressure.
After 1925, the new Fascist regime focused on centralising the options related to
welfare facilities and dened a National Programme allowing for the construction of
new buildings for public purposes. In the 1930s, the Fascist government centralized
the activities of Public Housing in a new institution called Istituti Fascisti Autonomi
delle Case Popolari (IFACP, Autonomous Fascist Institutes of Popular Housing), in an
attempt to control social housing production for low-income earners and the lowermiddle classes.3 Welfare was conceived by Fascism as a service provided for citizens, as
a way to control Italian society and build consensus through the population.
Discussion of the language of the new popular housing was mainly centred in
Milan during the Triennale exhibitions of 1933 and 1936, where the Italian rationalist culture tried to offer proposals and solutions directly related to the debate
triggered by the 1929 CIAM Congress on housing for the existenzminumum.4 For
20 years Italian modernism was the official language used for social housing, the case
del fascio (local Fascist Party headquarters), recreational facilities, schools and hospitals
built on the Italian peninsula. The Fascist regime used architecture as a medium of
representation and materialisation of its ideological presence in Italian society, with
its social corporatist ideology materialized through the language of modern architecture and applied to the different housing typologies designed for each social and
professionalclass.
In 1938 the Fascist government introduced a new law (Italian Law no. 1165),
which gave further political and nancial autonomy to the Istituti in relation to the
municipalities. After the Second World War and the fall of the Fascist dictatorship,
as a cultural and symbolic reaction to the previous situation the new Republican
state rejected the idea of using a single vision of architecture, a decision that would
have a profound inuence on the development of the post-war welfare state. In 1949
another important law (Tupini Law no. 408, 02.07.1949) once again changed the
situation by allowing only the central government, through its agencies, rst Ina-Casa
(housing division of the lIstituto Nazionale delle Assicurazioni National Institute
of Insurance), and from 1963 GESCAL (Gestione Case Lavoratori Management of
Workers Homes), to fund the Institutes for Popular Housing. Only in 1971, with
Italian Law no. 865 (22.10.1971) did the situation change radically. With the aim of
providing a national policy for popular housing, rents and the relationship between
the new housing complex and the territory, the Institutes were dened as different
economic structures and political responsibility was transferred from the single municipality to the regione (region).
Architectural debates over housing after 1945

When reviewing the evolution of the different laws relating to the welfare state, we
can consider the Ina-Casa law as the only national welfare experience which, from
1949 to 1963, saw architecture as a specic and necessary tool.5 Two seven-year
Ina-Casa programmes (19491956 and 19561963) were responsible for more than
355,000 housing units being built in most of the Italian municipalities, accounting for
10 per cent of the dwellings built in that period in Italy.
Design Criticism of the Italian Welfare State
261
Figure 13.1a Carbonia, Sardinia. General view of the village in 1938 (Comune di Carbonia Archive).
Figure 13.1b Carbonia, Sardinia. View of the case operaie (workers housing) along via Satta, 1939 (Comune
di Carbonia Archive).
262
Luca Molinari
The social programme was radically inuenced by a Catholic vision in respect of

the village model (as opposed to a modern, urban vision) with low-density housing,
the use of traditional materials and the provision of a set of public spaces where
little communities and neighbourhoods could meet. Most of the young modernist
Italian designers, including BBPR, Adalberto Libera, Mario Ridol, Gi Ponti,
Luigi Cosenza, Giancarlo De Carlo, Mario Fiorentino, Lodovico Quaroni, Carlo
Aymonino, Figini and Pollini, etc., were involved in the Ina-Casa programme.
After 1963 the policy for popular housing was dispersed into local and fragmented
solutions, weakened by public funding shortages and the necessity of facing the
increasing demographic pressure that had become apparent at the beginning of the
1960s. The result, in most cases, was the large-scale production of popular housing
blocks, without any collective services to promote decent urban living.
The mid-1960s was a delicate and contradictory time for Italian society. Between
1955 and 1970, more than 10 million Italians migrated outside their region; cities
such as Milan and Turin saw a 50 per cent increase in their population, and in the
outer belt of Milan, population ows grew by 150 per cent in the same period.6 In
1951 only 26 Italian cities counted more than 100,000 residents; in 1971 this number
grew to 45 cities and the Italian population living in cities increased from nine million
to 16 million over the same period. The population increased due to immigration
overwhelming the outskirts of the most industrialized cities, and several municipalities
started intensive programmes for popular housing to confront a situation that was
becoming more and more dramatic. The Istituto di Case Popolari (IACP) of Milan
introduced prefabrication systems of the kind used in France to address the massive
construction of new social housing, and the low density model of Ina-Casa was
replaced by the use of high-rise buildings and high-density planning models.7
During the 1960s we recognize a series of ground-level experiences within the
Italian social housing sector, which encouraged the debate on the Italian design of
popular housing to move up a level, in contrast with the limits of traditional modernist
zoning. The design of popular housing suddenly became an area for political and
cultural debate, and a series of projects launched in the mid-1960s tried to provide
alternative visions in relation to the emerging, dramatic social situation.
One of the rst innovative interventions was the competition for the Barene di
San Giuliano in Mestre, held in 1958, when the CEP (Coordinamento dellEdilizia
Popolare Coordinating Body for Popular Housing) launched a national competition for a residential district to be built close to the industrial area of Venice-Mestre.
The winning group was coordinated by Ludovico Quaroni. Their proposal entailed
a signicant transformation in Italian architectural and urban planning culture in
terms of scale and architectural language. The new development created a visual
dialogue with the city of Venice, measuring itself against the historical city in a new
way: 47,000 rooms over a total surface area of 190 hectares, which became denser
around the semicircles of the business district. The semicircles and large plazas were
the privileged elements representing the future modern city. The criterion of formulating standard housing types was established, together with the creation of collective
facilities and dwellings built according to a modular, exible construction system.
The project for Barene San Giuliano continued during the 1960s, becoming one
of the key works pertinent to political criticism of the modernist approach to popular
housing and urban design, and one of the most advanced urban models for the welfare
state in Italy.
Quaroni was one of the key gures in the evolution of urban planning in Italy,
through his work as an urban designer with the seminal projects for Matera-La Martella
(19491952), Roma Tiburtino (19491954), and then Barene San Giuliano.8 At the
same time, he was recognised as a polemicist and an educator, as Professor of Urban
Design at the Universities of Florence and Rome. The discussion of the limitations
of the CIAM grid, when rigidly applied to the Italian urban periphery, reected the
political and cultural need to confront the overwhelming demographic pressure due
to the intense immigration to the main Italian northern cities. A similar debate took
place during the 1960s in Venice at the Faculty of Architecture (Istituto Universitario
di Architettura di Venezia or IUAV) under the direction of Giuseppe Samon.9
Considered one the fathers of Italian post-war urbanism, Samon was the founder of
the so-called School of Venice where most of the Italian modernist designers were
appointed as full professors to create the rst modernist faculty of architecture in
Italy. The designers originating from the Italian CIAM group and belonging to the
board of the magazine Casabella-continuit, such as Ignazio Gardella, Franco Albini,
Lodovico Belgioioso and Giancarlo De Carlo became the core of the new Faculty
of Architecture, creating one of the richest periods in Italian architectural culture.10
In 1963 Samon appointed Carlo Aymonino, Leonardo Benevolo, Manfredo
Tafuri, Mario Manieri Elia and Guido Canella as new professors, opening up and
extending the debate on the design processes for the contemporary town to a new
generation. The presence of De Carlo, Samon, Aymonino and later, Aldo Rossi
made IUAV one of the most important discussion forums in Italy, combining echoes
of the Team 10 practice with the nal years of Casabella-continuit.
The Venice modernist group shifted its focus from architecture to urban design,
viewing the design process as an advanced form of political criticism in respect of
Italian society.
During the second half of the 1960s, Giancarlo De Carlo and Carlo Aymonino
were each involved in two housing projects which shifted the debate on social
housing to two alternative positions: one represented by the Monte Amiata
Gallaratese housing complex in Milan by Aymonino and Aldo Rossi (19671972),
and the other by Matteotti Village in Terni by De Carlo (19691972). Although the
two projects look very different, both were the outcome of the political criticism
of the Italian welfare state, urban experiments that were conceived as offering an
alternative to the emerging, alienated periphery. Both De Carlo and Aymonino had
been trained within the urban cultural approach of CIAM, but from the late 1950s
had been inuenced by the debate on the British new towns11 and by the discussions of Team 10 on emerging architectural infrastructures, determined by a mix of
overlapping functions.
The projects in Milan and Terni originated from different economic and political
backgrounds. The Gallaratese housing complex was a nancial investment by the
Societ Mineraria Monte Amiata (Monte Amiata Mining Company) which, faced
by the crisis in the mining sector, had decided to invest in real estate speculation, in
the eld of popular housing. The Matteotti Village followed a different route: it was
the result of a direct investment made by Terni Industries, one of the most important
263
264
Luca Molinari
Italian steel producers, in constructing a new residential district for their workers, to
replace the old one dating back to the 1930s. Both the economic models emerged
from the crisis of the traditional welfare system and reected the evolution of the
relationship between public and private investors. Faced with this changing scenario,
both architectural solutions tried to provide alternative strategies and urban visions,
but at the same time, they were conceived by the two designers as an ideological
criticism of the system and Italian society.
Matteotti Village at Terni

Terni was one of the most important Italian steel producers. The company had been
founded in 1884 as Societ degli Alti Forni, fonderie e acciaierie di Terni (Blast
Furnace, Foundry and Steelwork Company of Terni) and from the outset it was a
strategic industrial plant for military production. In 1940, more than 10,000 people
were working for Terni, and even after the war, when the company entered the IRI
(Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale Institute for Industrial Reconstruction)12
network, Terni was among the ve leading industrial plants for steel production in
the world.
Like other big industrial corporations such as Olivetti, Fiat and Pirelli, Terni
invested in the construction of housing complexes and facilities for its workers. The
Matteotti Village represented the last effort to dene a new housing settlement for
more than 3,000 people living in the areas surrounding Terni. The rst village had
been built during the 1930s. The aim of Terni was to pull down the old settlement
and build a bigger one to house more people.
In the late 1960s, Gianlupo Osti, the President of Terni, had two interesting
consultants working for him: the young architectural historian Cesare De Seta, and
Domenico De Masi, a sociologist who had studied in Paris with Chombart de Lauwe
(see Chapter 6 in this book). De Masi suggested that Terni develop a participatory
process that could involve the future inhabitants of the new village, and De Seta
recommended calling in Giancarlo De Carlo, seen as the best protagonist for this kind
of design process.
Giancarlo De Carlo13 (19192005) was one of the most interesting gures of Italian
post-war architectural culture. A member of the Italian CIAM group and on the
board of Casabella-continuit from 1953 to 1956, together with Ludovico Quaroni and
Giuseppe Samon, he formulated an alternative and more complex approach to urban
planning, introducing the ideas of Team 10, which he had joined in 1959, in Italy.14
During the 1960s, De Carlo developed a set of cultural and political arguments aiming
at a drastic redenition of urban planning as a participatory and multi-layered method,
which would address the increasing complexity of contemporary urbanisation. The
involvement of De Carlo in the Team 10 meetings was fundamental in shaping the
cultural independence of his presence within Italian architectural culture. The Team
10 experience resulted in De Carlo organising the 1968 Triennale, based on the key
theme of the The Greater Number and on the sensitive and difficult relationship
between architecture and democracy in contemporary society.
At the same time, De Carlos experience in Urbino on the citys masterplan (1958
1964), the design of a new university campus (Collegio del Colle, 19621965) and
the new masterplan of the city centre and Borgo San Giuliano commissioned by the
Municipality of Rimini (19701972), were important in developing his understanding
of the relationship between the design process and participation by the common
citizen. De Carlo put forward the theory that the lower classes and the common
people needed to become involved in the process of designing the city.
Matteotti Village was a key project in testing this political and cultural vision. As
De Masi recalled in 2005:
Before asking the future inhabitants what kind of house they wanted, we had
to introduce them to new kinds of habitations and new ways of living in them.
Working in cooperation with Giulio Macchis RAI [Radiotelevisione Italiana]
program Habitat, which looked at city planning and architecture, Cesare
De Seta identied a number of house types that were totally different from
those in Terni. We selected four or ve of these, which became the subject of
documentaries, series of photographs and architectural plans. All of this became
an exhibition, to which all the future residents of the Matteotti Village came
Once this new concept of house and neighbourhood was created in the minds
of the future inhabitants, we worked intensively with them for a long time.
Two months of daily meetings, one in the morning and another in the
afternoon, [took place and] over three thousand people were involved.
This was the most complex task to which De Carlo subjected himself, with
the greatest sacrice, but also with growing enthusiasm. The project was
developed with tens of thousands of drawings that had accumulated during
the numerous, long meetings. De Carlo went back to Milan with them and
designed a series of different types of houses, and for each type he proposed
variations. He returned to Terni with wooden and cardboard models that reproduced the village and the meetings with the future inhabitants began again.
Many families could look at the models and choose the most suitable type from
forty or so different options.15
The exhibition curated by De Seta had been held at the Galleria Poliantea in Terni
in AprilMay 1970. Four contemporary housing settlements designed by European
architects (including Stirling & Gowans Preston and Atelier 5s Siedlung Halen)16
were presented to the population, introducing discussion on the future new project.
After one year of meetings and open discussions, the nal solution proposed by De
Carlo developed 800 houses with 45 alternative typological solutions. A great deal of
attention was given to the idea of a city in the form of a palace (una citt in forma di
palazzo), a well known humanistic motto by Baldassare Castiglione, which had been one
of the arguments discussed by Team 10 group during the meeting in Urbino in 1966.
The general layout of the Matteotti scheme (Figure 13.2) was based on an
elementary grid of parallel housing blocks, overlapped by a complex system of
public spaces, pedestrian routes separated by vehicular roads and a set of ramps, stairs,
landings and vertical connections, facilitating good relations between neighbours and
recalling the solution developed by Quaroni and Ridol at the Quartiere Tiburtino
in Rome (19491954). De Carlo had used similar concepts at the Collegio del Colle
in Urbino which had been presented at the Team 10 meeting in 1966,17 but the scale
265
266
Luca Molinari
Figure 13.2 Giancarlo De Carlo, Villaggio Matteotti, Terni, general view, photographed by Mimmo
Jodice, 1973 (Mimmo Jodice Archive, Napoli).
of Matteotti and the complexity of the intervention were greater and had to deal
with the inclusion of more than 3000 people. At the Matteotti Village there had been
extensive use of green areas and terraced gardens due to the idea that future inhabitants, who were mostly ex-farmers, needed open spaces around them to cultivate
their own gardens.
From a nancial perspective, the Village followed GESCAL housing standards, and
Terni shouldered the additional costs of such a complex design process. The whole
housing complex was built using the same concrete prefabricated system as the one
applied in Urbino for the Collegio del Colle in 1966. Despite this, the project reects the
inuence of late Brutalist production, as represented in Reyner Banhams 1966 book The
New Brutalism, mostly in relation to the works of Stirling & Gowan and the contemporary
works of Atelier 5, in relation to the housing grid and the sophisticated use of concrete.18
Unfortunately the Terni experience was not successful, as De Masi reminds us:
The residents of the old village opposed it. In effect, even though their housing
was decaying and squalid, they wanted to acquire ownership of the land. The
residents managed to involve two forces. On the one hand, there was the church
on the other was [the far left group] Lotta Continua (Constant Struggle),
which used the slogan You dont deport the proletariat. The initiative ended
up being advantageous for ve or six hundred people and very disadvantageous
for 3500 workers And this practically stopped the construction of the new
Villaggio Matteotti, which today is just a fragment of the original idea.19
Figure 13.3 Giancarlo De Carlo, Villaggio Matteotti, Terni, view of the pedestrian route, photographed
by Mimmo Jodice, 1973 (Mimmo Jodice Archive, Napoli).
267
268
Luca Molinari
Figure 13.4 Giancarlo De Carlo, Villaggio Matteotti, Terni, view of the pedestrian deck, photographed
Figure 13.5 Giancarlo De Carlo, Villaggio Matteotti, Terni, view of the private terraces, photographed
Only a quarter of the village was built, with no amenities and collective activities,
which had been conceived as an integral part of the overall project.
Gallaratese 2 housing complex in Milan

If De Carlo was responsible for developing the idea of broader participation in
the design process in Italy, looking to generate architecture as the outcome of a
democratic dialogue with the working class, the Gallaratese 2 housing complex in
Milan designed by Carlo Aymonino and Aldo Rossi in the same period represented
an opposing design approach, looking for the autonomy of architecture as a plastic,
ideological, contemporary monument which could save Italys peripheral areas.
Carlo Aymonino graduated in 1950 from the Faculty of Architecture in Rome;
he participated, under the direction of Ludovico Quaroni and Mario Ridol, in the
Figure 13.6 Carlo Aymonino, Gallaratese 2 general axonometric (study) (Giuseppe Marcialis Archive,
Venice).
269
270
Luca Molinari
construction of the Tiburtino district in Rome, under the framework of the Ina-Casa
plan (19501954).20 In the late 1950s he was a member of the Centro Studi (Study
Centre) of Casabella-continuit, publishing a series of essays dedicated to the study of urban
phenomena. From 1963, he was Professor of Urbanism at the IUAV in Venice, and his
atelier soon became one of the centres of debate on the revision of urban planning.
The Gallaratese housing complex21 was conceived as a result of an agreement
signed between Monte Amiata Mining Company (like Terni, part of the IRI network)
and the municipality of Milan under Law no. 167 which, for a short period, permitted
nancial collaboration between the public and private sectors on the construction of
low-cost housing. Monte Amiata owned 12 hectares of land near to the Quartiere
Gallaratese, designed by Piero Bottoni in the mid-1950s, and received permission to
build 169,000 cubic metres for 2700 inhabitants. In 1967, the company commissioned
the Rome-based studio AYDE (Carlo Aymonino, Maurizio Aymonino, Alessandro
De Rossi, Baldo De Rossi) to design the new housing complex, opening up a difficult
and complex process, which would not end until 1972. Carlo Aymonino was involved
throughout and in 1969 he invited Aldo Rossi to join the project and to undertake
the design of just one block inside the housing complex.22 Design work persisted on
the project until 1969 and involved the offices in both Milan and Rome. At the same
time, a series of meetings between the Monte Amiata company and Milan municipality decided on the numbers of dwellings and density of the housing complex, based
on the GESCALs standards on popular housing in Lombardy. Construction started in
1970 and ended in 1972 (Figures 13.8 and 13.10).
By reviewing the writings and reports by Aymonino and Rossi at that time, we can
easily recognise their vision of the design process as a form of political and cultural
criticism of the contemporary town and economy. The whole process was conceived
in opposition to the set of rules imposed by GESCAL and the municipality of Milan,
and the housing complex was designed as a coherent, urban element perceived as a
unique building23 that would demonstrate a different way of designing the city for
the future. Aymonino and Rossi insisted on the autonomy of the complex in relation
to the existing context; they considered the use of elementary geometric gures24 as
the best functional matrix25 to resolve the composition of the buildings.
In the same essay Aymonino commented that the Unit dhabitation at Marseille
was built outside the prevailing regulations, that the Centre of Cumbernauld was
realised by an institution independent of municipal decrees and by private nance,
[and] that the proposals of Ungers, Quaroni and so many others have almost never
been realised.26 The references he quotes extend from the Unit dhabitation to
Ungers and Quaroni, but one of his central interests in this period was in contemporary British housing projects and particularly in the crescent as an urban housing
typology, as would be shown in his 1971 book Origini e sviluppo della citt moderna
(Origin and Development of the Modern City).
The architects distinguished between the set of housing units inuenced by
the rules of GESCAL and economic choices, and the system of public facilities
and spaces, which would have given the complexity and richness of a new urban
compound to Gallaratese 2.
The autonomy of the public spaces is strengthened by the use of colours and
a rhetorical formalism applied to the pedestrian ramps, the open theatre and the
Figure 13.7 Carlo Aymonino, Building A2:

perspective section with Mirano Psychiatric
Hospital (Carlo Aymonino Archive, Rome).
connection to the parking area. Aymonino focused on the aggregation of dwellings

instead of the single unit, trying to avoid GESCALs standard product. He designed
more than 100 models of aggregation employing a total of 440 units. The richness
of the aggregative model conceived by Aymonino shapes the facades of the different
housing blocks and reects the idea of creating a dynamic, urban fragment. In contrast
was the intervention by Rossi, which dramatically increased the idea of the buildings
autonomy through the use of simple, repetitive elements. Rossis building, 180 metres
long, is organized around a rigid, obsessive application of simple geometries, and
relies on a set of porticos, which dene the long pedestrian route on the ground oor
(Figure 13.9). Gallaratese 2 perfectly embodies Rossis idea of the modern monument
able to react as a fragment in antithesis of the crisis of the contemporary city.
The design solutions provided by Aymonino and Rossi mirror the discussion and
research carried out at the IUAV ateliers in the 1960s, which ultimately materialized
in their two milestone books: Larchitettura della citt (The Architecture of the City) by
Rossi in 1966, and Origine e sviluppo della citt moderna (Origin and Development of the
Modern City) by Aymonino in 1971.27
As with the Matteotti Village in Terni, Gallaratese 2 failed as a social and urban
alternative model. Once completed in 1972, Monte Amiata tried to sell it off to the
municipality of Milan, and then in 1974 decided to sell the dwellings at a reduced price
to enable lower income earners to become home owners. In the same year, groups of
students and workers occupied the buildings until they were forcibly removed by the
271
Luca Molinari
272
Figure 13.8 Carlo Aymonino and Aldo Rossi, Gallaratese 2, composite drawing with site plan, ground oor plan and sections, 1969.
Figure 13.9 Aldo Rossi, Monte Amiata housing complex, Gallaratese 2, Milan, general view, 2013,
photographed by Luca Molinari.
Figure 13.10 Carlo Aymonino, Monte Amiata housing complex, Gallaratese 2, Milan, main view,
2013, photographed by Luca Molinari.
273
274
Luca Molinari
police. Most of the commercial and public uses envisaged for some of the units failed,
and after a few years, home owners decided to gate the housing complex, thwarting
the idea of Gallaratese 2 as an active fragment of a new, emerging city.28
Conclusion
The two projects for Milan and Terni represent a critical step in the history of Italian
architecture, and in the evolution of the national welfare system, representing a
radical political critique and the beginning of the new era of the late 1970s, when the
production of social housing complex progressively slowed down.
Both projects were the product of a complex and dramatic political and social
climate, both were driven by the belief that they could offer an alternative to the kind
of social housing, and the kind of suburban areas, being built in Italy at that time.
Especially in De Carlo, the critique of the welfare state system is seen in the need
to bring the common citizens, with their history and everyday life, to the centre of
the design process. In both cases the architectural proposal was considered as an act
that re-establishes the foundations of the contemporary city, opposing the progressive
fragmentation of the Italian urban periphery. The call for an autonomy of architecture (Aymonino and Rossi) and for a participatory process in the design proposals
(De Carlo) represented an ideological and poetic attempt to dene alternative cultural
and political strategies for modern Italian cities.
The social failure of both projects clearly exemplies the illusions and limitations of
an intelligentsia incapable of understanding the increasing complexities of the general
urban Italian condition, and the inability of the national architecture culture to dene
a common, political strategy that could confront the fragmented political scene.
Notes
1 P. Pecorari and P. Ballini, Luzzati, Luigi, in Dizionario Biograco degli Italiani, Rome:
Istituto dellEnciclopedia Italiana, Vol. 66, 2007.
2 M. Grandi and A. Pracchi, Milano. Guida allarchitettura moderna, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1980,
pp. 111136.
3 M. Salvati, La casa, in V. De Grazia and S. Luzzato (ed.), Dizionario del Fascismo, Turin:
Einaudi, vol.1, 2002, pp. 250253.
4 C. Aymonino (ed.), Labitazione razionale. Atti dei Congressi C.I.A.M. 19291930, Venice:
Marsilio ed., 1971; G. Ciucci, Gli architetti e il fascism, Turin: Einaudi, 1989, pp. 152159;
E. P. Mumford, The CIAM Discourses on Urbanism, 19281969, Harvard: MIT Press, 2002;
R. De Simone, Il razionalismo nellarchitettura italiana del primo Novecento, Bari: Laterza, 2011,
pp. 127163.
5 P. Di Biagi (ed.), La grande ricostruzione. Il Piano Ina-Casa e lItalia degli anni 50, Rome:
Donzelli, 2010; Istituto Luigi Sturzo (ed.), Fanfani e la casa. Gli anni Cinquanta e il modello
italiano di Welfare State, il Piano Ina-Casa, Rome: Rubettino, 2002.
6 P. Ginsborg, Storia dItalia dal dopoguerra a oggi. Societ e politica 19431988, Turin: Einaudi,
1989, pp. 283340; G. Crainz, Storia del miracolo italiano. Culture, identit, trasformazioni tra
anni cinquanta e sessanta, Roma: Donzelli, 1996.
7 Grandi and Pracchi, Milano, pp. 343373.
8 M. Tafuri, Ludovico Quaroni e lo sviluppo dellarchitettura moderna in Italia, Ivrea: Ed. di
Comunit, 1964; P. Ciorra, Ludovico Quaroni, 19111987, Milan: Electa, 1986; A. di Meo
Bonollo, Ludovico Quaroni. Una frammentazione del sapere per progettare la citt sica,
in P. di Biagi and P. Gabellini (ed.), Urbanisti italiani, Bari: Laterza, 1992, pp. 255325;
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
A. Belluzzi, Ludovico Quaroni, in A. Belluzzi and C. Conforti (ed.), Architettura italiana

19441994, Bari: Laterza, 1994, p. 228.
F. Infussi, Giuseppe Samon. Una cultura per conciliare tradizione e innovazione, Biagi
and Gabellini, pp. 153254.
L. Molinari, Continuit: a response to identity crises. Ernesto Nathan Rogers and Italian architecture
culture after 1945, Delft: TU Delft, 2008; L. Molinari, Tra continuit e crisi, in L. Molinari
and L. Giannetti (ed.), Continuit e crisi. Ernesto Nathan Rogers e la cultura architettonica italiana
del secondo dopoguerra, Florence: Alinea ed., 2010, pp. 2332.
See: A. Rossi, Lesperienza inglese e nuovi problemi urbanistici, Larchitettura e lurbanistica
in Inghilterra, Casabella-continuit, no. 250, 1961; and Zodiac, no. 18, 1968.
A state organisation originally formed by Mussolini which connected strategic industrial
plants all over Italy, IRI was widely admired in the 1960s, for example, by the Labour
government in the UK.
G. De Carlo, Gli spiriti dellarchitettura, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1992; A. Mioni and E.
Connie Occhialin (ed.), Giancarlo De Carlo. Immagini e frammenti, Milan: Electa, 1995; L.
Rossi, Giancarlo De Carlo, architetture, Milan: Mondadori, 1998; J. McKean, Giancarlo De
Carlo. Layered places, Stuttgart-London: Axel Menges, 2004; M. Guccione and A. Vittorini
(ed.), Giancarlo De Carlo. Le ragioni dellarchitettura, Milan: Electa, 2005.
L. Molinari, The spirits of architecture. Team 10 and the case of Urbino, in M. Risselada
and D. van den Heuvel (eds.), Team 10 in search of a Utopia of the present 19531981,
Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2005, pp. 301306.
D. De Masi, Participation and project, in Guccione and Vittorini (eds.), Giancarlo De
Carlo, Le ragioni, 2005, pp. 6667.
The four housing projects presented were Kingsbury, London by Clifford Wearden
Associates, Preston, UK by Stirling & Gowan, St Francis Square, San Francisco by Marquis
& Staller, and Siedlung Halen, Switzerland by Atelier 5.
A. Van Eyck, University College in Urbino by Giancarlo De Carlo, in Zodiac, no. 16,
1966, 170187.
R. Banham, The New Brutalism, London: The Architectural Press, 1966, pp. 102105,
164173.
De Masi, Participation, p. 69.
G. Priori, Carlo Aymonino, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1990; M. Toy (ed.), Carlo Aymonino,
London: John Wiley & Sons, 1996, n.46.
Belluzzi and Conforti, Architettura italiana, pp. 154162; L. Monica (ed.), Gallaratese,
Corviale, Zen, Parma: Festival Architettura, 2008.
V. Savi, Larchitettura di Aldo Rossi, Milan: Franco Angeli, 1977; A. Ferlenga, Aldo Rossi,
architetture 19591987, Milan: Electa, 1990.
Si pertanto cercato di accentuare il distacco dallintorno, ricorrendo a un impianto generale il pi
possibile compatto e costruito che al limite potesse risultare quasi un unico edicio, meglio ununica
costruzione, in Monica, Gallaratese, Corviale, Zen, p. 109.
Ibid, p. 109.
Ibid, p. 109.
Ibid, p. 110.
A. Rossi, Architettura della citt, Venice: Marsilio, 1966; C. Aymonino, Origine e sviluppo della
citt moderna, Venice: Marsilio, 1971.
Belluzzi and Conforti, Architettura italiana, p. 162.
275
Figure 14.0 The new Tema Village by Fry and Drew just after completion, ca. 1960 (Keith Jopp, Tema.
Ghanas new town and harbour, Accra: Ministry of Information, 1961).
14
EXPORTING NEW TOWNS:
THE WELFARE CITY IN AFRICA
Michelle Provoost
Looking at the cities that were built from scratch during the 1950s and 1960s across
the world, it is astonishing to see how uniform the manner was in which the world
population growth was spatially accommodated in places extremely remote from,
and different in culture and political background to one another. The roots of this
phenomenon go back to the New Towns built around London from the 1940s, which
soon became the panacea for urban growth in western Europe. The new cities around
Stockholm, Hoogvliet in the Netherlands and the Villes Nouvelles around Paris all
prolonged the ideas of the garden city movement and the neighbourhood unit, and
share the same DNA.
The concept of New Towns derived popularity from its promise to contain
metropolitan growth by dispersing the population to new cities of a limited size. It
posed a solid answer to the fear of big city problems. The concept was copied in
many countries, not only at the level of national planning but also at the level of the
urban plan, designed according to a hierarchical model using the neighbourhood unit,
zoning of urban functions, and an efficient traffic structure. New Towns were seen as
the way to contain urban growth and stimulate economic development. They became
the quintessential instrument to shape social democracy, to achieve an inclusive
society, guarantee security and social stability and relate housing to social services: in
short, to shape the welfare state.
A little later the same modernist urban planning started to pop up and spread in
developing, decolonizing countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. The concept
was not only spread through professional discourse, but as an export product it was
also stimulated by two other factors.
First, the ambition of the leaders of the new nation-states to position their countries
as modern, progressive states, free from colonial rule, as exemplied paradoxically by
using modern (western) architecture for the new (capital) cities they erected. This
mostly meant hiring western architects, since the profession of architecture and
planning was largely non-existent in the developing countries at that time.1 Often
a strong connection remained between the former colonizing power and the now
278
Michelle Provoost
independent nation-states, mirrored in the nationality of professionals working in the

former colony: architects from the UK designed cities in Ghana and Nigeria and those
from France in Morocco or Algeria.
Second, the export of the New Town principles took place against the background
of the Cold War, in which East and West were both competing for the loyalty of
the third world in every way they could.2 The aid agencies and funding foundations
concerned with the developing world (UN, Ford Foundation and World Bank, among
others) considered urban planning a valuable instrument in the areas most contested
during the Cold War, mainly the Middle East, India/Pakistan, West Africa and parts
of Latin America. In these areas large urban (re)developments were supported and
nanced.3 Mostly modernist architects were chosen to design the following cities
in the 1950s and 1960s: Karachi, Islamabad, Tema, Khartoum (all by Constantinos
Doxiadis), Tehran (Victor Gruen), Chandigarh (Le Corbusier), Cidade dos Motores
(Jos Luis Sert), Ciudad Guyana (Joint Institute for Urban Planning). Taken together,
these two tendencies meant that the popular concept of the New Towns and its
ordering principles were spread all over the former colonies.
This ubiquitous use of modern architecture and planning does not mean that the
results were uniform. In the 1950s there were already clearly different attitudes and
visions towards the relation between the modernisation ambition of the clients and the
interpretation of the local culture and vernacular architectural, planning and cultural
traditions and the degree to which they should play a role in the design. While architects agreed to negotiate between the aim of progress and modernization and the
necessity to consider local culture and traditions in urban planning, the practices and
outcomes reveal varied interpretations of the weight each aspect should carry. The
model of the New Town proved to be a exible enough model to be used by planners
searching to integrate the local and vernacular as well as by planners taking a more
universal approach towards the ideal urban future.
The example par excellence of this last attitude is probably Constantinos Doxiadis,
the Greek planner who designed more than 40 new cities around the world. His
work, and that of like-minded designers, has often been criticized for exporting
western ideas to diverse contexts and thereby creating because of the lack of
consideration with the local huge cultural problems. Refraining from a critical
attitude towards their clients, it has been outside the scope of recent architectural
historiography, which seems to be largely limited to the designers showing at least
some anxiety towards their assignments.4 This is one of the reasons Doxiadis has been
largely ignored until recently.5
There were urban planners who took a position in which the local, the social and
the vernacular played a more important role, while still adhering to the organizational
models of the English New Towns. The English architects, Alcock and Fry and Drew,
are examples of this. The city of Tema, Ghana, was the testing ground on which
Doxiadis, Alcock and Fry and Drew worked in the same decade, and therefore facilitates a comparison between the different attitudes. This case also shows the exibility
and versatility of the New Town concept, which could be adjusted for different scales,
speeds and programmes yet still maintain its essential spatial characteristics as well as
its societal ambitions.
Exporting New Towns
Alfred Alcock
In 1952, when Kwame Nkrumah was elected Prime Minister of what was then the
English colony of the Gold Coast, the decision was taken to build a brand new harbour
as part of the ambitious Volta River scheme. The Tema Development Corporation
was established, modelled after the English New Town administrative bodies. The
English planner Alfred Alcock (who previously had worked in Kumasi, Ghana, and
from 1945 to 1956 was town planning adviser to the Gold Coast) designed what
looked like a typical English New Town, consisting of seven neighbourhoods aimed
at a total population of 50.000.6 The choice of an Englishman like Alcock was logical
at this point, ve years before independence. But after 1957, despite independence,
there were rather more English advisors, planners and engineers working in Ghana.
Not only the spatial planning and the inherent social and political values, but also the
institutional organization; it was a complete package that had been exported from the
motherland to Ghana.
A. D. King rightly described this period as one when cultural, political and
economic links have, within a large network of global communications and a situation
of economic dependence, provided the means to continue the process of cultural
colonialism with the continued export of values, ideologies and planning models.7
In the rst half of the twentieth century, the garden city movement in England had
developed into more than a spatial concept. It had turned into a planning ideology
concerning many social, economic and political aspects of societal life. Moreover, it
had also become a mechanism with its own institutional structure, legislation and
techniques for implementation. King states It was this expertise which, in all its
assumptions, values and mechanisms and partly modied by local conditions, was
exported to colonial societies.8
This expertise was visible in the rst urban plan for Tema by Alcock.9 First, in the
organizational structure, after declaring Ordinance no. 35 the Tema Development
Corporation was established, modelled after the English New Town administrative
bodies.10 Second, the model of the English New Towns was recognizable in Alcocks
masterplan on many levels: in the organisation of the town based on distinct entities
(communities); in the separation of these communities by highways and green strips;
in the hierarchical organization of the roads, public services and neighbourhoods; in
the orderly layout of houses in neighbourhood units; in the provision of collective
services; and in the zoning of urban functions. The cornerstone of Alcocks plan was
the neighbourhood unit (approximately 20003000 residents), centred around an
elementary school and a market for daily groceries. Four neighbourhoods formed a
community, centred around middle schools, shops and a market, banks, post office and
offices. Seven communities made up the city of Tema. At the level of the entire city
there was a centre, this time completely in line with the accepted western models
of New Towns with the corporate offices, hotels, institutional buildings, the civic
centre, and higher education and entertainment facilities. By means of a multitude
of alternations, variations in size and shape of communities and neighbourhoods and
a non-orthogonal road system, the plan looked in the end less rational than this
enumeration might suggest (Figure 14.1).
279
280
Michelle Provoost
Figure 14.1 Plan for Tema New Town, based on A.E.S. Alcocks planning advice, 1959 (Overseas Building
Notes, no. 87, May 1963).
Exporting New Towns
Of the seven communities planned by Alcock, three were realized. In 1954

construction started and a team of English architects designed a series of standardized
housing units, 80 per cent of which were intended for those with lowest incomes:
small houses mainly for harbour workers.11 Fry and Drew were also involved and
designed white, modernist apartment blocks along the main roads.
In the plan and the architecture a number of adjustments to local culture became
visible. That knowledge of local customs was used in the planning of these neighbourhoods is revealed in Alcocks comments:
One of the reasons why units of this size may be successful in recreating feelings
of belonging is the West African custom, when people seek each others
company in the evening, of walking up and down the principal streets near their
homes meeting, greeting, and gossiping. This is also the time for purchasing
the evening meal and other small necessities of life. ... The footpath and street
system is therefore planned to focus on the few shops, the small trading area
and the open-air meeting place, so that this natural activity will be concentrated
and will bring people into contact with each other and thereby, it is hoped, will
recreate the social atmosphere of the village evenings.12
Fry and Drew

A small shing village, Tema Manhean (Tema village), stood in the way of the new
development and needed to be demolished for the new central business district
(Figure 14.2). For this, the English office of Maxwell Fry, Jane Drew and Denys
Lasdun was engaged.
Since 1945, Fry and Drew had been involved in town planning in the four English
colonies in West Africa Nigeria, The Gambia, Sierra Leone and the Gold Coast
and, thanks to their publication Village Housing in the Tropics (1947),13 the popular
how-to handbook for building in the African climate, were considered the experts
on the subject. They had developed a hands-on approach, working in cooperation
with African chiefs on all kinds of practical improvements for cities and villages. Fry
explained: We saw planning of course as being self-help. We found easy ways of
making latrines, easy ways of digging wells. We found out what kind of trees to grow.
We were intensely practical.14
At Tema they took the same approach, which can be characterized as social and
participatory. It was well described and documented in the 1966 book, Tema Manhean,
a study of resettlement, which was intended for other professionals to learn from.15 As
Otto Koenigsberger (the then head of the Department of Development and Tropical
Studies at the Architectural Association in London) stated in his introduction, in many
development projects a lack of knowledge and feeling for the soft factors had led to
inhuman decisions, damaging the interest of minority groups which were in the way.16
To avoid this, for Tema village they started by mapping the existing shing village, both
spatially and socially, and examining its cultural traditions and social structure. They did
this in a way that was respectful but without overly romanticizing what they found.
Instead of incorporating the villagers into the new city of Tema, it was decided
to build a new village so they could keep their own identity, while still improving
281
282
Michelle Provoost
Figure 14.2 Tema village, just before it was demolished. In the front the future harbour is taking shape;
in the background the rst houses are erected (Keith Jopp, Tema. Ghanas new town and harbour).
their living environment. This decision proved to have far-reaching consequences: to

protect its authenticity, the tribe was condemned to remain in an enclave of traditional
living while next door modern progress unfolded in all its attractiveness.
The process initiated for the resettlement of the Tema villagers was remarkable,
since it involved participation of the residents to a degree uncommon at that time,
even in European resettlement schemes. Also remarkable was the evaluation of the
process, done ten years after the start, which was published in Tema Manhean. It reads
as a story familiar to anyone involved in participation nowadays. The main problems
the architects encountered had to do with the power structure within the village
and the conicting interests of residents; at the basis of most conicts were issues of
identity, respect, individual versus collective interest, social structure and, last but not
least, money.
The process in Tema was organized and executed with innite care. Social workers
from the Ghanaian government counted door-by-door how many people lived in the
village and collected their wishes and demands. This led to a programme of requirements for Fry and Drew. However, there was considerable antagonism. The villagers
had been living in Tema for generations and did not want to leave the location of their
ancestors; as many as 228 holy village statues (fetishes) were buried in special places.
The villagers also needed to buy land in the new village, which they objected to, as
the land had always been theirs in the rst place. They did not want to change their
way of agriculture, of working the elds in rotation; in the new village they would
Exporting New Towns
have to change their ways, working the same elds every year. There were also issues
of trust: the chief wanted to work with the government and was therefore considered
a traitor; the housing prototypes of Fry, Drew and Lasdun were vandalized and a lot
of violence was directed at the social workers.17
The situation nally changed when a resettlement office was opened in the village
with as many as 26 social workers, who took the trouble to talk not only with representatives of the villagers but also with individual inhabitants, and who understood the
real, underlying power structures, in which women played an important role. Finally,
after seven years, the village community started to rehouse to the new location. But
even then, a bulldozer was needed to convince the last diehards to move.
Initially, Fry and Drew designed the new village with a small harbour close to the
aluminium smelter, made up from four neighbourhoods positioned along a winding
route following the curves of the landscape. Placed in the centre were all the institutions of the modern welfare village: the schools, shops and a marketplace, as well as the
chief s palace and a sh-smoking area. When presented to the villagers this met with
a lot of criticism on all levels. Despite the insights Fry and Drew must have derived
Figure 14.3 Second and nal plan for Tema village by Fry and Drew, ca. 1956 (G.W. Amarteio,
D.A.P. Butcher and D. Whitham, Tema Manhean, a study of resettlement, Accra: Ghana
Universities Press, 1966).
283
284
Michelle Provoost
from their extended social research, the villagers disapproved of the location, the
layout of the plan and the housing. The dogma of zoning seems to have been crucial
here: whereas Fry and Drew designed the village as four neighbourhoods with one
main centre, the villagers complained about the long distances to the centre and the
lack of exibility in using and extending the houses. The women especially had good
reason to prefer the smoke ovens and shops in the immediate vicinity of their houses
and objected to the centralization.
Fry and Drew had to go back to the drawing board and designed a completely
different plan, still based, however, on the hierarchical organization model of the New
Town (Figure 14.3). There were still four neighbourhoods and one central area and
the separation of functions remained. This time, however, the houses were designed
to better accommodate compound-style living with extended families, and were more
exible, so that families could extend the number of rooms themselves. The houses
consisted of a series of repeating standard types of circular, rectangular, diamond, and
star-shaped compounds. A sanitary block with toilets, centrally located in the neighbourhood, was shared by two or three compounds (160600 people). The original
design of the houses, of which a prototype was built, had a at roof but, since the
villagers deemed this only t for pigeons and not dignied enough, the design was
changed to a pitched roof.
While improving the basic conditions of water supply, washing, cooking, storage,
latrines and hygiene, Fry and Drew also respected the traditional family structures and
housing habits, and included traditional social elements in the houses like the veranda.
In vain, they tried to maintain the indigenous building traditions. They objected to the
introduction of prefabricated housing: it would be an indication of failure to do what
should be done, because it would mean that the Africans had not been helped in the way
they required to be helped, namely, to use their own brains and hands.18 Nonetheless,
the houses were constructed in sandcrete blocks and corrugated steelroofs.
However sensitive, the rather beautiful, formal design of the village was still not
suited to all Ghanaian habits, for example, running a small shop from the house. In fact
what Fry and Drew had designed was basically because of the zoning four living
quarters. But local culture could not be denied: small shops and adjustments to houses
popped up everywhere right from the start. Also, the inhabitants were disappointed
by the downsides of their authentic living: the houses in Tema Manhean were just as
expensive as those built by the Tema Development Corporation in the rst communities of Tema, but as a traditional African village they lacked electricity, a bathroom and
running water inside the house. The African project leaders of the rehousing process
understood only when it was too late what this would mean in the long run: As it
expands Tema will surround the new village, making its status as a slum area inevitable if
its standard of services remains so low in comparison with those of new housing areas.19
The villagers showed their discontent with their new environment in the survey
undertaken in the 1960s for the publication Tema Manhean. When asked for suggestions for improving their housing, they specied piped water and a latrine inside the
house, a bathroom with water supply, and electric light. Of course, these were not
normal amenities in a Ghanaian shing village, but in the new Tema, right on the site
where the villagers were removed from, they were standard. Standing at night, in the
oil and candlelit village and looking over to the Township, a blaze of light across the
Exporting New Towns
Chemu Lagoon, we were well able to understand these unusually high expectations
and the resentment which had formed them.20
Kwame Nkrumah
Meanwhile in Tema, it became clear that Alcocks plan for a well-designed
English-style New Town was completely unable to achieve the speed necessary to
accommodate the overwhelming inux of workers from Ghana and abroad, attracted
by the economic promises of Tema harbour. In 1959 the Prime Minister, Kwame
Nkrumah (19091972), hired Constantinos Doxiadis to deal with the large scale and
the fast pace of development. No doubt he also wanted to lose the English designers,
who were so closely associated with the former colonial power.
Nkrumah was Prime Minister of Ghana from 1952, after he had become the rst
elected leader of the Gold Coast Parliament, and President of Ghana from 1960 up
to his dismissal in 1966. Judgements on him vary widely. In Ghana he is honoured
as one of the founding fathers of the country, advocate of independence and the
pan-African ideal as well as great statesman. He became a popular hero in 1951,
when his party won with an overwhelming majority while he was still imprisoned
as a political activist, subsequently to be released from prison by the English rulers.21
Politically, he is generally regarded as a Marxist socialist, who tirelessly stressed the
damage wrought by capitalism.22 In his vision for an independent Ghana the country
would reach modernization and progress not by relying on traditional agriculture but
by turning itself into a state-led industrial power. To that goal an impressive number
of state-owned companies was projected in his ve-year plans, covering steel, shing,
construction, mining, etc.23 Nkrumah wanted to kick-start Ghanas development and
achieve fast and impressive results by unrivalled investments in industry and infrastructure, including roads, bridges, dams, schools and hospitals; he initially gave the
impression his endeavours would be successful. But historians seem to agree he went
out of line and spent too soon; too much money on thoughtless projects.24 When
on top of that in 1961 the prices of cocoa, the most important export product of
Ghana, suddenly plummeted, a huge problem arose. The country was in debt, the
industrialization programme came to a grinding halt, capital left the country, and in
1965 the wealthiest country of Africa went bankrupt. The year after that Nkrumah
was dismissed in a military coup, allegedly with support from the CIA.25
Nkrumahs Ghana was not a welfare state. The direct links between democracy,
welfare and capitalism did not exist; while in the beginning of his reign there was a
limited democracy, there was certainly no ambition to become a capitalist economy.
Nkrumah did, however, introduce a system of welfare services in Ghana, offering
almost free education, health care and social services. Because of the emphasis on this,
the New Town model, with its hierarchic ordering of housing centred on community
facilities, was ideal for his purpose.
For Nkrumahs modernisation of the country, the Volta dam at Akosombo was
crucial, and Tema, as the international harbour, was thus part of his most ambitious
transformation project. With his commitment to growth, progress and modernization
it is not hard to understand why he would turn to Constantinos Doxiadis as the
planner for the city that would be the epitome of his ambitions.
285
286
Michelle Provoost
Constantinos Doxiadis
While Doxiadis has become known for his large scale, universal planning of a
multitude of cities around the globe, he started out on a much more modest scale.
Immediately after the Second World War he devised self-help reconstruction projects
for the poor Greek families deprived of their houses. In what looks like a very modern
project now, he conceived of a method with which the residents could themselves
rebuild their houses without large costs. In fact, the start of his career was a small scale
and largely bottom-up project.26 In later projects he showed a lively interest in existing
conditions, vernacular architecture and the culture of minorities (like the waterArabians in Iraq he surveyed and portrayed extensively), but he believed rst and
foremost in the modern welfare state and the universal improvements it would make.
When he began working outside of Europe, he was confronted with other issues
that largely had to do with the enormous growth of that era: especially of demography and economics. To deal with this new scale, Doxiadis developed an hermetic
theoretical design and engineering system that he called Ekistics, the science of
human settlements. It offered a rational and scientic alternative to the existing
historical cities with their congestion of cars and people.27 In their place, Doxiadis
proposed a gridiron city model that would provide for a human-scaled environment
and at the same time facilitate unlimited growth. This model still had its roots in the
accepted New Town model, but took it to another level: the neighbourhood units
were standardized and enlarged, while using the familiar hierarchical order, and they
were put in an ever-expanding grid, which was not supposed to contain growth as
with the English New Towns, but on the contrary, to facilitate it.
At the same time, he recognized the need to offer the new urbanites (for
usually the inhabitants of his cities were migrants from the countryside) a stable
and dependable framework, both spatially and socially. Aware of the existing local
characteristics as well as of future global urbanization, he proposed Ecumenopolis, the
world-encompassing city, as the solution. Doxiadis was possibly the leading exponent
of the explicit application of comprehensive modernist planning models as vehicles
for freedom, peace and progress.
The extremely rational and apolitical character of Ekistics, and the way Doxiadis
promoted his work as a science, made it popular with American governmental and
aid agencies as well as with the new politicians of the new nation-states, striving for
progress. He presented his designs in grids, charts, diagrams and schemes, completely
objectied, with no aesthetics or personal choices. In this pre-computer era there
was no possible way to resemble computer work any closer. Doxiadis was denitely
no whimsical arty architect with crayons; he was a trustworthy engineer who could
deliver. His Ekistics was a visionary, but scientic system in which local data had to
be entered and the design solution seemed to follow automatically. A touch of local
landscape and architecture was inevitable and necessary, but not too much, since this
would be contradictory to the universal pretentions of Ekistics. The rationality of his
approach not only made him attractive for western organizations and aid agencies but
also for new leaders in the developing world, for whom progress and growth sounded
like magic words.
Exporting New Towns
The universal city

Taking an approach that was almost completely the opposite from that of Fry and
Drew, Doxiadis did not start his design of Tema by talking to chiefs and inhabitants or
by analyzing the local culture. His assignment was also different in the sense that he
was planning for a largely unknown population. Nonetheless, it was indicative of his
work that he did not start by zooming in, but by zooming out, namely by designing
a plan for the whole Accra-Tema region. He surveyed the economic, demographic,
geological, hydrological and traffic developments in the region and applied his
theories of Dynapolis. As in his urban plans for Baghdad and Islamabad, he envisioned
the future of the region as dynamic and growing. While lling in the area between
Accra and Tema with a repetitive series of same-sized neighbourhoods, the arrows on
his map showed how the metropolis would grow and extend in a northern direction.
On an even larger scale, he pictured the new motorway from Accra to Tema as the
rst part of a pan-African highway, connecting the newly independent countries by
land and not in the colonial way by sea the infrastructural equivalent of Nkrumahs
pan-African political ambitions.28
Figure 14.4 Masterplan for Tema by Doxiadis Associates, 1961 (DA Review, November 1968, vol.
4, no. 47, Athens: Doxiadis Associates. Copyright Constantinos and Emma Doxiadis Foundation).
287
288
Michelle Provoost
The plan for Tema (Figure 14.4) was based on a mathematical system which was
rigidly hierarchical, with roads in eight different classes ranging from the footpath
connecting the houses (Road I) to the highway (Road VIII) and residential areas
ranging from a small cluster of houses (Community Class I) to the city as a whole (CC
V) and even to the metropolitan region (CC VI).
The familiar hierarchical order of the English New Towns was thus fully rationalized and magnied in scale. Doxiadis systematized Alcocks plan, removing all its
whimsicalities and irregularities. Doxiadis plan for Tema belonged to the same family
as his other urban plans, be it Khartoum, Islamabad or Baghdad. To a high degree
it was a generic system, with its neutrality as the container for a complex of social
goals including community creation, emancipation, modernization and economic
progress. Only a limited inuence from local factors was allowed, which usually were
not cultural but involved local building traditions or the climate. In the case of Tema
this involved the striking diagonal orientation inside the communities, which derived
from the prevailing direction of the wind.
The two realised communities designed by Alcock were incorporated in an
orthogonal grid of main roads, which delineated a series of identical, numbered
Communities Class IV, each with its own centre, including shops, higher schools and
government buildings. Every community was divided into four smaller parts (CC III),
again each with its own centre containing daily shops and primary schools.
One of the most important goals for Doxiadis was to facilitate social cohesion
within the communities; a necessary goal in a country which still had many differences and feuds between tribes and also necessary for a city in which every inhabitant
was a newcomer without existing social structures to fall back on. Therefore, the
design of public buildings and public space was a priority. All these were carefully
standardized: the schools, the marketplaces and the government institutions, as well as
the roads, paths and squares, along with the planting and trees along them.
The development of the housing types shows how Doxiadis rejected the
compound house; in the many series of experimental houses he developed, there
were bungalows, terraced houses, apartment buildings and every variation possible was
tested, but they were all geared to the modern, nuclear family. Whereas Fry and Drew
had accepted local housing habits, he viewed them as unt for a modern industrialized
society. Again, Doxiadis was in line with Nkrumahs belief that the rapid modernization of the country was essential. This was argued as follows by the UKs Building
Research Station in its 1963 report on Tema:
As urbanization takes effect in Ghana, tribal ties and discipline must be superseded by other loyalties if a co-ordinated, law abiding society is to emerge.
It is therefore important to give the urban Ghanaian a sense of community
membership. The policy in Tema has been to discourage racial, tribal,
religious, or class segregation, in the hope that the citizens loyalty will be to
the neighbourhood, the community and town. This policy requires non-traditional types of housing accommodation. The tribal compound has no place
in Tema, and is replaced by the private family dwelling. Differentiation of
dwelling standards is purely by income, and all income-groups are represented
in each community.29
Exporting New Towns
While the city was indeed meant for a mix of incomes, these were rarely mixed
within a single community; those with low incomes were concentrated next to the
industrial zone and along the highway, while those with the highest incomes were
housed along the green areas and lagoons. Interesting is the attempt of Doxiadis to
Figure 14.5 The design of public space in the lower and lower middle income housing was given great
attention, photograph ca. 1967 (DA Review, July 1967, vol. 3, no. 31, Athens: Doxiadis Associates.
Copyright Constantinos and Emma Doxiadis Foundation).
Figure 14.6 Terraced houses equipped with gardens lined with palm trees in Community 4, just after
completion (DA Review, March 1968, vol. 4, no. 39, Athens: Doxiadis Associates. Copyright
Constantinos and Emma Doxiadis Foundation).
289
290
Michelle Provoost
also provide for the lowest incomes by including areas in which migrants could build
their own house; this programme was called Firm Foundations and was an example
of sites and services, the approach that was to be made popular in the 1970s by John
Turner, the British architect who advocated self-organized building.30 Doxiadis had
already worked with this method in Baghdad and when he saw how migrant workers
were unable to rent a house or room in Tema and instead moved to the fast-growing
neighbouring slum Aishaman, he incorporated the same concept at Tema.
The unlikely image of Doxiadis city was that of nicely designed, English-style
suburban terraced houses with gardens, lived in by immigrants from different tribes,
working in industry; it was an anxious, dynamic industrial metropolis designed as
a suburban pastoral. But Doxiadis sketches also show he was not romanticizing: it
would also be noisy, lively and even sordid, and that is exactly what happened.
The New Town as social engineering

The New Town was not only a product of the European welfare state; abroad it also
functioned as an invocation of the welfare state, as a pedagogical model of what could
and should be done.
In its rst ve-year plan (1951), announced while the country was still a British
colony (Ghana became independent in 1957), Nkrumahs government set out the
vision of a modern industrial society:
For the rst time in West Africa, a community could be built up enjoying all
the advantages of modern civilisation well designed houses, a well equipped
hospital and comprehensive health, social and cultural services, piped water
supplies and underground sewerage, planned and lighted streets, well laid out
stores and markets, pleasant gardens and open spaces, well equipped schools and
community centres.31
Despite the fact that Nkrumahs government invested in the full range of welfare
services, Ghana did not become a welfare state. It is true that Nkrumah was democratically elected, but after a few years his rule changed into a dictatorship. There was no
contract between civic society and the government, or between labour and capital: it
was just Nkrumah and the services (schools, health care, community centres, etc.) of
the modern welfare state.
Nkrumah might have seen different qualities in Doxiadis plan than the planner
himself. Doxiadis Ekistics was founded on a universal humanistic conviction, in which
the scientic and rational order of the city served the emancipation and possibilities
for development of each human being. Creating a comfortable and reliable framework
would allow residents to evolve into urban citizens while shaping their own social
structure. In that sense, the urban plan was an example of social engineering, aiming
at an open, democratic society. But for Nkrumah, the hierarchical and surveyable
structure of Tema might have had another meaning: surveyable is, after all, related to
regulation and control. That would not be exceptional, since both aspects the New
Town as mirror image of the open society and the New Town as a regulatory model
were also present in New Town building in Europe in the 1950s.
Exporting New Towns
From the early 1950s onwards, New Towns started to appear outside of the
European welfare state context in these new nation-states. Because of the Cold
War, the need was strongly felt to include these countries in the western sphere of
inuence.32 The New Towns, with their promise of democracy and open society were
seen as the perfect vehicle for the local challenges. English planners like Anthony
Minoprio, Max Lock and Fry and Drew were able to export their practices, but
also German, American, Swedish and French planners worked in what at that time
were the most contested areas of the Cold War: Iraq, Kuwait, Pakistan, India, Ghana,
Nigeria, etc.33 In all of these countries there existed a sense of urgency for the local
governments as well as for the western (aid) agencies supporting the local development to prevent societal unrest and to prevent these countries from going over to
the other side.34 In The Global Cold War, Odd Arne Westad analysed this position
and for the core values of the USA singled out liberty, anti-collectivism, a reluctance
to accept centralized political power, and an absolute belief in science and technology
as the progenitor of rational action.35 So, civilization equals rationality. It was the task
of the Americans to raise other people into a state of civilisation. The rational and
scientic modernist planning (especially of Doxiadis) was the most suitable instrument
to do so in urban planning and many projects were either nanced by American funds
or supported by diplomatic means.36
We can state that the exported New Towns were not only a product of the welfare
state, they also functioned as an advanced post of the welfare state, at least in its U.S.
version, and hence as a regulating and pedagogical system to achieve a democratic,
open society. The widespread support for this concept shows how trust in the power
of modernist planning to achieve change was virtually unlimited at the time. This is
a trust we nowadays lack and which in hindsight, when we look at how development
in the countries concerned really took place, seems rather nave.
Models for urbanization

The work of Fry and Drew and Doxiadis in Tema could not have been further apart.
One putting emphasis on the local, the other on the universal; one choosing a participatory planning process, the other committed to top-down planning; one working at
the scale of a village, the other at that of what at the time was the biggest city in Ghana.
Some of these contrasts are the result of the different assignments Fry and Drew
and Doxiadis were given: the urban scale was a given for Doxiadis and residents
participation was hardly an option for him since he designed for a largely unknown
population. However, the question of to what extent the local culture, habits and
traditions are of signicance in urban planning for a strongly urbanizing area is relevant
even now and is the subject of debate in the context of present global urbanization.37
What, if anything, can be concluded about the effectiveness of these contrasting
approaches if we look at Tema and at the current state of the environments the two
offices designed?
As was predicted in the 1960s, Fry and Drews creation, Tema village, has become a
slum (Figures 14.7 and 14.8). The decision to respect Tema village as an autonomous
entity in order to safeguard the identity of the villagers has not worked well. It has
even made the area into the ghetto of the original tribal (Ga) community inside
291
292
Michelle Provoost
Figure 14.7 Old and upgraded canoes in the canoe harbour of Tema village, against the background of the
Valco Aluminum factory, 2007 (Michelle Provoost).
Figure 14.8 The original compound houses in Tema village, 2007 (Michelle Provoost).
Exporting New Towns
Tema: living conditions are worse, housing and amenities are cheaper and less attractive
than in Tema; the village people are living literally in the smoke of Temas industry,
and while the traditional shing still exists, it is, thanks to international competition,
only in a subservient way. There is still a chief, who has his (concrete) palace and traditional court household, but he mainly ghts to get compensation for the crowded and
polluted state the village is in. The houses by Fry and Drew are hardly recognizable,
squeezed between the many extensions and illegal buildings erected between, above
and around them. It is a poor, polluted area, cramped in by industry, looking at its
next-door neighbour Tema, where everything is better and more hopeful. The desire
to respect the original living habits and social structure of the villagers has been
overtaken by the reality of the fast-modernizing outside world and has resulted in the
villagers growing more dissatised by the day. The village is not an enclave anymore
but economically and socially part of modern Tema. The resentment over their resettlement and the bad deal that the villagers feel they got lives on today.
The city of Tema does not look like a clean English garden city anymore, as it did
shortly after completion (Figures 14.9 and 14.10). The modernist terraced houses
are hidden behind self-built rooms and shops and the wide streets are lined with
illegal kiosks. Though not intended this way, the New Town still takes advantage
of the unusual amount of open space that was originally designed. Also, the institutions that were planned schools, hospitals, churches and community centres seem
to function well and are widely and actively used. Being one of the few rationally
planned environments in the Accra region, Tema is regarded in Ghana as a desirable
place to live. The city has maintained some of its pioneering New Town character; to
be called a Tema-boy is a compliment and means you are taking opportunities and
will climb the social ladder. While those with the lowest incomes have no choice but
to settle in the nearby Aishaman self-organized settlement, Tema seems to have turned
into a haven for the middle class, with plans to redevelop the rst public housing areas
by replacing them with commercial housing.
Even though we cannot attribute the success or otherwise of the two areas solely
to the designers or their urban concepts, the comparison shows that the respectful,
participatory method does not necessarily lead to a satisfactory solution and that the
top-down, large-scale method of planning does not necessarily lead to a cultural disaster.
The comparison between the two areas and the two visions they represent becomes
all the more interesting when we consider the situation today. There is now, once
again, a huge urbanization taking place worldwide, which needs to be accommodated. It has been a major topic of urban planning discourse, particularly since 2007,
when the urban world population passed the 50 per cent barrier. The extrapolation
of this trend has triggered visions which echo the 1950s and 1960s in the sense
that once again, growth (demographic, economic) is the main driver behind urban
development.38
Another parallel is that there is now a marked division between academia and
theory and practice. Academic discourse focuses on small-scale participation and
bottom-up projects, on slums and self-organization.39 Meanwhile, a small number of
huge western offices such as HOK, KPF and SHoP are designing and building largely
generic cities of unprecedented scale in Asia and Africa, from New Songdo (South
Korea) to Kigamboni (Tanzania) and Konza City (Kenya).40 The export of western
293
294
Michelle Provoost
Figure 14.9 Some houses in Tema city Community 4 still have gardens, but most have used them to
extend their living spaces, 2007 (Michelle Provoost).
Figure 14.10 Schools and churches are the organising focal points in many Tema city communities, 2007
(Michelle Provoost).
Exporting New Towns
ideas, though it may seem like an outdated phenomenon of the Cold War period, is
very much alive, as urbanism has become a globalized profession and economy.41 The
only recent change in this is that Singaporean, Chinese and Korean offices are now
also exporting their planning expertise to Africa, Iran and India amongst others.42
In the present western discourse on urbanization the prevailing (and politically
correct) view is close to the approach that Fry and Drew were taking: one should
respect local habits and culture. However, the case of Tema poses the question of
whether it is possible to build for huge urbanization solely with small-scale, participatory and contextual methods. The alternative approach, large-scale, top-down
planning, has become suspect and generic planning has been rightfully judged on its
many shortcomings. Looking at the history of Tema we might conclude that both
approaches, with their advantages and disadvantages, are needed in order to accommodate rapid urbanization. Only a combination of these two attitudes and their
methods will work and might lead to a resilient city in the long term: a combination
of the local and the universal, the bottom-up and the top-down, the technocratic and
the participatory, the large scale and the small scale, the visionary and the practical.
Meanwhile, it would be hazardous to neglect all the large-scale, top-down cities being
planned by multinational commercial rms at the moment, not least because of their
omnipresence. Cities such as Songjiang in China and Lavasa in India, as well as African
cities such as Kigamboni and Konza, will house millions of people over the coming
decades.43 A better understanding of (the history of) the mainstream of generic urban
planning and the mechanisms behind it (political, economic and nancial) is required
and, however bleak, might even prove fascinating.
Notes
1 Patrick Abercrombie, Antony Minoprio, Max Lock and Fry and Drew were among the
English planners and architects who started working in developing countries after initially
working on the British New Towns.
2 M. Provoost, New Towns on the Cold War Frontier. How modern urban planning was
exported as an instrument in the battle for the developing world. Eurozine, published 2006,
www.eurozine.com/articles/2006-06-28-provoost-en.html. See also . Stanek and T. Avermaete
(eds) Cold War Transfer. Architecture and Planning from the Socialist Countries to the
Third World, themed issue of Journal of Architecture, 2012, vol. 17, no.3.
3 Many of the insights into the political and nancial background of New Town planning
are based on the ongoing research project by Crimson Architectural Historians, New
Towns on the Cold War Frontier, forthcoming publication in 2014. For the role of American
charities in the support for the export of modernist planning to developing countries,
see L. Winnick, Ford History, unpublished manuscript, Ford Foundation Archives; G. R.
Hess, Waging the Cold War in the Third World: The Foundations and the Challenges of
Development, in L. J. Friedman, M. D. McGarvie (ed.), Charity, Philanthropy, and Civility in
American History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 319339.; F. X. Sutton
The Ford Foundation: The Early Years, in Daedalus, Winter 1987, vol. 116, no. 1; Robert
F. Arnove (ed.), Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism. The Foundations at Home and Abroad,
Boston: Indiana University Press, 1980.
4 See S. Williams Goldhagen and R. Legault (ed.), Anxious Modernisms. Experimentations in
Postwar Architectural Culture, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002.
5 Recent publications include A.-A. Kyrtsis, Constantinos A. Doxiadis. Texts, Design Drawings,
Settlements, Athens: Ikaros, 2006; L. Theodosis, Containing Baghdad: Constantinos
Doxiadiss Program for a Developing Nation, in P. Azara (ed.) Ciudad del Espijismo: Bagdad,
de Wright a Venturi, Barcelona: Departament de Composici Arquitectonica, ETSAB-UPC,
295
296
Michelle Provoost
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
2008, p. 167172; P. Pyla, Planetary Home and Garden: Doxiadiss EnvironmentDevelopment Politics, Grey Room 2009 no. 36, p. 635; V. dAuria, From Tropical
Transitions to Ekistic Experimentation: Doxiadis Associates in Tema, Ghana, Positions: On
Modern Architecture and Urbanism/Histories and Theories, 2010 no. 1, p. 4063.
A. E. S. Alcock was Town Planning Adviser to the Gold Coast from 1945 to 1956 and
worked with Fry and Drew on other occasions. See I. Jackson, A. E. S. Alcock and the
Planning of Asawasi, Kumasi, http://transnationalarchitecturegroup.wordpress.com/2013/04/12/
tropical-architecture-current-research-4
A. D. King, Exporting planning: the colonial and neo-colonial experience, in G. E.
Cherry (ed.), Shaping an Urban World, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1980, p. 205.
King, Exporting planning: the colonial and neo-colonial experience, p. 210.
A. E. S. Alcock, A New Town in the Gold Coast, Town and Country Planning, January
1955, p. 5155.
See E. C. Kirchherr, Tema 19511962: The Evolution of a Planned City in West Africa,
Urban Studies, 1968, vol. 5, no. 2, p. 207217.
Chief Architect and Town Planner since 1954 was T. S. Clerk. Architects: D. C. Robinson,
D. Gillies-Reyburn; N. R. Holman, M. J. Hirst, W. D. Ferguson; C. Kossack, G. Rochford,
D. B. Duck, H. G. Herbert. See D. C. Robinson, Development of the New Town of
Tema, Ghana, Architectural Design 1959 nr. 4, p. 138140.
Cited in Kirchherr, Tema 19511962: The Evolution of a Planned City in West Africa,
p.207217.
E. M. Fry and J. B. Drew, Village Housing in the Tropics, London: L. Humphries, 1947.
Max Fry. Inspirations, friendships and achievements of a lifetime in the modern movement,
Building, 31 Oct. 1975, p. 56.
G. W. Amarteio, D. A. P. Butcher and D. Whitham, Tema Manhean, a Study of Resettlement,
Accra: Ghana Universities Press, 1966.
Amarteio, Butcher, Whitham, Tema Manhean, a Study of Resettlement, p. v.
The official name of the office included Denys Lasdun. It does not seem that he was
involved in any way in planning Tema village.
M. Fry and J. Drew Colonial planning and Housing, The Architectural Association Journal,
Vol. LXII.707, November 1946, p. 61.
Amarteio, Butcher, Whitham, Tema Manhean, a Study of Resettlement, p. 6465.
Amarteio, Butcher, Whitham, Tema Manhean, a Study of Resettlement, p. 6162.
M. Meredith, The State of Africa. A History of Fifty Years of Independence, London: Simon &
Schuster, 2005.
See Meredith, The State of Africa. A History of Fifty Years of Independence, 2005; B. Davidson,
Black Star: A View of the Life and Times of Kwame Nkrumah, Woodbridge: James Currey
Publishers, 2007. See also the many publications and lectures by Kwame Nkrumah himself,
especially Neo-colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism (1965) and African Socialism Revisited
(1967).
In 1966 more than fty state-led companies had been started. See Meredith, The State of
Africa. A History of Fifty Years of Independence, 2005, p. 185.
Meredith, The State of Africa. A History of Fifty Years of Independence, 2005, p. 184.
J. Stockwell, Nkrumah. How the CIA overthrew his government, in The Insight
Newspaper, March 17 2013.
For the Greek Recovery Program see Doxiadis Archives, Athens, www.doxiadis.org. See
also G. L. Reed, The Greek Villager houses himself , in IFHTP Newssheet 1951 August,
p. 2224.
C. A. Doxiadis, Ekistics. An Introduction to the Science of Human Settlements, New York:
Oxford University Press, 1968.
Toward an African Transport Plan, General Reports DOX-GA 1-3, Jan 1961Mar 1962,
Constantinos A. Doxiadis Archives, Athens.
Industrial Research of the Tropical Building Section, Building Research Station,
Community Development at Tema, Ghana, Overseas Building Notes, vol. 87, May 1963,
p. 6.
See R. Harris, Silence of the experts, aided self-help housing 19391954, Habitat
International, vol. 22 no 2, June 1988, p. 165198.
Exporting New Towns
31 K. Jopp, Tema. Ghanas new town and harbour, Accra: Ministry of Information, 1961, p. 8.
32 See, for example, A. R. Pierce, Woodrow Wilson and Harry Truman. Mission and Power in
American Foreign Policy, Westport: Praeger, 2003; The United Nations Development Decade.
Proposals for Action, Report of the Secretary General of the United Nations, New York,
1962.
33 On this subject see Stanek and Avermaete, Cold War Transfer. Architecture and Planning
from the Socialist Countries to the Third World, 2012.
34 See F. Saunders, The Cultural Cold War. The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, New York:
The New Press, 2000.
35 O. A. Westad, The Global Cold War. Third World Interventions and the Making of our Times,
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
36 Ibid.
37 This discussion becomes most visible in the curricula of, and the symposia organized by,
architecture and planning universities and research institutes across the world. See, for
example, The Urban Design Laboratory at the ETH, Zrich (led by Marc Angelil) and
the work of Kees Christiaanse and the Urban Think Tank Chair at the same University;
The Vertical Cities Asia International Design Competition organized by the National
University of Singapore; The Global Housing Studio at the TU Delft; Symposium Urban
Design: Conditions and Projections, Febr. 34 2012, Harvard GSD. Publications on the
topic include Urhahn Urban Design, The Spontaneous City, Amsterdam: Bis Publishers,
2011; M. Provoost (ed.), New Towns for the 21st Century. The Planned vs the Unplanned
City, Amsterdam: SUN Publishers, 2010; J. Chase, M. Crawford and J. Kaliski, Everyday
Urbanism, New York: Monacelli Press, 2008. See also note 39.
38 R. Burdett and D. Sudjic (eds), The Endless City, The Urban Age Project by the London School
of Economics and Deutsche Banks Alfred Herrhausen Society, London: Phaidon, 2010.
39 A large number of studies have been dedicated to the informal city in the last decade,
notably A. Roy and N. AlSayyad (eds), Urban Informality: Transnational Perspectives from
the Middle East, South Asia, and Latin America, Lanham: Lexington Books, 2004; A.
Brillembourg, K. Feireiss and H. Klumpner (eds), Informal City. Caracas Case, Munich:
Prestel Publishing, 2005; F. Hernndez, P. Kellett and L. K. Allen (eds), Rethinking the
Informal City. Critical Perspectives from Latin-America, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010.
40 Many examples of this are to be found in the International New Town Institutes (INTI)
database: www.newtowninstitute.org as well as in R. Keeton, Rising in the East. Contemporary
New Towns in Asia, Amsterdam: SUN Publishers, 2011.
41 See Volume, Winter 2012 no 34, Theme issue: City in a Box.
42 This information comes from ongoing research by INTI, titled New New Towns. See www.
newtowninstitute.org
43 See Keeton, Rising in the East. Contemporary New Towns in Asia, 2011. See also database
INTI, www.newtowninstitute.org
297
Figure 15.0 Mark 1 blocks on Kwun Tong resettlement estate, Kowloon, Hong Kong (built 19581959,
redeveloped by HKHA 19831991) photographed by Miles Glendinning in 1983.
15
FROM EUROPEAN WELFARE STATE
TO ASIAN CAPITALISM: THE
TRANSFORMATION OF BRITISH
PUBLIC HOUSING IN HONG KONG
AND SINGAPORE
Miles Glendinning
The international foundation narrative of the history of public housing has revolved
almost exclusively around Europe and North America, spanning from the earlytwentieth century up to the 1970s and 80s.1 This narrative comprises a relatively
restricted palette of well-known world-outlooks, often polarised against each other in
stereotyped ways as between the European welfare state and the U.S. combination of
capitalism with residual public housing; or between Soviet communism and western
social democracy, or between the supposed homogeneity of the Soviet-bloc Plattenbau
(prefabricated housing) and western European diversity. But these programmes in
Europe and North America had one thing in common the fact that most of them
came to an end, often rather dramatically: earlier in some western countries, later in
the Soviet case (19891991). In Europe and North America, public housing is seen
today as a closed subject, a twentieth-century phenomenon that is no longer in active
development, but is now a matter of management or even dismantlement.2
Elsewhere in the world, however, the picture is different, especially in eastern Asia,
which is today witnessing massive public housing construction, especially in mainland
China. These programmes are open rather than closed in character, spanning several
generations (like only a few European programmes, notably that of Vienna) and
continuing today. And they are bound up not with welfare state social democracy in
the western European sense, but with other values, notably a sometimes authoritarian,
socially-anchored free-enterprise capitalism.
Less well-known, however, is that these Asian programmes have signicant roots
in the wider history of European welfare-state mass housing: that the two narratives, the old and the new, are closely interrelated, especially through mechanisms
of colonialism and decolonization. This chapter sets out to begin the process of
excavating the two most important of these roots: the now 60-year-old mass housing
programmes of the mini-states of Hong Kong and Singapore. This was a period
dominated in Singapore by the rule of the Peoples Action Party, or PAP (under Lee
Kuan Yew, who took power in 1959 and in 1965 led Singapore to independence),
and in Hong Kong by the last decades of British colonial rule until 1997, notably the
300
Miles Glendinning
decade-long administration (19711982) of the most forcefully reforming Governor,

Sir Murray MacLehose.3 The best-known book on Hong Kong and Singapore
housing, Castells, Goh and Kwoks The Shek Kip Mei Syndrome (1990), although
rich in data on social, political and (especially) economic factors, contains relatively
little specic material on the often extraordinary built environments created by these
programmes.4 Unsurprisingly, given their common background in British colonialism, policy-makers and writers in the two territories have usually been well aware of
developments in the other, a tendency conducive to a sense of rivalry although there
is a strong contrast between the relatively low-key publications produced in or about
Hong Kong, and the more politicized character of writing on Singapore housing,
dominated by celebratory, highly affirmative accounts.5
This chapter, which sets out to present a preliminary overview within a longerterm research programme, is not concerned with any judgement of which of these
two remarkable programmes was better. The chapter has two specic objectives:
rst, to discuss how the programmes main features, including both their organization
and their architecture and built form, were interrelated with European practices and
precedents through the British colonial connection, and second, to analyse how far
these programmes fell within the western denition of the welfare state at all. It
argues that although the two programmes did, indeed, extensively appropriate and
transform European patterns and policies, this was not through direct, cause-andeffect contact with innovative or architecturally advanced western precedents but
indirectly and in a much more diffuse way, through long-established administrative
and political mechanisms of British colonialism and, even more importantly, through
the broad cultural-political-administrative processes of decolonization. The resulting
policies and built-forms bore a somewhat semi-detached relationship to the ethos
of welfare state architecture in the West, and thus to the foundation narrative of
masshousing.
Both territories were originally British colonial city-state ports in enclave
locations: a peninsula plus archipelago in the case of Hong Kong, and an island
closely abutting the Malayan mainland in the case of Singapore. In area, both are
small in conventional nation-state terms, but with Hong Kong signicantly the larger:
423 square miles as against 270 square miles in 2011. During the second half of the
twentieth century, both resembled some earlier hotspots of mass housing in Europe,
such as 1920s Red Vienna, in being geopolitically isolated siege societies confronted
with ferocious demographic and political emergencies, in this instance following the
decline of British imperial power in Asia and the Communist revolution in China.
In both cases, the post-war decades saw a rapid increase in population, in the case of
Hong Kong from 1.7 million in 1947 to 3.1 million in 1960 and 7.1 million in 2011,
and in Singapore from 0.9 million to 1.6 million and 5.2 million in the same years. In
both cases, mass housing became the foundation of effective decolonisation strategies,
shifting from emergency expedients to settled long-term policies. In both cases, this
process involved signicant transfer of policies and forms from mother country to
(ex)colony. But this happened in markedly divergent ways in the two cases.
From European Welfare State to Asian Capitalism
British public housing and planning: point of departure?

Our overview necessarily begins with the rst question: the link between these
programmes and British colonial precedent. Here we need to review the most
distinctive aspects of British welfare-state public housing and public housing architecture, seen in a comparative international context, and then pinpoint the divergent
ways in which those practices were appropriated and transformed during Asian
decolonisation and post-colonialism in Hong Kong and Singapore.
Crucial to the post-war public housing system in the UK was the uniquely strong
position of local, rather than national, politics in addressing the housing question.
Among the general models of the welfare-state proposed by Esping-Andersen
and others, Britain generally conformed to the liberal model, which combined
commodied elements with direct interventionism by state agencies. Within public
housing, the dominant form of intervention was the system of council housing:
housing directly built and rented out by municipal town and city authorities and
thus subject to the intense pressures and conicts of local politics, tending often to
foreground quantity rather than quality. But there was also a secondary stream of
local housing production separate from local politics, including the New Towns
(masterminded by colonial-style government administrators and architects and
dominated by enlightened design and planning) as well as national housing organizations in Scotland and Northern Ireland (the Scottish Special Housing Association
and the Northern Ireland Housing Trust/Executive). Unlike the Continental focus
on peripheral, suburban mass housing, British council housing combined this with
large-scale, invasive urban slum redevelopment.6
Architecturally speaking, the outcome was an extreme diversity and individuality.
At one extreme of the municipal spectrum was a production-dominated, engineerled approach in cities like Glasgow or Salford, where architects were kept rmly
subjugated to local-political pressure for output. The other extreme, exemplied
by the London County Council (LCC) was an insistence on architectural autonomy
and constantly uctuating ideas and forms. In the new towns, there was a different
recipe of professionally dominated harmonisation, focused on city and regional
planning, involving extensive coordination between planning, design and buildingproduction organisations. In the design-conscious authorities, architectural solutions
were usually far more variegated than the production centres, avoiding extreme,
unremitting density and reecting the rapid shifts in architectural fashion, from mixed
developments of slim towers and low-rise terraces in the 1950s to more complex
deck-access or low-rise high-density in the 1960s/early 1970s. In construction and
contract-organization, there was limited interest in the heavy concrete prefabrication
systems that reigned supreme in Eastern Europe and featured prominently in some
western countries, notably France.7
How much, and how, were these patterns diffused across the declining British
empire, and especially in Hong Kong and Singapore? Not, certainly, through the
uniquely British hegemonic role of council housing, with its heated local political
struggles, but rather, through a more diffuse process led partly by competing professional groups within the colonial administrations, including the engineers of the
ubiquitous Public Works Departments (PWDs) and the pioneers of planning and
301
302
Miles Glendinning
good design, often consultants sent from London to advise or produce reports.
As we will see below, in Hong Kong and Singapore the tendency was to unify and
coordinate housing production on a city-state-national rather than local basis.8
Hong Kong and Singapore: political and cultural context

At rst glance, both Hong Kong and Singapore were, and are, so wedded to freemarket capitalism as to fall outside even the most liberal or residual denitions of the
welfare state.9 But if we contextualize them within the processes of decolonization, it
becomes clear they were driven by political world-outlooks as forcibly ideological as
the orthodox welfare-state.
Both began as imperial port cities with a mainly Chinese transient population and
a low sense of identity and affiliation, prompting post-1945 government intervention
to promote a more embedded society. In the case of Singapore, that society was
multi-ethnic and interrelated with the mixed Chinese-Malay population of Malaya,
whereas Hong Kong was sharply divided off from the mainland at the revolution in
1949 and became swamped by refugees from the post-revolutionary turmoil across
the border. The two territories faced sharply different formulae of instability in
Singapores case a combination of ethnic and political tension, and in Hong Kongs
a combination of demographic and political pressure. But in both, the credibility of
British colonial rule had been radically undermined by wartime Japanese occupation.
In Singapore, hesitant moves towards self-rule began after 1945, with the 19531954
Rendel Commission charting a staged strategy of devolved administration from
1955 and full internal self-rule from 1959. The government was headed until 1959
by the moderate left-wing administrations of David Marshall (19551956) and Lim
Yew Hock (19561959), and thereafter by Lee Kuan Yews PAP. This devolution
settlement was overshadowed by the threat of communist destabilisation and the
linked complications of the pressure for a joint move to independence with Malaya
a time of turbulence after which the territory eventually emerged in 1965 as a
separate city-state.
The idiosyncratic character of the welfare state in Singapore was bound up with the
ambiguous and shifting position of the PAP, which initially gained devolved power in
1959 largely through communist-supported, anti-colonial agitation that undermined
Lims moderate left-wing rule, but thereafter shifted rightwards towards a combination
of capitalist economics with systematised, technocratic social provision and militant
anti-communism. The avowedly socialist and anti-colonialist origins of the PAP
fuelled its highly political slant on public housing, publicly disparaging pre-1959
policies and achievements while pragmatically building on them (Figure 15.1).10
In Hong Kong, too, the political balance reached a tipping point, in this case in the
late 1960s and early 1970s, when a more socially interventionist government policy
became necessary to anchor an increasingly unstable and disaffected society albeit
one that remained far more wedded to laissez-faire liberalism than Singapore. Here
the lack of an independence option, owing to the impending reversion of most of
its territory to China in 1997, necessitated its remaining a British colony until then.
This, in turn, ensured that any reform would be a matter not for politicians but for its
administrative, civil-service elite. Especially in the late 1940s and early 1960s, Hong
Figure 15.1 Singapore National Day display (2011) at Bukit Ho Swee estate, nowadays a PAP
stronghold. The centre gure in the poster is Lee Kuan Yew (Miles Glendinning).
Kong was swamped by successive waves of refugee immigrants from the communist
mainland: although it was over 60 per cent larger in area than Singapore, it had far
less developable land and its population grew by around a million persons per decade
until the late 1980s. The 1960s saw further challenges to the territorys viability, with
mounting crises of water shortage solved only by dependence on supplies from the
mainland, and two successive summers of rioting and unrest in 19661967 the
rst provoked by social discontent, the second by communist agitators reecting the
Cultural Revolution. Paradoxically, although communist China was geographically far
closer to Hong Kong, the latter witnessed far less strident anti-communist rhetoric
than Singapore, and, indeed, much less overt politicisation of social questions such as
housing in general. Yet Hong Kongs government also unleashed a highly interventive
policy towards the built environment constrained by the far worse land shortage
than in Singapore, by the stronger position of the private sector in land and property
development, and by the weaker position of planning.11
Thus, we can now begin to answer our two key questions, about the relationship of
both programmes to welfare-state ideology and to British precedent. In the rst case,
there were some strong strategic similarities between Hong Kong and Singapore. Both
aimed to stabilise a society of people in transit, and to foster a sense of community
or even national identity within a capitalist context. In both territories, unlike
Europe, the legitimacy of market capitalism was never seriously challenged, and in
recent years both have been labelled the two most free economies in the world
by the Heritage Foundation. Yet these were unusual free markets, depending on
303
304
Miles Glendinning
selective yet massive social provision, including planning on a scale the USSR would
have been proud of. As part of this, both governments, late-colonial Hong Kong and
post-colonial Singapore, chose to develop huge, centrally-administered public housing
programmes to rehouse their vast refugee populations and anchor their societies: by
1980s even Hong Kong was devoting over 20 per cent of GDP to public spending,
including diverse welfare-state provisions (for example, free schooling and nearly-free
healthcare). The chief difference, in politico-social terms, was the framing of the
policies: forcibly ideological in Singapore, more neutral in Hong Kong. In the process,
the particular, distinctive characteristics of public housing in the UK naturally formed
a backdrop, but these were transformed by Asian constraints into new recipes, distinct
not only from Europe but also from each other.
How did the built-environment mechanisms of British colonial inuence operate
in these territories? Up to the mid-1950s, both were in a similar position, with
officials exposed to direct British inuences both on home visits and through the
missions of consultant planners, such as George Pepler in Singapore and Patrick
Abercrombie in Hong Kong; especially frequent were the visits by the Colonial
Offices housing adviser, the architect George Atkinson, who helped in the 1950s to
propagate an ethos of enlightened modernist architecture and building technology
across the colonies. But the late 1950s and 1960s saw a sudden divergence between
Hong Kong and Singapore housing administration, the former pursuing a quiet,
gradual decolonisation (dogged by tensions with Labour governments in London
unsympathetic to Hong Kongs laissez-faire practices), but the latter plunging into a
sudden and chaotic Malayanisation in the late-1950s, which transformed the colonys
longstanding housing and planning agency, the Singapore Improvement Trust (SIT),
from a source of complacent pride to an ancien rgime lame-duck, purged of key
personnel almost overnight in 19581959. From 1950 onwards, foreign inuences
on Singapore housing practice stemmed as much from Australia or United Nations
agencies as from Britain.12
This strong contrast in administrative ethos was not reected in more explicitly
British policies on the ground in Hong Kong. Both territories established a national
housing authority (in Singapore, in 19591960, and in Hong Kong, in 1973) a
formula very different from Britains council housing. Conversely, both territories
strongly echoed Britain in their dual formula of radical urban redevelopment and a
planned programme of new towns and population overspill. The two decisive variants
in determining the exact recipe in either case were the governance/economic system
and the land supply. Put in a nutshell, Singapore, with its less acute land shortage and
increasingly authoritarian government style, evolved a programme that combined
the British framework of strong urban and new-town planning with an un-British
reliance on social home ownership, physically evenly spread across its territory in a
redistributive strategy described by Lee as a Robin Hood adventure. Conversely,
Hong Kong, with its looser government and ultra-free-market economy, and its severe
land and demographic situation (offset by Crown ownership of all land) developed
Britains system of extreme uctuations in housing policy and its tower block architecture to a dramatic extreme of height. The specic built forms of these programmes
resembled patterns in Britain in a much more indirect way especially as they were
entirely composed of high-density multi-storey ats. Yet Singapores early New Towns
were still distinctly reminiscent of the Mark 1 British New Towns, in their radical
variety of block heights, profuse greenery and segregated neighbourhood/zoning
pattern.13
In both territories, there were two key tensions: the rst between emergency
and long-term approaches and the second between social renting and social homeownership. In the rst case, Hong Kong saw a linear, albeit convulsive, progression
of policy, from initial dominance by emergency resettlement to a gradual takeover by
a long-term permanent housing strategy integrated with planning; while Singapore
experienced a more idiosyncratic, politically-structured uctuation from planning to
emergency housing and back to planning again. In the second case, rst Singapore
and then (more hesitantly) Hong Kong began ambitious programmes of purpose-built
social home-ownership developments a programme that continued to an extreme
in Singapore but was more circumscribed and subject to pressures from private developers in Hong Kong.
1950s to 1970s: from resettlement to home ownership

The beginnings of large-scale public housing in the 1950s saw the two territories
further apart than they would ever be subsequently, with most low-cost housing
effort in Singapore devoted to lavishly-coordinated but low-output efforts, but Hong
Kong emphasising a crash programme of emergency accommodation for squatter
redevelopment.
Singapore was almost unique among British colonies and ex-colonies in having
developed by the 1950s the beginnings of a housing-planning strategy, presided over
by the SIT. Its original mission of slum-redevelopment reected the nineteenthcentury improvement formula common in British industrial cities and some colonial
centres.14 But this system was broadened post-1945 into an embryonic system of
integrated housing and regional planning. The 1950s saw the development of an
Abercrombie-style masterplan for the territory (rst conceived 1951 and nally
approved 1958), including a network of new towns, beginning with Queenstown
(from 1953), and attempts to boost general-needs low-income housing output.15
Architecturally, the SIT built a mixture of low-rise ats and terraced houses,
moderately modernist in style and reminiscent of late-1940s British-style mixed
development, including isolated high blocks of up to 14 storeys. But its careful, smallscale programme became increasingly paralysed by political disruption during the
19551959 transition to self-rule.16 Overall, congestion in shop houses and squatter
kampongs in Singapore was lower than in post-1949 Hong Kong, so the political
impetus to build seemed less, and it was always assumed that all new public housing
should comprise self-contained ats, with toilet and cooking facilities and preferably
of several rooms (Figure 15.2).
By 1958, however, although the cumulative production of the SIT had reached
23,000 ats, and nearly 10 per cent of the housing stock was government-owned
(virtually unprecedented within any European colonial territory), a consensus had
been reached within the devolved Labour Front governments of Marshall and Lim
Yew Hock prodded by SIT chief J. M. Fraser that a step-change in housing and
planning administration would be needed to galvanise output under full self-rule
305
306
Miles Glendinning
Figure 15.2 The rst completed blocks (19571958) in SITs Kallang Airport redevelopment, showing
the low height and density compared to Hong Kong (Miles Glendinning).
from 1959.17 In 1956, a government report advocated a radical increase in squatter

resettlement (doubtless inspired by Hong Kongs recent achievements discussed
further in this chapter), and in 19581959 Lims government passed legislation to
establish a Housing and Development Board (HDB) to oversee all housing efforts
and mastermind a concerted redevelopment of the squatter settlements, for which
slab-blocks of emergency one-room ats were designed by Frasers staff.18 But all this
effort was overtaken by the mounting political chaos of the late 1950s, and by the anticolonial, anti-expatriate agitation fanned by the left wing of the PAP and its rebrand
city-council chief, Ong Eng Guan. In 1959 Fraser was pressured to leave the SIT, and
immediately became head of the Housing Authority in Hong Kong (HKHA). As a
result, the public housing and planning drive, far from intensifying, fell into virtual
abeyance, and it seemed unlikely in 1959 that the new PAP Administration would
make much difference. A decade later, as we will see shortly, the picture would look
very different!19
During the 1950s, in fact, it was not Singapore that seized the lead in unleashing
a large-scale programme of public housing, but Hong Kong. The pressures of
overcrowding and refugee inux here led to policies and solutions that were different
to the careful debates and modest designs in Singapore. The years after 1945,
especially following the post-revolution refugee inux, had seen an upsurge in debates
within Hong Kong about the need to establish a low-cost housing programme to
ameliorate overcrowding and shortages among lower-income groups. A number of
relatively small-scale responses were started with government nancial aid, chiey the
Hong Kong Housing Society (from 1951/1952: a philanthropic organisation emphasising Octavia Hill management) and the Hong Kong Housing Authority (from 1954,
building for households earning over HK$400 a month).20
But these restricted programmes, inspired chiey by the SIT, and driven by housing
need ideologies reecting contemporary debates in Britain, were sidelined by the
dramatic emergence and growth of a very different movement, the Resettlement

programme, driven by hard-headed anxiety over the spread of squatter settlements
over potential development land, and the disruption caused by res in these uncontrolled shanty towns. Catalysed by an especially destructive re at Shek Kip Mei in
December 1953, existing low-key resettlement programmes of low-rise, lightweight
structures were jettisoned in 1954 in favour of a programme of reinforced-concrete
6- and 7-storey blocks, intended to rehouse squatters and clear development land,
which were built by a military-style Resettlement Department spun out of the Public
Works Department, with minimal housing-management input. The early (Mark 1)
resettlement blocks were extreme examples of utilitarian tenements, simplied from
PWD designs for police housing blocks at Hollywood Road and Canton Road.
They resembled interwar or nineteenth-century London labourers blocks or Calcutta
chawls, but at a far higher density nearly 4,000 persons per acre (9,800 per hectare),
rather than the 200 persons per acre (490 per hectare) maximum of new post-war
London developments. The 7-storey blocks, built of in-situ concrete, were arranged
in H plans with continuous external balconies and back-to-back unserviced single
rooms: WCs and taps were in the cross-bars of the H blocks (Figure 15.0).21
At rst, during 1954, this was all merely an ad hoc emergency expedient. But soon
the underlying political motivation became clear as the resettlement programme rapidly
developed, exploiting the refugee disruptions to reshape the built fabric of this laissezfaire colony through public, not private initiative, with the Tai Hang Tung re late that
year prompting the shift from re rehousing to proactive clearance. By the late 1950s,
this programme had developed such a momentum that more than 10,000 dwellings were
being completed annually, reaching a maximum of 23,000 in 1964/1965. Even this could
not keep pace with the number of refugees, and squatter numbers actually doubled in
the decade to 1964. By the mid-1960s, the upsurge in general, social and political disaffection in Hong Kong had converted the resettlement estates into hotbeds of disorder and
agitation. Among housing and architectural professionals, the consensus was growing that a
more coordinated strategy was needed. Two successive government committee reports, in
1958 and 1963, argued forcefully for a long-term 10-year strategy of low-income housing,
driven by a single unied government department and rmly linked into a colony-wide
development plan incorporating a network of new towns in the New Territories.22
For the moment, this was premature, and any signicant shift in the wider Hong
Kong consensus against long-term planning and public social spending (upheld
especially by Financial Secretary John Cowperthwaite, 19611971) had to wait until
the shock of the 19671968 riots and the arrival of a new, reformist governor in 1971.
During the 1960s, alongside the vast resettlement output, and a new Government
Low-Cost Housing programme (from 1961) of resettlement-type blocks for slightly
higher income groups, the Housing Authoritys developments cautiously expanded
in scale and architectural ambition under Fraser and his chief architect, Donald Liao,
initially in slabs of up to 20 storeys (for example, Choi Hung, 19631965), but then
extending to tall twin tower blocks of up to 25 storeys (as at Wah Fu, 19651971),
with yawning, galleried internal courts: the HKHA general-needs ats were roughly
the same size as the smallest SIT ats (Figure 15.3). Reformist agitation clearly looked
to Singapore as an exemplar of coordination and planning as seen in Frasers at times
impassioned evidence to the two housing inquiry committees.23
307
308
Miles Glendinning
Figure 15.3 Donald Liao, photographed in 2010 at the Hong Kong Jockey Club, Sha Tin New Town
(Miles Glendinning).
But by the later 1960s, it was not Frasers earlier work at the SIT that was attracting
wider attention, but the unexpected and dramatic progress of the new HDB in
Singapore. In later years, Singapores First Decade of Housing under the PAP became
exalted into a nation-building foundation-narrative, its cathartic moment a sudden
production breakthrough following Singapores equivalent of Shek Kip Mei, the
Bukit Ho Swee re of May 1961. The reality was rather more uncertainty-ridden
and reliant on ad hoc improvisation. The overall effect was, in some ways, the same
as in Hong Kong: re emergency exploited to begin a wider reshaping of the built
environment. Between 1959 and 1963, and especially between the 1961 walkout by
the PAPs left-wing to form the Barisan Sosialis (Socialist Front) and the 1963 security
crackdown that ended that rebellion, the PAP government was ghting for survival
and public housing, as a key responsibility of self-rule government, was one of the
few ways open for it to win decisive public support. Signicantly, housing became
the rst area in which Lee signalled the impending split with his partys left wing: on
inheriting the newly-established HDB, he sidelined Ong Eng Guan, newly appointed
as minister responsible for housing and planning, and in 1960 appointed businessman
Lim Kim San as rst head of the Board, which began operation on 1 February that
year.24
Pragmatically, Lim Kim San made few radical changes to the SITs policies and
practices although for propaganda purposes the SIT was henceforth portrayed as an
ineffective dinosaur and the HDB as a PAP-devised remedy. What had really changed
was the implementation of those existing practices: with the shift of the PAP from
poacher to gamekeeper, a steely but pragmatic drive for output now dominated (Figure
15.4). The SITs low-rise developments were wound down and its new range of
emergency one-room ats in orthodox modernist slab blocks were mass-produced by
the HDB at Tiong Bahru/Bukit Ho Swee, Queenstown and elsewhere, alongside slabs
of larger-size permanent ats, to begin a virtuous circle of decanting and redeveloping
the squatter settlements: early-1960s Singapore had proportionately as many squatters
as Hong Kong (300,000 as compared with 550,000), but these were dominated by
Figure 15.4 Bukit Ho Swee Phase 1 (Tiong Bahru Cemetery Site) Singapore HDBs rst overspill
blocks for re victims, built in 19611962: 910 storeys, 440 23-room ats (Miles Glendinning).
farmers rather than refugees. Following a purge of expatriate SIT staff by Ong in
1959 creating a very different, more Asian feel to HDB staffing by comparison with
Hong Kong this building policy of no-holds-barred consolidation was ably put into
effect by the new HDB chief architect, Teh Cheang Wan, and output soared, with
54,000 ats completed in ve years, and annual resettlement reaching 6,500: eventually,
aided by mounting compensation levels, 230,000 squatter families would be rehoused
by 1985.25
The mid-1960s saw two especially important changes in emphasis in HDB policy,
both building massively on themes initially conceived by the SIT. First was the expansion
of the Master Plan new-town programme into an island-wide development strategy,
beginning with the full-scale commencement of Toa Payoh in 1965 (mainly 1 and
2-room ats initially) and the rst plans for Woodlands and Ang Mo Kio, in the north,
from the 1970s, both on high-density Mk. 1 New Town lines (200 dwellings per hectare
maximum (combined net density), compared with 500 at Toa Payoh). In addition the
Master Plan was repeatedly revised, most notably in 1967 as the Concept Plan.26
The second stage in the PAP housing strategy also started adventitiously: the
beginning of a programme of mass social homeownership in 1964. Stemming from
smaller-scale SIT experimental schemes (notably at St Michaels Estate, 19581959),
this policy was now projected into action as part of the PAPs bid to counter ethnic
tensions during the brief union with Malaysia (19631965) the rst Home
Ownership for the People scheme being a group of 16-storey slabs in Queenstown
area 3 (Figure 15.5). But in another demonstration of the ad hoc character of early
HDB policymaking, the scheme made relatively little progress until it was decided
to open up the Central Provident Fund a compulsory pension-saving scheme
devised and introduced under Marshall in 1955 as a nancial source for at-purchase
under the scheme. From that point, the home ownership scheme grew so rapidly
as to displace mainstream rental housing as the main production focus within a few
years, and by 1979 over 61 per cent of publicly-built housing was owner-occupied
309
310
Miles Glendinning
under 99-year leases. The policy became the HDBs paramount contribution to the
embedding of Singaporean society: by 1987, 585,000 public ats housed 85 per cent
of the total population.
Of course, the state promotion of mass social home ownership of governmentbuilt dwellings was hardly a unique discovery of Singapores, but was, by 1964,
already the principal social housing strategy of countries ranging from Iceland and
Finland to Israel. What was unique to Singapore was the association of social homeownership with mass building of high-density tower blocks, a policy which became
a very effective agent both of decolonization and social stabilization even if, in the
long run, it also arguably encouraged over-consumption in housing and created a
growing affordability problem.27 In contrast to, say, the pre-1965 London County
Council, with its combination of large-scale public-authority structure and design
individualism, in the HDB high density and high output were universally accepted
constraints and prerequisites. Although the role of architects, planners and landscapists
was central to the HDB programme, this followed carefully integrated, rather than
design-rst, lines. Large interdisciplinary teams were built up to supervise the HDB
housing drive, controlled by chief architect Teh Cheang Wan in the 1960s and 1970s
and then by Liu Thai-Ker.
Following the frenetic efforts of the 1960s, the 1970s were years of consolidation in Singapore, with both resettlement clearances and new completions edging
steadily upwards. In Hong Kong, the position was startlingly different: these were the
years of a second housing revolution, transforming the old resettlement-dominated
programme into something more like Singapores comprehensive strategy, complete
Figure 15.5 HDBs rst home ownership blocks, Queenstown neighbourhood 4: three 16-storey slabs,
designed by Teh Cheang Wans staff and completed in 1964 (Miles Glendinning).
with unied housing administration, permanent self-contained dwellings, new towns

and home ownership scheme. But the crisis of political legitimacy following the
19661967 anti-government and communist riots led to a rather low-key political
projection of that programme by the late-colonial governing class, in terms of general
civic integration.28 The 19661967 riots had housing implications not unlike the
Ronan Point collapse in England in 1968: in their wake, a vigorous, output-oriented
state building programme was suddenly seen as obsolete, primitive and, at the very
least, overtaken by rising expectations. But in contrast to what happened in England,
the remedy in Hong Kong, charted by a new (1971), reformist Governor, Sir Murray
MacLehose, was to launch a vastly enhanced, vastly more comprehensive ten-year
housing programme. This was overseen by an expanded Hong Kong Housing
Authority (formed in 1973, following a high-prole policy speech by MacLehose in
October 1972).29
This highly ambitious strategy, long-advocated in progressive official circles but
repeatedly shelved as smacking of excessive big government, was now suddenly
propelled into reality by MacLehoses reforms. It began by increasing the production
of rental housing, both in new towns generally much larger in population than
Singapores and in the beginnings of redevelopment of resettlement estates, and
extended almost immediately to a social home ownership scheme (for households with monthly incomes of HK$35005000) similar to that of Singapore all
programmes in which, unlike the engineer-dominated resettlement programme, the
coordinating role of architects and planners would become of central importance.
The fundamental aim of the entire strategy was to stabilise Hong Kong society and
create a sense of community empowerment building on reforms such as the earlier
creation of ombudsman-like City District Officers (1968). Although expatriate
British staff members dominated both technical and administrative elds until the
early 1990s, Chinese professionals gradually assumed greater and greater control, with
the HKHAs chief architect/CEO Donald Liao leading the way from the late 1960s.
Organizationally, the contrast with the fragmented council-housing system of the
UK was stark. A closer parallel was with Northern Ireland, which also responded to
serious problems of political legitimacy and ethnic division by introducing (1971) an
administrator-led, depoliticised national housing authority. Planning in Hong Kong,
however, remained more fragmented than in the PAPs disciplined Singapore, with a
looser master-plan and implementation split between various agencies.30
Architecture of the permanent programmes

In Castells judgement, the two housing policies [HK and Singapore] were right
in line with the Anglo-Saxon town planning tradition of creating social harmony
through the manipulation of space.31 But architecturally, the two programmes could
not have been more different from the British precedents and, in some respects,
from each other. Higher density and higher blocks would clearly be necessary in both
redevelopments and new towns, but once resettlements utilitarian early slab blocks
had been left behind, the two programmes developed along divergent architectural
lines. In some areas, British precedents were adopted in both places, as, for example,
in the nomenclature of estates and individual blocks, although Hong Kong adopted
311
312
Miles Glendinning
individual block names (in Cantonese) whereas Singapore favoured large gable-wall
numbers. Also in the British lineage was the (relative) distrust of large-scale prefabricated construction, a trend followed in both territories to reect local building
conditions, although selective precast elements were increasingly incorporated. It was
topography, above all, that determined the contrasting built-forms of at Singapore
and mountainous Hong Kong although the need to reserve the latters best housing
sites for private developers further constrained public housings land-supply, requiring
most sites to undergo formidable and costly formation works.
In Singapore, the basic unit of estate planning was the individual at-type. Housing
was laid out in a site-specic manner by HDBs architectural teams, increasingly (from
the 1980s) incorporating highly individualized postmodernist decoration to emphasize
neighbourhood identity. Initially dominant in Singapore, owing to the more
favourable land supply than Hong Kongs, were straightforwardly modernist in-situ
concrete slab blocks of small but self-contained ats, usually of 1011 storeys, and
either with central corridors (emergency ats) or balconied on one side (permanent
improved ats): at sizes remained invariably larger than Hong Kongs. But by the
1970s, Singapores new towns were moving towards a rather denser formula of 1113
storey blocks, tightly arranged in enclosed groupings to exclude sunlight, while
maximising the access permeability of the blocks in order to enhance air penetration
a tropical echo of the typical English deck-access formula of the 1960s. The basic
development unit became the precinct of up to 1,000 ats, rather than the neighbourhood of up to 6,000.32 As part of this design development process, Singapore also
continued its emphasis on balcony access decks, combined with open ground oors
(officially dubbed void decks), all now increasingly seen in social-engineering terms
Figure 15.6 HKHAs Sun Chui estate phase 2, Sha Tin, Hong Kong, under construction, 1983: new
public-rental estate designed by Donald Liaos architects (Miles Glendinning).
Figure 15.7 Sui Wo Court, Sha Tin: pioneering HKHA home ownership scheme, designed by Palmer
& Turner and opened 1981 by Governor MacLehose (Miles Glendinning).
by the PAP government as settings for inter-ethnic community-building. Often these

new town precincts included taller blocks as landmarks up to around 25 storeys
high.33
In Hong Kong, the switch from resettlement blocks to permanent, self-contained
ats left unchanged the general tendency towards small dwellings, but with minimum
sizes increased and ats of one room, kitchenette and toilet now the smallest. Also
intact was the Hong Kong British tradition of focusing development planning on the
entire building, with standard block types still prevailing, and a more straightforward
modernist aesthetic retained throughout. Unlike the linear blocks and precinct layouts
of Singapore, Hong Kong took up the typical British 1950s fashion for slender point
blocks and expanded it to a huge scale, establishing 41 storeys (the maximum permissible without expensive re refuge oors) by the late 1980s as a norm for most blocks,
whether in new towns or in redevelopments of earlier public housing or squatter
settlements in the existing urban cores (Figures 15.615.8).
Moving away from more idiosyncratic early tower or short slab plan types (such
as Liaos Twin Tower Block of the 1960s), HKHA block types evolved progressively towards highly articulated tripod or cruciform-plan models, as the optimum
way to accommodate large numbers of well-ventilated small ats per oor around
central lift/stair cores; from the 1990s, these all featured gated security modelled on
private blocks. Most prolically built of these standard blocks was the Harmony, a
type intended for both rental and home ownership. These were designed in the late
1980s by architects John Ng, John Lambon and others under chief housing architect
Derek Messling, in a range of variants intended to allow different permutations of
313
314
Miles Glendinning
Figure 15.8 Sin Ming Court, Bishan New Town, Singapore (19851988): typical home ownership
new-town development, designed in colourfully postmodern style by the HDBs architects (Miles Glendinning).
Figure 15.9 HKHAs Lower Ngau Tau Kok redevelopment under construction in 2011: 41/46-storey
site-specic towers based on Harmony type-plans, replacing 16-storey resettlement slabs (Miles Glendinning).
at numbers and sizes, with up to 20 ats per oor. Although pressure from local
architects led in 2005 to the adoption of Singapore-style site-specic design, the
component elements of the blocks were still recognisably derived from the Harmony
series, now in effect over a quarter of a century old (Figure 15.9).34
Recent developments
Although there is no space here to trace in detail the later, mature phases of the
housing programmes in both territories, we can certainly note that they became
successfully embedded in the populations to a far greater extent than in the UK,
especially in Singapore where the vast majority of the population (85 per cent) now
live in HDB-built ats. With the growing democratization of Hong Kong, post-war,
British-style political bidding wars over public housing output now seem to be
emerging. But in neither case (at any rate, since the 1960s resettlement problems in
Hong Kong) has there been any signicant sign of the slide towards rejection and
stigmatization of state-provided housing typical of the West. Partly this may stem from
the way in which mass housing has been closely bound up with consistent economic
growth in both territories, as emphasized by Castells. By 2011, both ranked among
the worlds wealthiest economies, with a per capita GDP of 22,474 in Hong Kong
and 29,562 in Singapore, and a total GDP of 159 billion in Hong Kong (compared
with 0.83 billion in 1960) and 153 billion in Singapore (0.41 billion in 1960).35
Multi-generational longevity is, in itself, one of the most distinctive aspects of both
the HDB and HKHA programmes, and has enabled them to act as an effective
bridge between the mass housing traditions of the Old West and New East. For
the mass housing tradition in eastern Asia is now not just alive but is on the increase,
especially in mainland China. There many cities, led by Bo Xilais former redoubt of
Chongqing, have launched huge programmes of public housing as a way of combating
and channelling the countrys enormous demographic pressures.36 Built in a frenetic
hurry, these could potentially become vulnerable in the future to the same obsolescence problems as the 19451975 output in the west. Or could the lessons of Hong
Kong and Singapore help avert such an eventual fate?
Notes
File reference abbreviations below: HKRS: Hong Kong Public Records Office, pre-1984
open les; HDB: National Archives of Singapore, pre-1960 open les; HB: National
Archives of Singapore, post-1960 les (generally closed).
1 See, for example, M. Glendinning, La guerre de cent ans, in M. Casciato and E. dOrgeix,
Architectures Modernes, Wavre: Mardaga, 2012, 89100.
2 US doomed to failure accounts: see, for example, D. Bowly, The Poorhouse: Subsidised
Housing in Chicago, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978; J. Bauman, R. Biles,
K. M. Szylvian, From Tenements to the Taylor Homes, University Park: Penn State Press, 2000;
Soviet Plattenbau interpretations: R. Liebscher, Wohnen fr Alle, Berlin: Vergangenheits
Verlag, 2009; H. Moravcikova and others, Bratislava Atlas of Mass Housing, Bratislava: Slovart,
2011. Overview of rise and fall: M. Harloe, The Peoples Home? Oxford: Blackwell, 1995.
3 The specic research context of this article is an ongoing investigation of the international history of mass housing, focused especially on Hong Kong. Travel for this research
(including for this chapter) is supported by a British Academy/Leverhulme grant.
315
316
Miles Glendinning
4 M. Castells, L. Goh and R. Kwok, The Shek Kip Mei Syndrome Economic Development
and Public Housing in Hong Kong and Singapore, London: Pion, 1990; HK policy accounts:
R. Hutcheon, High Rise Society, Hong Kong: HKHS, 1998; M-Y. Leung, From Shelter to
Home, Hong Kong: HKHA, 1999; Y. M. Yeung, Fifty Years of Public Housing in Hong Kong,
a Golden Jubilee Review and Appraisal, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press (HKUP),
2003. Singapore policy accounts: Housing and Development Board (HDB), First Decade
in Public Housing, Singapore: HDB, 1970; A. K. Wong and S. H. K. Yeh (eds), Housing
a Nation: 25 Years of Public Housing in Singapore, Singapore: Maruzen, 1985; S. E. Teo,
Patterns of change in public housing in Singapore, Third World Planning Review, 1989, vol.
11, 373391.
5 Affirmative accounts of Singapore/superiority complex concerning public housing: Lee
Kuan Yew, The Singapore Story, Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore: Press Holdings, 1998;
Lee Kuan Yew, From Third World to First, Singapore: Harper, 2000; HDB, 50,000 Up:
Homes for the People, Singapore: HDB, 1965; HB204-69 Prestige Publication of HDBs
Achievements... 196069, 1969; W. Fernandez, Our Homes: 50 Years of Housing a Nation,
Singapore: Straits Times, 2011; Loh Kah Seng, The 1961 Kampong Bukit Ho Swee Fire
and the Making of Modern Singapore, PhD thesis, Murdoch University, 2008, Chapter 10.
6 M. Bowley, Housing and the State, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1945; S. Merrett, State
Housing in Britain, London: Routledge, 1979; M Glendinning and S. Muthesius, Tower
Block, London: Yale, 1994 (Chapters 2022); Harloe, The Peoples Home.
7 Glendinning and Muthesius, Tower Block, Chapter 27.
8 Tensions between PWD and designers in postwar HK: interview with Michael Wright,
2011.
9 Denitions of welfare state: D. Donnison, The Government of Housing, London: Pelican,
1967; G. Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1990; T. Fahey and M. Norris, Housing in the Welfare State, International
Journal of Housing Policy, December 2011, vol. 11, no. 4, 439452; P. Malpass, Housing and
the Welfare State, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
10 Early post-war history of Singapore: M Turnbull, A History of Singapore, Kuala Lumpur:
Oxford, 1977; H. C. Chan, A Sensation of Independence: David Marshall, a Political Biography,
Singapore: Oxford, 2001; Singapore Constitutional Commission, Report of the Constitutional
Commission, Singapore: Constitutional Commission, 1954; T. Y. Tan, Creating Greater
Malaysia: Decolonisation and the Politics of Merger, Singapore: Institute of S. E. Asian Studies,
2008. PAP emergence: J. B. Tamney, The Struggle over Singapores Soul, Berlin: De Gruyter,
1996; T. Bellows, The Peoples Action Party of Singapore, New Haven: Yale, 1970; D. K. Mauzy
and R. S. Milne, Singapore Politics under the Peoples Action Party, London: Routledge, 2002.
11 Early post-war history of Hong Kong: S. Tsang, A Modern History of Hong Kong, Hong
Kong: I. B. Tauris, 2004; D Bray, Hong Kong Metamorphosis, Hong Kong, 2001; J. M.
Carroll, Edge of Empires, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard, 2005.
12 Hong Kong governance and civil service in early post-war era: D. Akers-Jones, Feeling the
Stones: Reminiscences by David Akers Jones, Hong Kong: HKUP, 2004; Establishment Branch,
Hong Kong Administrative Service 18621967, Hong Kong Government, 1967; Hong Kong
Government, The Government and the People, Hong Kong Government, 1962 S. Tsang,
Governing Hong Kong: Administrative Officers from the Nineteenth Century to the Handover to
China, London: I. B. Tauris, 2007; L. F. Goodstadt, Uneasy Partners The Conict between
Public Interest and Private Prot in Hong Kong, Hong Kong: HKUP, 2005; G. B. Endacott,
Government and People in Hong Kong 18411962, HKUP, 1964. Singapore Malayanisation
process: Castells, Syndrome, 286. British/Commonwealth housing/planning links with
Hong Kong: HKRS156-1-3425 (Abercrombie report); HKRS156-1-3812, 156-1-5264
(1953, 1956-60 visits by Atkinson); HKRS156-1-4079-1 (1953 report by A. R. Giles on
UK New Towns); HKRS156-1-9678 (1962 visit by Fraser to Calcutta). Singapore-UK
links: HDB 1086 (Lincoln Page, Senior Architect, visited Rosebery Avenue ats in London
in 1949; Atkinson sent booklet to Page and Woolmer in 1950s); HB229-70. On Atkinson,
see R. Harris, Development and hybridity made concrete in the colonies, Environment and
Planning A, 2008, vol. 40 no 1, p. 26.
13 Robin Hood: Castells, Syndrome, 270. Mark 1 New Towns: F. J. Osborn and A. Whittick,
The New Towns, London: Leonard Hill, 1977, Part 2.
14 R. Home, Of Planting and Planning, London: Spon (2nd edition), 2013.

15 C. Low and National Heritage Board, Ten Stories: Queenstown Through the Years, Singapore:
NHB, 2007; Castells, Syndrome, 215224. Master Plan: HDB 1219 (Future of SIT
19561960).
16 Increasing paralysis of SIT: HB4-1-60, complaints about disruption; Castells, Syndrome, 262
Slowdown in production 19581959: HDB1070-1078.
17 Highly positive pre-1959 portrayal of post-war history of SIT: HB 4-1-60, Colony Annual
Report 1958, draft chapter on Planning and Housing (output of 21,408 ats hailed as a
prodigious achievement and calls for more planning for the growth of a modern state
by housing Minister, Haji Jumat). Castells, Syndrome, 225. Roots of Resettlement in
mid-1950s: HDB1238, HDB1256, HDB1284.
18 Pre-1959 origins of HDB: HDB1219 (Future of SIT, 19561960).
19 SIT-HDB transition: Loh, Bukit Ho Swee, Chapter 3; HDB1070-1078; HDB1244;
Castells, Syndrome, 230.
20 Beginnings of HKHA/HKHS: HKRS523-2-1, 896-1-49.
21 Shek Kip Mei re and genesis of Mk I blocks: A. Smart, The Shek Kip Mei Myth
Squatters, Fires and Colonial Rule in Hong Kong 19501963, Hong Kong: HKUP, 2006;
A Smart, Making Room Squatter Clearance in Hong Kong, Hong Kong: HKUP, 1992.
HKRS163-1-781, 310-1-1, 310-3-1, 310-1-11, 310-3-5 (1967-8, celebration of millionth
resettlement tenant). Resettlement (general): HKRS394-23-8, 524-2-11, 890-1-10,
896-1-9, 686-3-161.
22 Special Committee on Housing, Final Report, HK, 1958; National Archive, London, le
CO-1030-1179. HKRS523-2-7, 896-1-72, 156-3-6/7, 158-1-62, 158-2-9, 158-2-10
(comments on report by Fraser, etc.); Castells, Syndrome, 5-23; Smart, Shek Kip Mei Myth,
190.
23 HKHA early projects: Gu Daqing, Affordability as the Inspiration of Design for Public
Housing, Time + Architecture, 2011, vol. 120, 50-3; HB 193-61, 1961 report by Teh on
HK public housing.
24 Emergency years for PAP: Loh, Bukit Ho Swee, Chapter 8; HDB1244 (Ong Eng Guan
Meet the People sessions, 1959).
25 Programme post-Bukit Ho Swee Fire: HDB1263, HDB1074-1079; Loh, Bukit Ho
Swee, Chapter 8. Teh and Lims new regime: National Archives of Singapore, Interview
transcripts 526 and 891 (Lim, Choe); Low, Ten Stories, 62-65; Castells, Syndrome, 238-9.
Claim by Teh that formation of PAP was conceived by PAP: HDB1227, note of 11-3-63
by Teh. Post-1961 building policy (general): HDB 1243, HDB1263 (improved at designs);
HB224-1-65 (R & D unit, formed 1964).
26 First New Towns: see, for example, HDB 1095 (Toa Payoh squatter clearance), HDB 1259
(Woodlands). Castells, Syndrome, 215224; 259264.
27 Start of HOS: HB145-63; HDB1244, 1254 (St Michael, Tiong Bahru); HDB 1228
(19581959 HOS proposal). L. Low and T. C. Aw, Housing a Healthy, Educated and Wealthy
Nation through the CPF, Singapore: Institute of Policy Studies, 1997. Comparisons with
Israel/Finland, etc.: J. Kemeny, The Myth of Home Ownership, London: Routledge, 1981;
J.Kemeny, From Public Housing to the Social Market, London: Routledge, 1995.
28 Riots: G. Ka-wai Cheung, Hong Kongs Watershed the 1967 Riots, Hong Kong: HKUP,
2009; HKRS524-2-15-1. Castells on Hong Kong governing class as striving to leave their
nal trace in history pre-1997: Syndrome, 332.
29 General evaluation of MacLehose: HKRS684-2-16. 1970s public housing policy (general):
HKRS 483-4-1, 489-7-27; E. G. Pryor, Housing in Hong Kong, Hong Kong: Oxford, 1973;
D. W. Drakakis-Smith, High Society, Hong Kong: HKUP, 1979. Formation of new HKHA:
HKRS163-9-1338, 163-10-141, 163-10-57, 163-7-1, 177-3-6, 545-1-456, 523-2-2,
70-6-788, 151-1-4809-1, 163-10-56.
30 Planning policy/Colony Outline Plan, HKRS896-1-114, 608-1-44, 608-1-40-41. HOS:
Castells, Syndrome, 136-140; J. Lee, Housing, Home-Ownership and Social Change in Hong
Kong, Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999; HKRS163-7-83, 545-1-459-1, 667-2-4, 835-1-171,
163-8-141, 143, 147. Mei Foo private development was precedent for HOS: HKRS703-297; interview with Sir D. Akers-Jones, 2013. HK New Towns: HKRS 337-4-4337,
545-1-447-2, 895-1-55, 1070-1-1, 710-3-3, 608-1-49.
317
318
Miles Glendinning
31 Castells judgement: Syndrome, 332, 136140.

32 Liu Thai-Ker, Design for Better Living Conditions, in S. H. Yeh (ed), Public Housing in
Singapore, Singapore, 1975, 145151 (origins of precinct concept in 1970s); T Tan et al.,
Physical Planning and Design, in Wong and Yeh, Housing a Nation, 56112.
33 SERS: see, for example, Low, Ten Stories, 146150.
34 Evolution of standard blocks: Hong Kong Housing Authority, Planning, Design and Delivery
of Quality Public Housing in the New Millennium, Hong Kong: HKUP, 2010; HKRS1638-29, 46112.
35 HK civil service in 1970s1990s: McKinsey & Co, The Machinery of Government, Hong
Kong: McKinsey, 1973; I. Scott and J. Burns (eds), The Hong Kong Civil Service and Its
Future, Hong Kong, Chinese University Press, 1988. HKHA, Planning, Design and Delivery.
Singapore housing as heritage: G. L. Ook, National Identity, Public Housing and
Conservation in Singapore, Habitat International, 1994, vol. 18, issue 2, 7180.
36 Chongqing: see, for example, www.scmp.com/article/710727/chongqing-launches-huge-publichousing-programme. Housing and Asia (general): J. Doling, Housing Policies and the Little
Tigers, Housing Studies, 1999, vol. 14, issue 2, 229250; S. H. Ha (ed), Housing Policy and
Practice in Asia, London: Routledge, 1987; R. P. Applebaum and J. Henderson (eds), States
and Development in the Asian Pacic Rim, Newbury Park: Sage, 1992. Present-day HK vs.
Singapore debates (density, etc.), see, for example, L. Xueying, Hong Kong nds room for
7.2 million people, Sunday Times (Singapore), 19 February 2013 (information courtesy of
Ian Tan).
Appendix and further

reading
APPENDIX: OUTCOMES FROM THE

LIVERPOOL WORKSHOP 2012
The Liverpool Workshop on Architecture and the Welfare State was organized by
Mark Swenarton, Tom Avermaete and Dirk van den Heuvel and took place in the
Colin Rowe Studio at the Liverpool School of Architecture in September 2012.
The invited participants at the closed-doors symposium were Tom Avermaete
(TU Delft), Jos Antnio Bandeirinha (University of Coimbra), Eve Blau (Harvard
University), Nicholas Bullock (University of Cambridge), Adrian Forty (University
College London), Miles Glendinning (University of Edinburgh), Elain Harwood
(English Heritage), Hilde Heynen (KU Leuven), Caroline Maniaque-Benton (Paris
Malaquais/University Paris Est), Helena Mattsson (KTH Stockholm), Luca Molinari
(Second University of Naples), Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen (Yale University), Simon Pepper
(University of Liverpool), Michelle Provoost (Crimson Architectural Historians),
Laurent Stalder (ETH Zurich), Mark Swenarton (University of Liverpool), ukasz
Stanek (University of Manchester), Florian Urban (Glasgow School of Art) and Dirk
van den Heuvel (TU Delft).
For the concluding session of the symposium a list of key issues and questions
was drawn up by a working group comprising Tom Avermaete, Adrian Forty, Hilde
Heynen, Mark Swenarton and Dirk van den Heuvel. Transcribed by Adrian Forty,
these questions formed the starting point for the concluding discussion, in the course
of which were generated other questions and issues. These were summarized by
Adrian Forty and the document then circulated to the participants following the
symposium.
The full document is published here as a record of the issues raised at the Liverpool
Workshop and as pointers for future research.
Questions for the concluding discussion

1. Variants of welfare state recognition of distinctions between different models of
welfare states, and architectural implications of these.
322
Appendix
2. Success/failure of welfare state architecture? Is this a necessary, or a legitimate line

of discussion? How are we to establish criteria for success/failure? Are they those
of the time or post hoc?
3. Roles of architecture within the welfare state. What is the agency of architecture?
How does the role of the architect compare to that of other professionals
engineers, planners, sociologists etc?
4. Was innovation a structural feature of welfare state? How is this manifested?
5. Ideology how far does architecture serve ideological, as distinct from material,
ends in the fulllment of welfare state programmes? How is ideology manifested?
6. How are we to address the differences between the exceptional and the everyday
productions of the welfare state?
7. In what ways did the welfare state promote its own mechanisms of internal institutional critique? What was the role of these critiques? Were they absorbed by the
welfare state?
8. Of what signicance is the distinction between avant-garde and experimental
architecture in the discussion of welfare state architecture?
9. What is the picture of the collective produced by welfare state architecture? How did
architects respond to their obligation to create such an image?
10. What are the social relations being produced by welfare state architecture?
11. How did architects deal with relations between the public and the private?
12. What characterizes the versions of the public developed by architects?
13. What is the role of protest movements? How are they to be interpreted
historically?
14. Is welfare state architecture a screen onto which other concerns are projected?
Is the architecture itself irrelevant?
15. What does slum clearance mean in different contexts? Can we quantify differences between slum clearance/new build programmes in different countires?
16. Why do we only talk about housing?
17. Could we agree on a common bibliography of key texts?
Issues and questions raised at concluding discussion

18. Treat welfare state, and its architecture, as time-sensitive. Even within the
19451975 period, concepts of the welfare state were changing, and criteria that
may be used at one moment of time may not be applicable at other moments.
Allow for shifts in values, expectations, etc.
19. Success/failure. Agreed to be a necessary question. But needs to be nuanced by
acknowledging that discussions of success/failure have their own history, are
ideologically determined, and assessments are dependent upon the time and the
circumstances when the question is put.
20. Consider the circulation of ideas, exchanges of information, contacts, networks, travel
between welfare state countries as constituting an alternative view of welfare
state architecture.
21. Can we identify specic historical/architectural questions that are unique to the
welfare state period, and that do not occur in other periods? What would the merits
Outcomes from the Liverpool Workshop
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
be of such identication? Might even transhistorical themes, such as happiness,

be framed in terms that are particular to the welfare state?
How is the nature of the contract between state and citizen in the welfare state
manifested in architectural/spatial terms?
Are there advantages in concentrating upon one scale of activity rather than
another? Is it more productive to attend to the territory, the region, the city,
the dwelling, or to the very smallest artefacts?
How different notions of the city were produced by the welfare state and
conversely, how was the welfare state affected by concepts of the city?
Supplementary to point 3: consider changes in the accountability of the designer,
answerable to an expanded eld.
Vocabulary of welfare state architecture/planning. Recognize historical specicity of
terminology. A glossary of the language of welfare state architecure?
Did welfare state architecture have a distinctive architectural language? Why and
with what consequences has Brutalism become assumed to be the architectural
language of the welfare state?
Why are we studying welfare state architecture today? Are the motives political
a response to the erosion of welfare state by neoliberal socio-economic policies?
Or architectural in response to allegations that the welfare state nished architecture off, and a wish to divine architectures future?
Give more attention to the relation between welfare state and its others, both to
clarify its limits, and also to better understand its own internal operations.
(i) Attend specically to the circumstances of (a) decolonization and (b) the
Cold War. The welfare state based upon principle of inclusion/exclusion
which is why it had such difficulty in dealing with movements of population.
Welfare state part of project of modernity, and as such emancipation
at its heart; but notions of emancipation reliant upon the existence of a
non-emancipated class provided in the welfare state case by the members
of western European states former colonies.
(ii) Comparability of relationship between citizen and state in western and
socialist countries; socialist states use of similar instruments housing, access
to consumer goods, etc. in order to legitimize status quo. An opportunity
to ask how far certain results were conditional upon the specic circumstances of western models of welfare state, or apply more broadly.
Adrian Forty, 14 September 2012
323
FURTHER READING
The intention of this section is not to provide a comprehensive bibliography on the

subject of architecture and the welfare state, which would necessarily be vast in scale,
but merely to provide some suggestions for further reading on selected themes and
countries, with an emphasis on more recent titles containing bibliographical references. The entries largely reect the interests and expertise of the editors and authors,
supplemented in places by recommendations made by colleagues in other countries
which we gratefully acknowledge, especially Ellen Braae, Mari Hvattum, Christina
Malathouni, Rui Jorge Garcia Ramos, Luz Sempere and Panayotis Tournikiotis. The
arrangement follows the fourfold categorization of the welfare state set out in the
introduction (namely: Anglo-American, Scandinavian, Continental and Southern/
Mediterranean), preceded by a general section and followed by a section on the wider
world.
General
Balchin, P. (ed.), Housing Policy in Europe, London: Routledge, 1996.
Bauer, C., Modern Housing, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1934.
Castles, F. G., Liebfried, S., Lewis, J., Obinger, H. and Pierson, C., The Oxford Handbook of the
Welfare State, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010.
Crowley, D. and Pavitt, J. (eds), Cold War Modern: Design 19451970, London: V&A
Publishing, 2008.
Dani, A. A. and de Haan, A. (eds), Inclusive States: Social Policy and Structural Inequalities,
Washington DC: World Bank, 2008.
Denby, E., Europe Re-housed, London: Allen & Unwin, 1938.
Diefendorf, J. (ed.), Rebuilding Europes Blitzed Cities, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990.
Dufaux, F. and Fourcaut, A., Le monde des grands ensembles, Paris: Creaphis, 2004.
Esping-Andersen, G., The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990.
Fuerst, J. S. (ed.), Public Housing in Europe and America, London: Croom Helm, 1974.
Guerrand, R. H., Une Europe en construction. Deux sicles dhabitat social en Europe, Paris: La
Dcouverte, 1992.
Further reading
Harloe, M., The Peoples Home? Social Rented Housing in Europe and America, Oxford: Blackwell,
1995.
International Labour Office, Housing Policy in Europe, Geneva: International Labour Office,
1930.
Judt, T., Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945, New York: Penguin Press, 2005.
Lefaivre, L. and Tzonis, A., In the name of the people: the development of the contemporary
populist movement in architecture, Forum, XXV no. 3 (1976), pp. 533.
Marshall, T. H., Citizenship and Social Class, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1950.
Mumford, E., The CIAM discourse on urbanism 19281960, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
2000.
Pepper, S. (ed.), The Garden City Idea, themed issue of Architectural Review, vol. CVXIII no.
976 (June 1978).
Pierson, C., Castles, F. G. and Naumann, I. K. (eds), The Welfare State Reader, Cambridge:
Polity Press, 2000/2013.
Power, A., Estates on the Edge: The Social Consequences of Mass Housing in Northern Europe,
Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997.
Power, A., Hovels to High-Rise: State Housing in Europe since 1850, London: Routledge, 1993.
[Rassegna] The Reconstruction in Europe after World War II, themed issue of Rassegna, 54
(1993).
Rimlinger, R., Welfare Policy and Industrialization in Europe, America and Russia, New York:
Wiley, 1971.
Risselada, M. and van den Heuvel, D. (eds), Team 10: In Search of a Utopia of the Present (1953
1981), Rotterdam: NAi, 2005.
Sherwood, R., Modern Housing Prototypes, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1981/2001.
Urban, F., Tower and Slab: Histories of Global Mass Housing, London: Routledge, 2012.
Verderber, S., Innovations in Hospital Architecture, London: Routledge, 2010.
Wagenaar, C., Happy: Cities and Public Happiness in Post-War Europe, Rotterdam: NAi
Publishers, 2004.
Ward, S. V., Planning the Twentieth-Century City: The Advanced Capitalist World, Chichester: John
Wiley & Sons, 2002.
Ward, S. V. (ed.), The Garden City: Past, Present and Future, London: Spon, 1992.
Wynn, M. (ed.), Housing in Europe, London: Croom Helm, 1984.
Anglo-American
Bauman, J. F., Biles, R. and Szylvian, K. S. (eds), From Tenements to the Taylor Homes: In
Search of an Urban Housing Policy in Twentieth-Century America, Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2000.
Bloom, N. D., Public Housing that Worked: New York in the Twentieth Century, Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.
Bowley, M., Housing and the State, 19191944, London: Allen & Unwin, 1945.
Bowly, D., The Poorhouse: Subsidised Housing in Chicago, 18951976, Carbondale: Southern
Illinois UP, 1978/2008.
Brown, R. K., Public Housing in Action: The Record of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh UP, 1959.
Bullock, N., Building the Post-War World: Modern Architecture and Reconstruction in Britain,
London: Routledge, 2002.
Burnett, J., A Social History of Housing 18151985, Second Edition, London: Routledge, 1991.
Calabi, D., Il male citt: diagnosi e terapia, Roma: Officina Edizioni, 1979.
Cherry, G. (ed.) Pioneers in British Planning, London: Architectural Press, 1981.
Clapson, M., A Social History of Milton Keynes: Middle England/Edge City, London: Frank Cass,
2004.
325
326
Further reading
Colquhoun, I., RIBA Book of British Housing: 1900 to the Present Day, London: Butterworth
Heinemann, 1999.
Cullingworth, J. B., Environmental Planning 19391969. Volume III, New Towns Policy, London:
HMSO, 1979.
Daunton, M. J. (ed.), Councillors and Tenants: Local Authority Housing in English Cities 19191939,
Leicester: Leicester UP, 1984.
Dunleavy, P., The Politics of Mass Housing in Britain 19451975, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1981.
Finnimore, B., Houses from the factory: System Building and the Welfare State, London: Rivers
Oram Press, 1989.
Firth, C., State Housing in New Zealand, Wellington: Ministry of Works, 1949.
Fraser, M., John Bulls Other Homes: State Housing and British Policy in Ireland, 18831922,
Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1996.
Fuerst, J. S., When Public Housing Was Paradise: Building Community in Chicago, Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2005.
Glendinning, M., Modern Architect: The Life and Times of Robert Matthew, London: RIBA
Publishing, 2008.
Glendinning, M., and Muthesius, S., Tower Block: Modern Public Housing in England, Scotland,
Wales and Northern Ireland, New Haven: Yale UP, 1994.
Gold, J. R., The experience of modernism: Modern Architects and the Future City, 19281953,
London: E & FN Spon, 1997.
Gold, J. R., The Practice of Modernism: Modern Architects and Urban Transformation, 19541972,
London: Routledge, 2007.
Hall, P., Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth
Century, Oxford: Blackwell, 1988.
Harrison, H., Mullin, S., Reeves, B. and Stevens, A., Non-Traditional Houses: Identifying
Non-Traditional Houses in the UK 191875, Garston: BRE Press, 2004.
Harwood, E., and Powers, A. (eds), Twentieth Century Architecture 9: Housing the Twentieth
Century Nation, London: Twentieth Century Society, 2008.
Hirsch, A., Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago 19401960, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1983.
Hunt, B., Blueprint for Disaster: The Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2009.
Klemek, C., The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal: Postwar Urbanism from New York to
Berlin, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.
Maclure, S., Educational Development and School Building: Aspects of Public Policy 194573,
London: Longman, 1984.
Malpass, P. and Murie, A., Housing Policy and Practice, 5th ed., Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999.
Merrett, S., State Housing in Britain, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979.
Muthesius, S., The Post-War University: Utopianist Campus and College, New Haven: Yale UP,
2001.
Osborn, F. J. and Whittick, A., New Towns: Their Origins, Achievements, and Progress, London:
Leonard Hill, 1977.
Plunz, R., A History of Housing in New York City: Dwelling Type and Social Change in the American
Metropolis, New York: Columbia UP, 1990.
Ravetz, A., Model Estate: Planned Housing at Quarry Hill, Leeds, London: Croom Helm, 1974.
Rose, A., Regent Park, A Study in Slum Clearance, Toronto: Toronto UP, 1958.
Saint, A., Towards a Social Architecture: The Role of School-Building in Post-War England, New
Haven: Yale UP, 1987.
[Scotland], A Guide to Non-Traditional Housing in Scotland 19231955, Norwich: The Stationery
Office, 1987/2001.
Short, C. A., Barrett, P. and Fair, A., Geometry and Atmosphere: Theatre Buildings from Vision to
Reality, Farnham: Ashgate, 2011.
Further reading
Sutcliffe, A. (ed.), British Town Planning: The Formative Years, Leicester: Leicester UP, 1981.
Sutcliffe, A. (ed.), Multi-Storey Living: The British Working Class Experience, London: Croom
Helm, 1974.
Swenarton, M., Building the New Jerusalem: Architecture, housing and politics 19001930, Garston:
IHS-BRE, 2008.
Swenarton, M., Homes Fit for Heroes: The Politics and Architecture of Early State Housing in Britain,
London: Heinemann, 1981.
Vale, B. (ed.), Prefabs: A History of the UK Temporary Housing Programme, London: E & FN
Spon, 1995.
Vale, L., Reclaiming Public Housing: A Half Century of Struggle in Three Public Neighborhoods,
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2002.
Venkatesh, S. A. and Wilson, J. W., American Project: The Rise and Fall of an American Ghetto,
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2000.
Scandinavian
Albertsen, N. and Nielsen, T. (eds), Welfare City Theory, themed issue of Nordisk
Arkitekturforskning/Nordic Journal of Architectural Research, vol. 17, no. 2, 2004.
mark, K., Hundra r av vlfrdspolitik: Vlfrdsstatens framvxt i Norge och Sverige, Stockholm:
Borea Bokf rlag, 2005.
Andersen, M. A., Nordic Architects Write: A Documentary Anthology, Abingdon: Routledge, 2008.
Backstrom, S. and Alund, S., Fyrtiotalets svenska bostad, Stockholm: Tidskriften Byggmastaren,
1950.
Bergstrm, A. and Edman, V., Folkhemmets museum; Byggnader och rum fr kulturhistoriska
samlingar, Stockholm: Byggf rlaget, 2005.
Brunnstrm, L., Det svenska folkhemsbygget: Om Kooperativa Frbundets arkitektkontor, Stockholm:
Arkitektur, 2004.
Caldenby, C., Wedebrunn, O. and Zettersten, G. B., Survival of Modern: from Cultural Centres to
Planned Suburbs, Kbenhavn: Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture,
2012.
Childs, M. W., Sweden: The Middle Way, New Haven: Yale UP, 1936.
Creagh, L., Kberg. H. and Miller Lane, B. (eds), Modern Swedish Design: Three Founding Texts,
New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2008.
Dunr, K., Guide to Construction of Social Welfare Facilities in Sweden During the Nineteen Sixties,
Stockholm: National Association of Swedish Architects, 1970.
Eriksson, E., Den moderna staden tar form: Arkitektur och debatt 19101935, Stockholm: Ordfront,
2001.
Eriksson, E., Mellan tradition och modernitet: Arkitektur och arkitekturdebatt 19001930, Stockholm:
Ordfront, 2000.
Ferring, M., Den levande vggen: Frg och arkitektur i svensk 1970-tal, Mklinta: Gidlund, 2011.
Findal, W., Nordisk Funksjonalisme: Det Internasjonale Og Det Nasjonale, Oslo: Ad Notam
Gyldendal, 1995.
Fogh Kirkeby, O., Om velfrd: det godes politik, Kbenhavn: Gyldendal, 2011.
Grange, K., Arkitekterna i byggbranschen: Om vikten att upprtta ett kollektivt sjlvfortroende,
Gteborg: Chalmers University of Technology, 2005.
Habel, Y., Modern Media, Modern Audiences: Mass Media and Social Engineering in the 1930s
Swedish Welfare State, Stockholm: Aura Frlag, 2002.
Hirdman, Y., Att lgga livet till rtta: Studier i svensk folkhemspolitik, Stockholm: Carlssons
Bokfrlag, 1989.
Jacobson, T. P. and Silow, S. (eds), Ten Lectures on Swedish Architecture, Stockholm: Byggmstaren,
1949.
327
328
Further reading
Johnsen, E., Brytninger: Norsk Arkitektur 194565, Oslo: Nasjonalmuseet for kunst, arkitektur
og design, 2010.
Kalm, M. and Ruudi, I., Constructed Happiness: Domestic Environment in the Cold War Era,
Tallinn: Institute of Art History, 2005.
Kervanto Nevanlinna, A., Industry and Modernism: Companies, Architecture, and Identity in the
Nordic and Baltic Countries During the High-Industrial Period, Helsinki: Finnish Literature
Society, 2007.
Kristensen, H., Social Housing Policy and the Welfare State: A Danish Perspective, Urban
Studies, vol. 39, no. 2 (2002), pp. 255263.
Kristensen, H. (ed.), Bypolitik, Kvarterlft og Velfrd: en Antologi, Hrsholm: Statens
Byggeforskningsinstitut, 1999.
Kural, R., Velfrdsstaten: betydninger i by, rum og arkitektur, Kbenhavn: The Royal Danish
Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture, 2004.
Lendig, M. and Hvattum, M. (eds), Nonumentality, themed issue of Nordic Journal of
Architecture, no. 2, 2012.
Lund, N.-O., Nordic Architecture, Kbenhavn: Arkitektens Forlag/The Danish Architectural
Press, 2008.
Lund, N.-O., Teoridannelser i arkitekturen: Arkitekter og ideer fra 40erne til i dag, Kbenhavn:
Arkitektens Forlag, 1985.
Lundin, P., Stenls, N. and Gribbe J., Science for Welfare and Warfare, Sagamore Beach, Mass.:
Science History Publications, 2010.
Mattsson, H. and Wallenstein, S.-O. (eds), Swedish Modernism: Architecture, Consumption and the
Welfare State, London: Black Dog, 2010.
Myrdal, G. and A., Kris i befolkningsfrgan, Stockholm: Bonnier, 1934.
Nsstrm, G., Svensk funktionalism, Stockholm: Natur och Kultur, 1930.
Pech, C., Motstndets arkitektur: Om skandet efter alternativ i svensk arkitektur 19701980,
Gteborg: Makadam, 2011.
Pelkonen, E.-L., Alvar Aalto: Architecture, Modernity and Geopolitics, New Haven: Yale UP, 2009.
Rudberg, E., The Stockholm Exhibition 1930: Modernisms Breakthrough in Architecture, Stockholm:
Stockholmia, 1999.
Sandstrm, U., Arkitektur och social ingenjrskonst. Studier i svensk arkitektur- och bostadsforskning,
Linkping: Linkping Studies in Arts and Science, 1989.
Sderqvist, L., Att gestalta vlfrd: frn id till byggd milj, Stockholm: Formas, 2007.
Spliid Hogsbro, C. and Wischmann, A., Nortopia: Modern Nordic Architecture and Postwar
Germany, Berlin: Jovis, 2009.
Vestergaard, H., Boligpolitik i velfrdsstaten, in Ploug, N., Henriksen, I. and Krgaard. N.
(eds), Den danske velfrdsstats historie: Antologi, Kbenhavn: Socialforskningsinstituttet, 2004,
pp. 260286.
Wedebrunn, O. (ed.), Modern Movement Scandinavia: Vision and Reality, Kbenhavn: Fonden til
udgivelse af Arkitekturtidsskrift B, 1998.
Widenheim, C. (ed.), Utopia and Reality. Modernity in Sweden 19001960, New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2002.
Continental
Avermaete, T., Another Modern: The Post-War Architecture and Urbanism of Candilis-Josic-Woods,
Rotterdam: NAi, 2005.
Barbieri, S.U. (ed.), Architectuur en Planning: Nederland 19401980, Rotterdam: Uitgeverij 010,
1983.
Barbieri, U. and Boekraad, C., Kritiek en ontwerp: Proeven van architectuurkritiek, Nijmegen:
SUN, 1982.
Further reading
Barr, H. (ed.) Neues Wohnen 1929/2009: Frankfurt und der 2. Congrs International dArchitecture
Moderne, Berlin: Jovis, 2010.
Benevolo, L., Histoire de larchitecture moderne. 3. Les conits et laprs-guerre, Paris: Dunod,
1980.
Blau, E., The Architecture of Red Vienna 191934, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999.
Bodenschatz, H., Platz frei fr das Neue Berlin! Geschichte der Stadterneuerung in der Grten
Mietskasernenstadt der Welt seit 1871, West Berlin: Transit, 1987.
Bosma, K., Hoogstraten D. van and Vos, M., Housing for the Millions. John Habraken and the SAR
(19602000), Rotterdam: NAi, 2000.
Bosma, K. and Wagenaar, C. (eds), Een Geruisloze Doorbraak: De geschiedenis van de architectuur en
stedebouw tijdens de bezetting en de wederopbouw van Nederland, Rotterdam: NAi, 1999.
Bramhas, E., Der Wiener Gemeindebau: vom Karl-Marx-Hof zum Hundertwasserhaus, Basel:
Birkhuser, 1987.
Brouwer, P., Van stad naar stedelijkheid: Planning en planconceptie van Lelystad en Almere 19591964,
Burlen, K. (ed.), La Banlieue Oasis: Henri Sellier et les cits-jardins 19001940, Paris: Presses
Universitaires de Vincennes, 1987.
Busbea, L., Topologies: The Urban Utopia in France, 19601970, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
2007.
Casciato, M., Panzini, F. and Polano, S. (eds), Architektuur en volkshuisvesting: Nederland
18701940, Nijmegen: SUN, 1980.
De Vletter, M., De Kritiese Jaren Zeventig. Architectuur en Stedenbouw in Nederland 19681982/
The Critical Seventies: Architecture and Urban Planning in the Netherlands 19681982,
De Vos, E., Hoe zouden we graag wonen? Woonvertogen in Vlaanderen tijdens de Jaren Zestig en
Zeventig, Leuven: Universitaire Pers, 2012.
Drhfer, K., Erscheinungen und Determinanten staatlich gelenkter Wohnungsversorgunge in der
Bundesrepublik Deutschland: Zur Planung und Durchfhrung des Wohnungsbau fr die breiten
Schichten des Volkes (Sozialer Wohnungsbau), Berlin: TU, 1978.
Dufoux, F., Fourcaut, A. and Skoutelsky, R., Faire lhistoire des grands ensembles: bibliographie
19501980, Lyon: ENS ditions, 2003.
Durban, C., Koch, M., Kurz, D., Schumacher, M. and Somandin, M., Mehr al Wohnen:
Gemeinntziger Wohnungsbau in Zrich 19072007, Bauten und Siedlungen, Zrich: GTA
Verlag, 2007.
Fourasti, J., Les Trente glorieuses: ou, La Rvolution invisible de 1946 a 1975, Paris: Fayard, 1979.
Gosseye, J., Heynen, H., Loeckx, A. and Van Molle, L., Architectuur voor Vrijetijdscultuur:
Culturele Centra, Zwembaden & Recreatiedomeinen, Leuven: LannooCampus, 2011.
Grinberg, D. I., Housing in The Netherlands 19001940, Delft: Delft UP, 1977.
Guerrand, R.-H., Le Logement populaire en France: sources documentaires et bibliographie, Paris:
Centre dtudes et de recherches architecturales, 1979.
Hannemann, C., Die Platte: industrialisierter Wohnungsbau in der DDR, Berlin: Verlag Hans
Schiler, 2005.
Harlander, T., Zwischen Heimsttte und Wohnmaschine: Wohnungsbau und Wohnungspolitik in der
Zeit der Nationalsozialismus, Basel: Birkhaser, 1995.
Harlander, T. and Fehl, G. (eds), Hitlers Sozialer Wohnungsbau 19401945: Wohnungspolitik,
Baugestaltung und Siedlungsplanung, Hamburg: Christians, 1986.
Herck, K. Van and Avermaete, T., Wonen in Welvaart: Woningbouw en Wooncultuur in Vlaanderen,
19481973, Rotterdam: Uitgeverij 010, 2006.
Herlyn, U., Saldern, A. von and Tessin, W. (eds), Neubausiedlungen der 20er und 60er Jahre: ein
historisch-soziologischer Vergleich, Frankfurt: Campus, 1987.
Ibelings, H., Van den Broek en Bakema 19481988: Architectuur en stedenbouw: de functie van de
form, Rotterdam: NAi, 2000.
329
330
Further reading
Jacob, B. and Schche, W. (eds), 40 Jahre Mrkisches Viertel: Geschichte einer Grosiedlung, Berlin:
Jovis, 2004.
James-Chakraborty, K., Bauhaus Culture: From Weimar to the Cold War, Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2005.
Kleinman, M., Housing, Welfare and the State in Europe: A Comparative Analysis of Britain, France
and Germany, Cheltenham: Elgar, 1996.
Landauer, P., LInvention du Grand Ensemble: la Caisse des dpts matre douvrage, Paris: Picard, 2010.
Lengereau, ., Ltat et Larchitecture, 19581981: Une politique publique?, Paris: Picard, 2001.
Liebscher, R., Wohnen fr Alle: eine Kulturgeschichte des Plattenbaus, Berlin: Vergangenheitsverlag,
2009.
Lucan, J., France: Architecture 19651988, Paris: Electa Moniteur, 1989.
Maniaque-Benton, C., French Encounters with the American Counterculture 19601980, Farnham:
Ashgate, 2011.
Miller Lane, B., Architecture and Politics in Germany 19181945, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
UP, 1968.
Mitscherlich, A., Die Unwirtlichkeit unserer Stdte. Anstiftung zum Unfrieden, Frankfurt: Campus,
1965.
Molnar, V., Building the State: Architecture, Politics, and State Formation in Post-war Central Europe,
Abingdon: Routledge, 2013.
Monnier, G. and Klein, R., Les Annes ZUP: Architectures de la croissance, 19601973, Paris:
Picard, 2002.
Pouvreau, B., Un politique en architecture: Eugne Claudius-Petit (19071989), Paris: Le Moniteur,
2004.
Prak, N. L., Het Nederlandse woonhuis van 1800 tot 1940, Delft: Delft UP, 1991.
Quiring, C., Voigt, W., Schmal, P. C. and Herrel, E. (eds), Ernst May 18861970, Mnchen:
Prestel, 2011.
Ross, K., Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the reordering of French Culture, Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1995.
Ryckewaert, M., Building the Economic Backbone of the Belgian Welfare State: Infrastructure, Planning
and Architecture 19451973, Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2011.
Schuyt, K. and Taverne, E., Dutch Culture in a European Perspective: 1950, Prosperity and Welfare,
Assen: Uitgeverij Van Gorcum, 2004.
Stanek, ., Henri Lefebvre on Space: Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of Theory,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
Stieber, N., Housing Design and Society in Amsterdam: Reconguring Urban Order and Identity,
19001920, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Stissi, V., Amsterdam, het mekka van de volkshuisvesting: Sociale woningbouw 19091940,
Rotterdam: Uitgeverij 010, 2007.
Tellier, T., Le Temps des HLM 19451975: La saga urbaine des Trente Glorieuses, Paris: Editions
Autremont, 2008.
UNESCO, Siedlungen der Berliner Moderne: Eintragung in die Welterbeliste der UNESCO/Berlin
Modernism Housing Estates: Inscription on the UNESCO World Heritage List, Berlin: Braun,
2007/2009.
Vanstiphout, W., Maak een stad: Rotterdam en de architectuur van J. H. van den Broek, Rotterdam:
Uitgeverij 010, 2005.
Vayssire, B.-H., Reconstruction-Dconstruction: le hard french ou larchitecture franaise des trente
glorieuses, Paris: Picard, 1988.
de Vreeze, N., Woningbouw, Inspiratie & Ambities. Kwalitatieve grondslagen van de sociale woningbouw
in Nederland, Almere: Nationale Woningraad, 1993.
Wagenaar, C., Town Planning in the Netherlands since 1800, Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2011.
Wagenaar, C., Welvaartsstad in wording: De wederopbouw van Rotterdam 19401952, Rotterdam:
NAi, 1992.
Further reading
Wagner, G., Sozialstaat gegen Wohnungsnot: Wohnraumbewirtschaftung und sozialer Wohnungsbau im

Bund und in Nordrhein-Westfalen 19501970, Paderborn: Schningh, 1995.
Weihsmann, H., Das Rote Wien: Sozialdemokratische Architektur und Kommunalpolitik 19191934,
Wien: Promedia, 2002.
Wiedenhoeft, R., Berlins Housing Revolution: German Reform in the 1920s, Ann Arbor: UMI
Research Press, 1971/1985.
Wilde, A., Das Mrkische Viertel, West Berlin: Nicolai, 1989.
Southern/Mediterranean
Allen, J., Barlow, J., Leal, J., Maloutas, T. and Padovani, L., Housing and Welfare in Southern
Europe, London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004.
Almeida, R. V. de, Operaes SAAL 19741976, in Becker, A., Tostes, A and Wang, W.
(eds), Arquitectura do Sculo XX Portugal, Munich: Prestel, 1997.
Bandeirinha, J. A., O Processo SAAL e a Arquitectura no 25 Abril de 1974, Coimbra, Imprensa
da Universidade, 2007.
Belluzzi A. and Conforti C., Architettura italiana 19441994, Bari: Laterza, 1994.
Beretta Anguissola L. (ed.), I 14 anni del Piano Ina Casa, Roma: Staderini, 1963.
Cmara Municipal do Porto, As Ilhas, as Colnias Operrias e os Bairros de Casas Econmicas,
Porto: Cmara Municipal do Porto, 2000.
Ctedra de elementos de composicin, ETSAM, Tipologas de la vivienda colectiva en Madrid,
1890/1970, Madrid: COAM, 1982.
Centellas, M., La vivienda moderna, 19251965: registro DOCOMOMO Ibrico, Barcelona:
Fundacin Caja de Arquitectos/Fundacin DOCOMOMO Ibrico, 2009.
Ciucci, G., Gli architetti e il fascismo: architettura e citt 19221944, Torino: Einaudi, 1989.
Costa, J. P., Bairro de Alvalade, Lisboa: Livros Horizonte, 2002.
Cruz, M., Construir a casa: Elementos exploratrios para a compreenso dos contedos, do
contexto e do processo de concepo arquitectnica da habitao unifamiliar, Sociologia
(Porto), 16 (2006), pp. 231250.
De Pieri, F., Bonomo, B., Caramellino, G. and Zan F. (eds), Storie di case: Abitare lItalia del
boom, Roma: Donzelli, 2013.
De Simone R., Il razionalismo nellarchitettura italiana del primo novecento, Bari: Laterza, 2011.
Di Biagi, P., (ed.), La grande ricostruzione: Il Piano Ina-Casa e lItalia degli anni 50, Roma:
Donzelli, 2001.
Di Biagi, P. and Gabellini, P. (eds), Urbanisti italiani: Piccinato, Marconi, Samon, Quaroni, De
Carlo, Astengo, Campos Venuti, Bari: Laterza, 1992.
Ferrera, M., Il welfare state in Italia: Sviluppo e crisi in prospettiva comparata, Bologna: Il Mulino,
1984.
Gonalves, E., O Bairro do Monte Pedral e o alojamento operrio em 1900, in Ramos, R. J.
G. (ed.), Leituras de Marques da Silva, Porto: Fundao Marques da Silva, 2011, pp.100109.
Gros, M. C., O Alojamento Social Sob o Fascismo, Porto: Afrontamento, 1982.
Istituto Luigi Sturzo, (ed.), Fanfani e la casa: Gli anni Cinquanta e il modello italiano di welfare state,
il Piano Ina-Casa, Roma: Rubettino, 2002.
Lpez de Lucio, R., Los nuevos ensanches de Madrid: la morfologa residencial de la periferia reciente
19851993, Madrid: Gerencia Municipal de Urbanismo, 1995.
[Madrid], La vivienda en Madrid en la Dcada de los 50: El Plan de Urgencia Social, Madrid: Electra,
1999.
[Madrid], La Vivienda Experimental: Concurso de viviendas experimentales de 1956, Madrid:
COAM, 1997.
Milherio, A. V. (ed.), Habitar em colectivo: Arquitectura Portuguesa antes do SAAL, Lisboa: Instituto
Universitrio de Lisboa, 2009.
331
332
Further reading
Molinari, L., Continuit: A Response to Identity Crises. Ernesto Nathan Rogers and Italian architectural culture after 1945, Delft: TU Delft, 2008.
Monica L. (ed.), Gallaratese, Corviale, Zen, Parma: Festival Architettura, 2008.
Montaner, J. M., Herramientas para habitar el presente: la vivienda del siglo XXI, Madrid: Mster
Laboratorio de la vivienda del siglo XXI, 2011.
Moya, L., Barrios de promocin ocial: Madrid 19391976, Madrid: COAM, 1983.
Pagano G., Architettura e citt durante il Fascismo, Bari: Laterza, 1976.
Pereira, V. B. and Queirs, J., Na modesta cidadezinha: Gnese e estruturao de um bairro de casas
econmicas do Porto (Amial, 19382010), Porto: Afrontamento, 2013.
Pinto, P. R., Housing and Citizenship: Building Social Rights in Twentieth-Century Portugal,
Contemporary European History, 18, no. 2 (2009), pp. 199215.
Ramos, R. J. G., Disponibilidade moderna na arquitectura domstica de Raul Lino e Ventura
Terra na abertura do sculo XX, in M. D Mesquita (ed.), Revistas de Arquitectura: Arquivo(s)
da Modernidade, Lisboa: Caleidoscpio, 2011, p. 78111.
Ramos, R. J. G., A casa: Arquitectura e projecto domstico na primeira metade do sculo XX portugus,
Porto: FAUP Publicaes, 2010.
Sambricio, C. (ed.), Un siglo de vivienda social 19032003, Madrid: Editorial Nerea, 2 vols.,
2003.
Tournikiotis, P. (ed.), Greek Modern Architecture. Thematic Cross-sections and Documentation of a
Creative Era: the 1930s (Enhancement Programme for Basic Research, Final Report 65/1641,
2007), Athens: School of Architecture, National Technical University of Athens, 2009.
Valero, A., Anlisis poltico-econmico general de las disposiciones sobre vivienda social y dems viviendas
de proteccin ocial, Madrid: Ministerio de la Vivienda, Servicio Central de Publicaciones,
1977.
The wider world

Al-Haidary, A., Entwicklungstendenzen der Wohnungsversorgung im Irak: Das
Wohnungsbauprogramm 1981 bis 2000, Architektur der DDR, 9 (1983), pp. 569573.
Alans, E. X. de A., Vivienda colectiva de la modernidad en Mxico: los multifamiliares durante el
periodo presidencial de Miguel Alemn (19461952), Mexico City: UNAM Press, 2008.
Amis, P. and Lloyd, P. (eds), Housing Africas Urban Poor, Manchester: Manchester UP, 1990.
Awotona, A., Housing in Libya 19501980, Habitat International, vol. 14, no. 1 (1990), pp.
5585.
Castells, M., Goh, L. and Kwok, R., The Shek Kip Mei Syndrome: Economic Development and
Public Housing in Hong Kong and Singapore, London: Pion, 1990.
Colin Buchanan and Parters/National Housing Authority (Kuwait), National Housing Programme,
London: Buchanan, 1976.
CRIT (Collective Research Initiatives Trust), Housing Typologies in Mumbai, Mumbai: CRIT,
2007, www.urban-age.net/0_downloads/House_Types_in_Mumbai.pdf
dAuria, V., From Tropical Transitions to Ekistic Experimentation: Doxiadis Associates in
Tema, Ghana, Positions, no. 1 (2010), pp. 4063.
Drabkin-Darin, H., Housing in Israel: Economic and Sociological Aspects, Tel Aviv: Gadish, 1957.
Harris, S. E., Communism on Tomorrow Street: Mass Housing and Everyday Life After Stalin,
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2013.
Home, R., Of Planting and Planning: The Making of British Colonial Cities, London: E & FN
Spon, 1997.
Housing and Development Board, First Decade in Public Housing 196069, Singapore: Housing
and Development Board, 1970.
Housing and Development Board, 50,000 Up: Homes for the People, Singapore: Housing and
Development Board, 1966.
Further reading
Junhua, L., Rowe, P. and Jie, Z., Modern Urban Housing in China 18402000, Munich: Prestel,
2001.
Keeton, R., Rising in the East: Contemporary New Towns in Asia, Amsterdam: SUN Architecture,
2011.
King, A. D., Exporting planning: the colonial and neo-colonial experience, in G. E. Cherry
(ed.), Shaping an Urban World, London: Mansell, 1980.
Lizardi, J. and Schwegmann, M. (eds), Espacios Ambivalentes: historias y olvidos en la arquitectura
social moderna/Ambivalent Spaces: Memory and Oblivion in Modern Social Architecture, San Juan
(Puerto Rico): Ediciones Callejn, 2012.
Loh, K. S., Squatters into Citizens: The 1961 Bukit Ho Swee Fire and the Making of Modern
Singapore, Singapore: NUS Press, 2013.
Smart, A., The Shek Kip Mei Myth: Squatters, Fires and Colonial Rulers in Hong Kong 19501963,
Hong Kong: Hong Kong UP, 2006.
Smith, M. B., Property of Communists: The Urban Housing Program from Stalin to Khrushchev,
DeKalb: Northern Illinois UP, 2010.
Stanek, . and Avermaete, T. (eds), Cold War Transfer. Architecture and Planning from the
Socialist Countries in the Third World, themed issue of Journal of Architecture, vol. 17,
no. 3 (2012).
Waswo, A., Housing in Japan: A Social History, London: Routledge, 2002.
Wong, A. K. and Yeh, S. H. K. (eds), Housing a Nation: 25 Years of Public Housing in Singapore,
Singapore: Maruzen Press, 1985.
Yeh, S. H. K., Public Housing in Singapore: A Multi-Disciplinary Study, Singapore: Singapore UP,
1975.
Yeung, Y. M. and Wong, T. K. Y., Fifty Years of Public Housing in Hong Kong, Hong Kong:
Chinese UP, 2003.
333
CONTRIBUTORS
Tom Avermaete is Professor of Architecture at TU Delft. He is the author of

Another Modern: The Post-War Architecture and Urbanism of Candilis-Josic-Woods (2005)
and co-editor of Colonial Modern: Aesthetics of the Past, Rebellions for the Future (2010)
and of the themed issue of OASE, LAfrique, cest chic (2010).
Eve Blau is Adjunct Professor of the History of Urban Form at Harvard University
Graduate School of Design. Her books include The Architecture of Red Vienna (1999),
Project Zagreb (2007), Urban Form: Stdtebau in der postfordistischen Gesellschaft (2003)
and Shaping the Great City: Modern Architecture in Central Europe (1999).
Nicholas Bullock is Emeritus Reader in the Department of Architecture at
Cambridge and also teaches at the Architectural Association. He published Building
the Post-War World: Modern Architecture and Reconstruction in Britain in 2002 and is now
researching the architecture and modernization of France in the thirty years after the
Second World War.
Miles Glendinning is Professor in Architectural Conservation at the University
of Edinburgh and Director of the Scottish Centre for Conservation Studies. He

has researched and published extensively on built environment subjects, including
modernist and contemporary architecture and housing, and the architectural history
of Scotland.
Janina Gosseye is a postdoctoral research fellow at both TU Delft, where she is part
of the Methods and Analysis group, and at the University of Queensland, where she
is a member of the Architecture Theory Criticism History Research Centre (ATCH).
Her research focuses on the notion of collectivity in post-war architecture.
Hilde Heynen is Professor of Architectural Theory at KU Leuven. Her books include
Architecture and Modernity. A Critique (1999) and The Sage Handbook of Architectural
Theory (2012, co-edited with Greig Crysler and Stephen Cairns). She publishes in
journals such as Home Cultures and The Journal of Architecture.
Contributors
Caroline Maniaque-Benton is Associate Professor of Architecture at the cole
Nationale Suprieure dArchitecture, Paris Malaquais/University Paris Est. She is the

author of Le Corbusier and the Maisons Jaoul (Princeton Architectural Press, 2009) and
French Encounters with the American Counterculture 19601980 (Ashgate, 2011).
Helena Mattsson is Associate Professor at the KTH School of Architecture,
Stockholm. Among other publications she was editor (with S.-O. Wallenstein) of
Swedish Modernism: Architecture, Consumption and the Welfare State (2010) and Kalmar
Stortorg (2006). Her current project is Architecture of Deregulations, investigating the
neoliberal turn in Swedish 1990s architecture.
Luca Molinari is Associate Professor in History of Contemporary Architecture at
the Second University of Naples. He was curator for architecture of the Triennale
of Milan (20002004) and curator of the Italian Pavillion at the XII Venice Biennale
of Architecture (2010) and has written extensively about postwar Italian architecture.
Simon Pepper is Emeritus Professor of Architecture at the University of Liverpool.
His books include Housing Improvement: Goals and Strategy (1971), Firearms &
Fortications: Military Architecture and Siege Warfare in Sixteenth-Century Siena (1986,
with Nicholas Adams), and Books, Buildings and Social Engineering (2009, with Alistair
Black and Kaye Bagshaw).
Michelle Provoost is a founding partner of Crimson Architectural Historians,
which was established in 1994 in Rotterdam and undertakes research and design in
the eld of modern urban planning and architecture. Since 2008 she has also been the
Director of the International New Town Institute in Almere.
ukasz Stanek is a lecturer at the Manchester Architecture Research Centre,
University of Manchester. He is author of Henri Lefebvre on Space: Architecture, Urban

Research, and the Production of Theory (2011) and Postmodernism Is Almost All Right:
Polish Architecture After Socialist Globalization (2012). He has also taught at ETH Zurich
and Harvard.
Mark Swenarton is James Stirling Professor of Architecture at the University of
Liverpool. His writings on twentieth-century social housing include Homes Fit for
Heroes (1981) and Building the New Jerusalem (2008). He is currently researching the
housing built by Camden Council under Sydney Cook between 1965 and 1973.
Florian Urban is Professor and Head of Architectural History and Urban Studies
at the Mackintosh School of Architecture, Glasgow School of Art. He is author of

Neo-historical East Berlin: Architecture and Urban Design in the German Democratic Republic
19701990 (2009) and Tower and Slab: Histories of Global Mass Housing (2011).
Dirk van den Heuvel is Head of the Jaap Bakema Study Centre at Het Nieuwe
Instituut, Rotterdam and Associate Professor at TU Delft. He co-edits DASH (Delft

Architectural Studies on Housing) and the online journal Footprint. With Max Risselada
he co-authored Team 10: In Search of a Utopia of the Present (2005).
335
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1.1
Figure 1.2
Figure 1.3
Figure 1.4
Figure 1.5
Figure 1.6
Figure 2.0
Figure 2.1
Figure 2.2
Figure 2.3
Figure 2.4
Figure 2.5
Figure 2.6
Cumbernauld Development Corporation (Hugh WilsonDudley Leaker/Geoffrey Copcutt), Cumbernauld New

Town, North Lanarkshire, the town centre photographed
in 1967
Alison and Peter Smithson (Greater London Council),
Robin Hood Gardens estate, London, 19651972,
photographed by Sandra Lousada
Candilis Josic Woods (Commissariat lnergie atomique
(CEA) and Ministre de la construction), La Citadelle
housing, Bagnols-sur-Cze, 1958
City of Frankfurt am Main (Ernst May/Carl Rudloff ),
Bruchfeldstrasse estate (Zickzackhausen), Frankfurt, 1927
Jean Prouv with construction company CIMT, youth
club for the Mille Clubs programme, 1966
Giancarlo De Carlo talking to the students/protesters
occupying the Milan Triennale, 1968, photographed by
Cesare Colombo
Karl Ehn, Karl Marx Hof, view of forecourt, 192730
Das Neue Wien/Vienna of Today, 1931
Bebelhof, Karl Ehn, 19251926, ground oor plan and
street view
Karl Marx Hof, plan and view of forecourt, Karl Ehn,
19271930
Plans: Rabenhof and Am Fuchsenfeld, Heinrich Schmid
and Hermann Aichinger architects, (19241928)
Adolf Loos Terrassenhaus Project Elevations, dated
December 1923; Oskar Strnad, Terrassenhaus Project, 1923
Friedrich Pangratz, Franz Schuster, Stephan Simony, Max
Fellerer, Eugen Wrle, Per Albin Hansson Siedlung
9
12
13
15
26
31
32
34
35
37
39
List of figures
Figure 2.7
Figure 2.8
Figure 3.0
Figure 3.1
Figure 3.2
Figure 3.3
Figure 3.4
Figure 3.5
Figure 3.6
Figure 3.7
Figure 4.0
Figure 4.1
Figure 4.2
Figure 4.3
Figure 4.4
Figure 4.5
Figure 4.6
Figure 4.7
Figure 4.8
Figure 4.9
Figure 5.0
Figure 5.1
Figure 5.2
Figure 5.3
Figure 5.4
Figure 5.5
Figure 5.6
Figure 5.7
Figure 5.8
Harry Glck, Kurt Hlaweniczka, Requat & Reinthaller &

Partner, Wohnpark Alt-Erlaa, Vienna, 19681985
Wilhelm Holzbauer, Wohnen Morgen housing complex,
Vienna, 19741979
Catholic housing as seen by socialists and socialist housing
as seen by Catholics
Home Emile Vandervelde II
A view of Hengelhoef s residential pavilions
Spatial layout of the two different pavilion types in Hengelhoef:
type A (the rectangular plan) and type B (square plan)
Two families sitting in front of their bungalow unit,
enjoying the serenity of nature
Front page of the 1958 socialist election bulletin of Leuven
Photo of the cultural centre of Hasselt, shortly after
opening in 1972
Leisure infrastructure built in Flanders between 1958 and 1985
Needwood House, Woodberry Down estate, 1949
LCC Housing at Woodberry Down, Stoke Newington
LCC Housing at the White City, air view from Forshaw
and Abercrombie
Woodberry Down, model of the revised LCC proposal
19381939
Diagram of Proposed London Population Housing Densities
Reconstruction in Shoreditch and Bethnal Green
Artists impression of mixed development at West Ham
Park, from Patrick Abercrombie, Greater London Plan 1944
Woodberry Down, nal site plan
Woodberry Down, 8-storey slab blocks on Seven Sisters Road
The shape of the future, 2013
Typical patterns of mixed uses around the docks in the
south of West Ham
The location of Newham in Greater London (left) and
West Ham in the 1950s (right)
Typical patterns of mixed uses around the docks in the
south of West Ham
Tom North, son of West Ham and borough architect and
planner
Proposals for West Ham as part of the Greater London
Plan (left) and Neighbourhood 15 (right)
The Appleby Road estate, typical of early post-war
developments
Mixed development in West Ham: the Claremont Road estate
Newham modernized: 22-storey Taylor WoodrowAnglian point-blocks in the early 1970s
The collapse of Ronan Point on the Clever Road estate,
May 1968
42
45
50
57
58
59
60
61
63
63
68
71
72
73
76
77
78
79
80
86
92
94
94
95
96
97
98
101
103
337
338
List of figures
Figure 6.0
The structure of housing types in the agglomeration of

Bordeaux
Figure 6.1
Robert Auzelle, general plan of the Cit de la Plaine in
Clamart, constructed between 1947 and 1967
Figure 6.2
Robert Auzelle, Cit de la Plaine in Clamart, collective
housing estates, current state
Figure 6.3
Robert Auzelle, Cit de la Plaine in Clamart, individual
houses, current state
Figure 6.4
Robert Auzelle, Cit de la Plaine in Clamart, collective
housing estates, current state
Figure 7.0
Piet Blom, Kasbah housing project, Hengelo (196974)
Figure 7.1
Aldo van Eyck, sketch for the town hall of Deventer (1966)
Figure 7.2
Herman Hertzberger, Centraal Beheer office building in
Apeldoorn (19681972), view into an interior street
Figure 7.3
De Opbouw and the Van den Broek and Bakema office,
panel of the CIAM Grid of 1956, visual group for
Rotterdam Alexanderpolder
Figure 7.4
Piet Blom, Kasbah housing project in Hengelo (1969
1974), south facade
Figure 7.5
Piet Blom, oor plan of Urban Roof Study (1965) with
inserted Provo references
Figure 7.6
1974), ground oor and location plan
Figure 7.7
1974), the undercroft with public gardens and parking
Figure 7.8
Piet Blom, Kasbah roofscape, model
Figure 8.0
Skrholmen Centrum, photographed by Sune Sundhal, 1968
Figure 8.1
Model of Skrholmen, Boijsen & Efvergren
Figure 8.2
Skrholmen Centrum,drawing by Boijsen & Efvergren
Figure 8.3
Plan of Skrholmen, Stockholm City Planning Office, 19
October 1964
Figure 8.4
Skrholmen Centrum, view from the south, drawing by
Boijsen & Efvergren, 4 August 1968
Figure 8.5
Skrholmen Centrum: the public street connecting
shopping areas, social spaces and the housing area
Figure 8.6
Skrholmen Centrum, conceptual sketch for traffic by
Boijsen & Efvergren, 11 March 1967
Figure 8.7
Skrholmen Centrum, drawing by Boijsen & Efvergren,
1415 April 1963
Figures 8.8 and 8.9 Details of concrete facades in the shopping centre
Figure 8.10
Skrholmen Centrum
Figure 9.0
Part of the Long Lament residential slab block by Ren
Gags and Volker Theissen, begun 1964
Figure 9.1
Mrkisches Viertel (built 19631975): high-rise slab blocks
by Georg Heinrichs and Hans Mller
Figure 9.2
Mrkisches Viertel, plan
112
116
117
118
118
132
135
135
139
142
142
145
148
150
154
156
157
161
162
163
166
167
169
171
176
178
179
List of figures
Figure 9.3
Figure 9.4
Figure 9.5
Figure 9.6
Figure 9.7
Figure 9.8
Figure 10.0
Figure
Figure
Figure
Figure
10.1
10.2
10.3
10.4
Figure 10.5
Figure 11.0
Figure 11.1
Figure 11.2
Figure 11.3
Figure 11.4
Figure 11.5
Figure 11.6
Figure 11.7
Figure 11.8
Figure 11.9
Figure 12.0
West Berlin in the grip of speculators poster shown at

the Anti-Building-Fair
The Long Lament residential tower by Ren Gags and
Volker Theissen, begun 1964
Buildings at the Mrkisches Viertel by Oswald Mathias
Ungers, begun 1964
Residential towers on Senftenberger Ring at the
Mrkisches Viertel by Chen Kuen Lee and by Heinz
Schudnagies, all begun 1964
Late-nineteenth-century tenement or Mietskaserne (rental
barracks) on Schnieer Strae, Prenzlauer Berg
Housing at the Mrkisches Viertel by Shadrach Woods
with an interior garden
Icosa: la tortue qui cause de construction, U.V. Rdaction
exprimentale, Dpartement durbanisme, Universit de
Paris VIII, 1973
Stewart Brand (ed.), Cover of Whole Earth Catalog, Fall 1968
Garbage Housing, Architectural Design
Lloyd Kahn, spread from Shelter, Bolinas, 1973
Grard Aim, Patrice Aoust and Philippe Bone, Le
catalogue des ressources (1977), Vol. III
Grard Aim, Patrice Aoust and Philippe Bone, Le
catalogue des ressources, Vol.IV, energies/habitats
ATBAT presentation on so-called conomie Technique in
urban projects, 1952
ATBAT architects Shadrach Woods, Victor Bodiansky and
Georges Candilis on the roof of the Unit dhabitation in
Marseille, under construction, around 1950
The arrival in New York of the French Mission
dArchitecture et dUrbanisme to the United States from
September 1945 to April 1946
Two members of a TVA design committee visit the
construction site of the Fontana Dam, 1944
Axonometric of a Two-Cell house by Tennessee Valley
Authority House, 1942
Two-Cell houses at Fontana Dam Village by Tennessee
Valley Authority
Unit dhabitation, Marseille
GAMMA (Groupe dArchitectes Modernes Marocains),
Habitat for the Greatest Number Grid, CIAM 9, 1953
Scheme of Habitat by ATBAT architects
ATBAT presentation on newly developed housing projects
in Morocco, 1953
Lesley Martin and Patrick Hodgkinson, The Brunswick,
London, completed 1974, part of east facade to Brunswick
Square
181
182
182
184
190
193
198
201
204
205
206
208
218
220
221
222
223
223
224
226
228
230
236
339
340
List of figures
Figure 12.1
Figure 12.2
Figure 12.3
Figure 12.4
Figure 12.5
Figure 12.6
Figure 12.7
Figure 12.8
Figure 12.9
Figure 12.10
Figure 13.0
Figure 13.1a
Figure 13.1b
Figure 13.2
Figure 13.3
Figure 13.5
Figure 13.6
Figure 13.6
Figure 13.7
Figure 13.8
Figure 13.9
Figure 13.10
Figure 14.0
Exemplar of mixed development: London County

Council, Loughborough estate, Brixton, 19521956
237
Leslie Martin and Patrick Hodgkinson, Brunswick, rst
scheme (revised), September 1962, sectional perspective
239
Patrick Hodgkinson, student design for Loughborough
estate, Brixton, 1953, axonometric
242
estate, Brixton, 1953, site plan at roof level
242
estate, Brixton, 1953, detailed section
243
estate, Brixton, 1953, axonometric of upper unit above
walkway showing arrangement with 1.5 storey kitchen/
living room
245
estate, Brixton, 1953, plans of upper and lower units
245
estate, Brixton, 1953, model showing 3.5-storey
arrangement in long section
246
Leslie Martin and Patrick Hodgkinson, West Kentish
Town housing, St Pancras, 19571958, cross section
250
Leslie Martin and Patrick Hodgkinson, West Kentish
Town housing, St Pancras, 19571958, layout model
250
Carlo Aymonino, Building A2: perspective section with
savage and young lady
258
Carbonia, Sardinia. General view of the village in 1938
261
Carbonia, Sardinia. View of the case operaie (workers
housing) along via Satta, 1939
261
Giancarlo De Carlo, Villaggio Matteotti, Terni, general view 266
Giancarlo De Carlo, Villaggio Matteotti, Terni, view of
the pedestrian route
267
the pedestrian deck
268
the private terraces
268
Carlo Aymonino, Gallaratese 2, general axonometric (study) 269
Carlo Aymonino, Building A2: perspective section with
Mirano Psychiatric Hospital
271
Carlo Aymonino and Aldo Rossi, Gallaratese 2, composite
drawing with site plan, ground oor plan and sections, 1969 272
Aldo Rossi, Monte Amiata housing complex, Gallaratese
2, Milan, general view, 2013
273
Carlo Aymonino, Monte Amiata housing complex,
Gallaratese 2, Milan, main view, 2013
273
The new Tema village by Fry and Drew just after
completion, ca. 1960
276
List of figures
Figure 14.1
Figure 14.2
Figure 14.3
Figure 14.4
Figure 14.5
Figure 14.6
Figure 14.7
Figure 14.8
Figure 14.9
Figure 14.10
Figure 15.0
Figure 15.1
Figure 15.2
Figure 15.3
Figure 15.4
Figure 15.5
Figure 15.6
Figure 15.7
Figure 15.8
Figure 15.9
Plan for Tema New Town, based on A.E.S. Alcocks

planning advice, 1959
Tema village, just before it was demolished
Second and nal plan for Tema village by Fry and Drew,
ca. 1956
Masterplan for Tema by Doxiadis Associates, 1961
The design of public space in the lower and lower middle
income housing was given great attention, ca. 1967
Terraced houses equipped with gardens lined with palm
trees in Community 4, just after completion
Old and upgraded canoes in the canoe harbour of Tema
village, against the background of the Valco Aluminum
factory, 2007
The original compound houses in Tema village, 2007
Some houses in Tema city Community 4 still have
gardens, but most have used them to extend their living
spaces, 2007
Schools and churches are the organising focal points in
many Tema city communities, 2007
Mark 1 blocks on Kwun Tong resettlement estate,
Kowloon, Hong Kong, in 1983
Singapore National Day display (2011) at Bukit Ho Swee
estate
The rst completed blocks (19571958) in SITs Kallang
Airport redevelopment
Donald Liao, photographed in 2010 at the Hong Kong
Jockey Club, Sha Tin New Town
Bukit Ho Swee Phase 1 (Tiong Bahru Cemetery Site)
HDBs rst home ownership blocks, Queenstown
neighbourhood 4
HKHAs Sun Chui estate phase 2, Sha Tin, Hong Kong,
under construction, 1983
Sui Wo Court, Sha Tin
Sin Ming Court, Bishan New Town, Singapore
HKHAs Lower Ngau Tau Kok redevelopment under
construction in 2011
280
282
283
287
289
289
292
292
294
294
298
303
306
308
309
310
312
313
314
314
341
INDEX
Figures in bold denote illustrations

Aalto, Alvar 248, 249, 253
Abbey Road estate 100
Abercrombie, Patrick 72, 73, 77, 78, 86,
304, 305
Abraham, 40
Achleitner, Friedrich 44
Ackroydon 82
Act Troclet 55
Adler, Max 29
Aebli, Werner 120
Africa 6, 19, 219, 225233
Aichinger, Hermann 33, 34
Aim, Grard 207
Aishaman 293
Aix-en-Provence 227, 229
Akosombo 285
Albert Hall Mansions 244
Alcock, A. E. S. 278, 279281, 280, 288
Albini, Franco 263
Alexanderpolder 139, 139
Alexandra Road 253
Alkmaar 147
Alton West estate 241; see also Richmond
Park estates, Roehampton estate
Am Fuchsenfeld 33, 34
Am Schpfwerk 43
mark, Klas 158
American inuence 18, 19, 28, 84, 105,
159, 164167, 170, 199214, 219,
220225, 232, 234; see also Fordism,
Taylorism
Amsterdam 15, 133, 134, 132, 138, 139,
143, 146, 147
Amsterdam Academy of Architecture 143
Andersen, Jenny 158

Ang Mo Kio 309
Annan, Thomas 7
Anselme, Michel 127
Antwerp, 55
Aoust, Patrice 207
Apeldoorn 134, 135
Appleby Road estate 97
Archigram 1, 29, 40, 41
Architects Journal 74, 99
Architectural Design 200, 204, 238, 251
Architectural Review 246
LArchitecture dAujordhui 213, 229
Architectural Association 14, 19, 74, 238,
240, 241, 248, 252, 281
Architectural Association Journal 247
Arsta Centrum 15960
Arts, Wil 7
arts and crafts movement 240, 253
Ashbee, C. R. 240
Asia 6, 19, 277
Association of Building Technicians 80, 81
Astengo, Giovanni 263
ATBAT 18, 218, 219233, 220, 224, 228,
230
Atelier 5 265, 266
Atelier Montrouge 1
Atkinson, George 304
Atkinson, J. J. 98, 100
Atlantic Charter 7
Atlee, Clement 81
Aubert, Jean 212213
Aubck, Carl 40
Aujame, Roger 219
Austro-Marxism 29, 30, 43
autonomy of architecture 269274
344
Index
Auxelle, Robert 115119, 116, 117, 118

avant-garde 41, 127, 143, 202, 320; see also
experiments
Avermaete, Tom 2, 18, 219, 319
AYDE 270
Aymonino, Carlo 258, 262, 263, 269274,
269, 271, 272, 273
Aymonino, Maurizio 270
Baghdad 287, 288, 290
Bakema, Jaap 1, 18, 133, 138139, 143; see
also Van den Broek and Bakema
Baller, Hinrich 183
Banik-Schweitzer, Renate see Schweitzer,
Renate
Bandeirinha, Jos Antnio 319
Banham, Reyner 240, 266
Barbican 134
Barene di San Giuliano 262263
Barlow Commission 96
Barking 105
Barnwood Road estate 100, 102
Barr, Cleeve 104
Bartels, Finn 183
Basildon 96, 98, 100
Bateson, Gregory 203
Bath 84
Baudrillard, Jean 121
Bauer, Otto 29,
BBC 102
BBPR 262
Bebelhof 32, 33
Bekaert, Geert 55
Belgioioso, Lodovico 263
Benevolo, Leonardo 263
Bentham Road estate 241
Bergamo 227
Berlin 11, 15, 18, 133, 177194
Berlin Free University 146, 149
Berlin Technical University 178, 181
Benevolo, Leonardo 38
Bethnal Green 77
Bevan, Aneurin 83
Beveridge Report 8
bidonville 219, 226, 227, 232
Bijlmermeer 134
Bishan New Town 314
Bismarck, Otto von 10
Blau, Eve 16, 27, 319
Blom, Piet 18, 132, 133, 136, 140150, 142,
145, 148, 150
Bo Xilai 315
Bodiansky, Vladimir 219, 220, 221,
222225, 227, 229
Bhm, Gottfried 184
Boijsen & Efvergren 156, 157, 162, 164,
166, 167, 172
Bone, Philippe 207

Bordeaux 112, 115, 117
Borgo San Giuliano 265
Bottoni, Piero 270
Boudon, Philippe 122
Bourdieu, Pierre 122
Boyce, Sam 95, 96, 97, 100, 107
Braem, Renaat 54
Brand, Stewart 201, 203
Brandt, Willy 188
Breslau 244
Brinkman, Michiel 133
Britishness 240, 254; see also Englishness,
Festival of Britain
Brixton 237, 241
Bron-Parilly 178
Brown, Arnesby 240, 253
Brown, Neave 237, 240, 241, 248, 252, 253
Bruchfeldstrasse estate 12
Brunfaut Act 53, 54, 60
Brunfaut, Maxime 60
Brunswick Centre 236, 238, 239, 251252,
253
Brussels 11, 228, 60, 62, 63, 64, 65
Brutalism 146, 266, 321
Buikslotermeer 138
building industry 157, 158, 168169, 172,
219
Building Research Establishment 84, 288
Bukitt Ho Swee 303, 308, 309
Bullock, Nicholas 17, 82, 93, 319
Burt, D. M. 79
business interests 155, 158, 172; see also
Stockholm Chamber of Commerce,
Stockholm Retailers Association
Cambridge 251
Cambridge University 248
Camden 237, 252
Camus 40
Canal Act 55
Candilis, Georges 1, 10, 19, 219, 220,
224225, 225229, 231; see also
Candilis-Josic-Woods
Candilis-Josic-Woods 1, 9, 10, 126127,
231; see also Candilis, Georges; Josic,
Alexis; Woods, Shadrach
Canelea, Guido 263
Canning Town 93
Carrires-Centrales 229
car parking 141, 155, 160, 162, 165
Carbonia 261
Carlu, Jacques 117
cars 58, 138, 143, 159, 166, 167, 170, 187;
see also car parking
Carter, Peter 241
Casabella-continuit 263, 264, 269
Index
Casablanca 225, 226, 227, 229

Castells, Manuel 300, 315
Castiglione, Baldassare 265
Catholic Association of Farming Women 52
Catalogue des ressources 18
Centraal Beheer 134, 135, 146
Central Housing Advisory Committee 104
Centre dtudes des Groupes Sociaux
(CEGS) 114, 115
Centre dtudes sociologiques 119
CERFI 113, 124127
Chandigarh 278
Chareyre, Robert 207
Charter of Athens 120, 144, 225,
Chtenay 75
Chelsea 80
Chipping Camden 240
Choi Hung 307
Chombart de Lauwe, Paul-Henry 17, 112,
113, 114119, 123, 127, 264
Chongqing 315
CIA 285
CIAM 11, 16, 30, 33, 38, 40, 41, 54, 55,
115, 134, 138, 139, 144, 226, 227, 228,
260, 263, 264; see also Charter of Athens
Cidade dos Motores 278
citt diffusa 54
Cit Benauge 117
Cit Carriet 115
Cit de la Plaine 115117, 116, 117, 118
Cit Le Jard 115
Cit Le Prche 115
Ciudad Guyana 278
Civic Trust 100, 102,
Clamart 115117, 116, 117, 118
Claremont Road estate 98
Claudius-Petit, Eugne 219, 221
Clever Road estate 101, 102, 103
clinics see healthcare
Coates, Wells 246
Cobb, Ron 212
Cobra 144
Cold War 6, 7, 28, 38, 54, 133, 278, 291,
295, 321
Collegio del Colle 264, 265
Cologne University 178
Cologne-Chorweiler 184
colonies and colonialism 10, 19, 20, 219,
225227, 228, 230, 231, 232, 277295,
299315, 321; see also postcolonialism
Colquhoun, Alan 241
concrete 14, 72, 141, 160, 162, 171, 177,
183, 186, 187, 188, 191, 192, 193, 199,
209, 210, 224, 225, 252, 266, 266, 267,
268, 293, 301, 307, 312
Congrs Internationaux dArchitecture Moderne
see CIAM
conservation, 4
Constant (Nieuwenhuys) 144
construction 2, 10, 11, 13, 14, 75, 78, 83,
140, 158, 172, 199, 207, 214, 231; see
also building industry, Camus, concrete,
prefabrication
consumerism 6, 18, 155, 159, 160, 164, 165,
170, 172, 321; see also shops and shopping
Cook, Peter, 40
Copcutt, Geoffrey 3
Copenhagen 11, 15
Cornell University 188
corporatism 18, 155, 158, 165, 166, 172; see
also welfare state typologies
Cosenza, Luigi 262
cottage estates 73, 74, 85
Couchaux, Denis 207
Council for Research in Housing
Construction 75
counterculture 15, 18, 199214
County of London Plan 72, 75, 76, 77, 80,
81, 83, 97
courts and courtyards 247, 249, 252, 307; see
also quadrangles
Couvreur, L. 112
Coventry 83, 100
Cowperthwaite, John 307
crescent see Georgian urbanism
crisis see economic crisis
Croydon 82
Crumb, Robert 212
cube houses 140
Cubitt, James 248
cultural centres see leisure
Cumbernauld 3, 270
Custom House 96
Czech, Hermann 44
Dagenham 105
Dannatt, Trevor 248, 249
Danneberg, Robert 29
Darbourne, John 238
Dautry, Raoul 220
Dawson, Thomas 75, 78, 81, 86
De Carlo, Giancarlo 15, 19, 134, 262, 263,
264269, 266, 267, 268
De Meerpaal 144
de-pillarization see pillarization
De Masi, Domenico 264265, 266
De Rossi, Alessandro 270
De Rossi, Baldo 270
De Seta, Cesare 264265
De Taeye Act 53, 54, 55
Debord, Guy 119
decks 168, 268, 301, 312
Denby, Elizabeth 73, 74, 85, 86, 87
density 19, 43, 70, 73, 7677, 81, 98, 99,
345
346
Index
100, 149, 237, 238, 247, 249, 253, 262,

307, 309, 310, 311; see also high-density
low-rise
Design Centre 240
Design Council 240
Detroit 164
Deventer town hall 134, 135
Dickens, Charles 7
Dienste Wonen 52
Dilbeek 6364
do-it-yourself 18, 199214
Docomomo 4
Dollfuss, Engelbert 30
Domenig, Gnther 40
Dor, Gustave 7
Dougill, Wesley 73
Doxiadis, Constantinos 10, 19, 278, 285,
286295, 287, 289, 291295, 294
Drancy 75
Drew, Jane, 10, 19, 281; see also Fry and
Drew
Dreyfus, Jacques 125
Dronten 144
Dutch structuralism 134, 146,
Dttmann, Werner 177
EAHN see European Architectural History
Network
East Ham 93, 101, 105106
Eastbourne Road estate 100
Ebert, Wils 184
Ecochard, Michel 19, 221, 225, 226, 227, 229
cole des Beaux Arts 203
cole Spciale dArchitecture 203
ecological see environmentalism
economic crisis (1930s) 11, 159, 220, 232
economic crisis (1970s) 8, 1416, 149
economic crisis (current) 2, 6
education 1, 13, 14, 29, 30, 52, 94, 140,
279; see also schools, universities
Edwards, Arthur 97, 102, 104, 107
Edwards, Trystan 87
EFM bungalows 96
Egli, Ernst 120
Ehn, Karl 26, 32, 33, 34
Eindhoven 144
Ekistics 286, 290
Eldon Road estate 101
emergency housing 75, 96, 300, 305, 306,
307, 312
Endless House 41
Engels, Friedrich 7
Engels, Lucien 5657, 57
Englishness 238, 244, 246, 253; see also
Britishness
environmentalism 15, 143, 170, 172, 202,
202, 209, 211213
Erskine, Ralph 159

Esherick, Joseph 204
Esping-Andersen, Gspa 1, 7, 8, 157158,
301; see also welfare state typologies
ETH Zurich 120
European Architectural History Network
(EAHN) 1
Evry 126
Existenzminimum 11, 260
experiments 36, 40, 42, 44, 76, 78, 79, 81,
83, 85, 86, 98, 133, 136, 137, 139, 140,
144, 146, 149, 200, 205, 208, 210, 213,
221, 225, 237, 251, 263, 288, 309, 320;
see also avant-garde, innovation
Faculty of Architecture, Rome 269
Faculty of Architecture, Venice see IUAV
Falkenhagener Feld 184
Fayeton, Jean 199
Fellerer, Max 39
Festival of Britain 240, 246, 253, 254
Feuerstein, Gnther 40
Figini & Pollini 262
Finsbury 80, 83
Fiorentino 262
First World War 11, 29, 93
Fleig, Karl 187
Folkhemmet 13, 155, 158
Fontana Dam 221, 222, 223
Ford Foundation 278
Fordism 15, 16, 127
Forshaw, John 72, 72, 76, 82, 8485, 86
Forty, Adrian 2, 319, 321
Forum 144, 149
Foster, Norman 149
Foucault, Michel 125
Fourastie, Jean 8
Fournier, Pierre 211
Fourquet, Franois 125
Frampton, Kenneth 240, 241, 248
Frankfurt 11, 12, 228
Frankfurt-Nordwestadt 184
Fraser, J. M. 305307
Friedman, Yona 143, 144, 209
Fry, Maxwell 10, 19, 281; see also Fry and
Drew
Fry and Drew 276, 278, 281285, 283, 287,
288, 291295, 290
Fuller, Buckminster 200, 203
Gac, Pierre 206
Gags, Ren 176, 177, 178, 181, 182,
187
Gale, Adrian 240
Gallaratese 2 19, 258, 259, 263264,
269274, 269, 271, 272, 273
Gardella, Ignazio 263
Index
garden city 13, 80, 84, 99, 164, 224225,

277, 279, 293
Gelissen, John 7
Genk 56
Georgian urbanism 247, 253, 270
Gibberd, Frederick 85, 246
Giedion, Sigfried 120
Ginzburg, Moisei 186, 244
Glasgow 105, 301
Glendinning, Miles 20, 299, 319
Glikson, Arthur 147
Glck, Harry 41, 42, 43
Goh, Lee 300
Golden Lane competition 247, 252
Goodden, Robert 240
Gosseye, Janina 16, 51
Gospel Oak 248
Gough, Ian 8
grands ensembles 54, 113, 117, 120
Granotier, Bernard 203
Gravier, Jean-Franois 230
Gray, David 240
Graz 41
Greater London Council 85
Greater London Plan 77, 78, 96
Grenoble 214
Gropius, Walter 184
Gropiusstadt 184, 187
Gross, Eugen 40
Gross-Rannsbach, Friedrich 40
Grossfeldsiedlung 40
Grosiedlungen 178, 180, 184, 191
Groupe dEthnologie Sociale (GES) 114
Gruen, Victor 164, 278
Grumbach, Antoine 125
Gruyters, Hans 140
Guattari, Felix 126
Gulick, Charles A. 46
Gurvitch, Georges 122
Gyllensten, Lars 170, 172
Haarlem 147
habitat 115, 226, 227229, 228, 231
Hackney 85
Halprin, Lawrence 204
Hamburg-Mmmelmannsberg 184
Hareiter, Angela 41
Harlow 84, 85
Harpsund democracy 158
Harvey Court 251252
Harwood, Elain 319
Hasselt 56, 62, 63
Haumont, Nicole 120
Hauptstadt 133
Hansaviertel 180
Hasermann-Costy, Claude 209
health centres see healthcare
healthcare 1, 10, 13, 14, 29, 30, 51, 52, 70,

79, 94, 140, 260, 271, 285, 290, 293, 304
Hegel 137
Heidegger, Martin 16
Heinrichs, Georg 177, 187
Heimatstil 39
Hengelhoef 5759, 58, 59, 60
Hengelo 18, 132, 140150, 142, 145, 148,
150
Hertzberger, Herman 134, 135, 143, 146,
147
Heynen, Hilde 16, 51, 319
high-density low-rise 19, 40, 75, 76, 77, 87,
104, 236, 237254, 239, 242, 243, 245,
246, 250, 301
high-rise 17, 19, 6987, 78, 80, 98, 99, 100,
101, 102, 104, 117, 176, 177194, 178,
179, 182, 184, 193, 199, 220, 259274,
262, 271, 272, 273, 298, 305, 309, 310,
311, 312, 313315, 313, 314; see also
skyscrapers, towers
Hilversum 147
Hiorns, Frederick 76
Hitler, Adolf 254
Hjerne, Gunnar 160
Hlaweniczka, Kurt 42
Hoch, Adolf 40
Hoddesdon 227
Hodgkinson, Patrick 19, 236, 237254, 239,
242, 243, 245, 246, 250
Hodgkinson student project 238247,
251254, 242, 243, 245, 246, 248, 251,
252254
HOK 293
Hollein, Hans 40, 41
Hollomey, Werner 40
Holzbauer, Wilhelm 44, 45
Home Emile Vandervelde II 5657, 57
homes t for heroes 10
Hong Kong 20, 298, 299305, 306308,
308, 310312, 312, 313, 313315, 314
Hoogvliet 277
Hoppenbrouwers, Alfons 64
hospitals 1, 260, 271, 285, 293; see also
healthcare
housing 1, 5, 6, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16,
17, 18, 19, 26, 2746, 32, 33, 34, 37,
39, 42, 45, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 6987,
71, 72, 73, 78, 79, 80, 93108, 112,
113127, 116, 117, 118, 132, 133150,
142, 145, 148, 150, 155, 162, 163,
164, 168, 176, 177194, 178, 179, 182,
184, 193, 199, 220, 222, 223, 231, 236,
237254, 239, 242, 243, 245, 246, 250,
252, 258, 259274, 266, 267, 268, 269,
277295, 289, 294, 298, 306, 309, 310,
312, 313, 314, 320, 321
347
348
Index
Housing Act (1956) 84, 99, 100

Housing Cost Yardstick 102
Housing Manual (1944) 97
Housing Manual (1949) 107
Housing (Financial & Miscellaneous
Provisions) Act (1946) 83
Houthalen-Helchteren 56, 57
Huber, Timo 41
Hufnagel, Victor 43
Hugo, Victor 7
Huizinga, Johan 141
Huth, Elfried 40
IBA 178, 183, 188
Ideal Home Exhibition 74
Illich, Ivan 203
immigrants 105106, 126, 192, 232, 290,
303
Ina Casa 259, 260, 262, 270
industrialised building 101104; see also
building industry, Camus, concrete,
construction, Larsen-Nielsen, National
Building Agency, prefabrication
infrastructure 2, 13, 14, 16, 30, 39, 40, 52,
53, 5455, 169, 220, 222, 224, 225, 229,
231, 232, 263, 285, 287
innovation 4, 17, 19, 27, 38, 43, 46, 86,
136, 140, 146, 209, 254, 322; see also
experiments
Institut de Sociologie Urbaine (ISU) 113,
119123
international exchange 4, 8, 10, 17, 18,
19, 20, 138, 168, 221, 320; see also
American inuence, CIAM, colonies and
colonialism, postcolonialism
Isgour, Isia 56
Islamabad 278, 287, 288
Itterbeek 64
IUAV 263, 270, 271
Jacobs, Jane 15, 105, 183
Jensen, Major Rolf 84
Joint Institute for Urban Planning 278
Josic, Alexis 1, 10; see also
Jungmann, Jean-Paul 212213
Kahn, Lloyd 203, 205
Kainrath, Wilhelm 4
Kallang Airport redevelopment 306
Kapnger, Otto 41, 44,
Karachi 278
Karl Marx Hof 26, 33, 34
Karlsruhe 11
Kasbah 18, 132, 136, 140150, 142, 145,
148, 150
Keay, Lancelot 83
Kebbell, Edward 100, 102, 107

Kensington 246
Kensington Housing Trust 73
Keynes, John Maynard 13
Keynesianism 8, 15, 159
Khartoum 278, 288
Kiesler, Frederick 41
Kigamboni 293, 295
King, A. D. 279
Kings College, Cambridge 248, 249
Kings Mead estate 72
Kikutake, Kiyonori 41
Klemek, Christopher 180
Kleihues, Josef 183
Knoxville 219, 221
Koenigsberger, Otto 10, 281
Koetter, Fred 136, 140
Konza City 293, 295
Kopp, Anatole 203
KPF 293
Kreuzberg 188
Krischanitz, Adolf 41, 44
Kuhnert, Nikolaus 183
Kumasi 279
Kuwait City 146
Kwok, R. 300
Kwun Tong estate 298
La Citadelle 9
La Rochelle 247
La Sarraz 11
Lajus, Pierre 203204
Lambeth 107
Lambon, John 313
Lamour, Philippe 231
Languedoc-Roussillon 231
Larsen-Nielsen 101
Lapassade, Georges 113, 123124
Lasdun, Denys 281, 283
Latham, Charles 75, 78, 86
Latin America 278
Lauter, Bernt 184
Lavasa 295
Le Corbusier 18, 19, 38, 84, 117, 122, 148,
186, 219, 220, 221, 222, 224225, 227,
238, 241, 244, 247, 248, 252, 253, 254,
278
Leaker, Dudley, 3
Lebreton, Philippe 212
Ledeboer, Judith 247
Lee, Chen Kuen 178, 184
Lee Kuan Yew 299, 302, 303, 308
Leeds 69, 80
Lefebvre, Henri 16, 17, 113, 119123, 127
Leicester University 248, 249
leisure 1, 13, 14, 29, 30, 5165, 63, 141,
144, 180, 247, 260, 279
Index
Lenny, J. 112
Lethaby, W. R. 253
Leuven 6061, 61, 62
Lewis, Whiteld 84, 85
Liao, Donald 307, 308, 311, 312, 313
Libera, Adalberto 262
libraries 29, 64, 70, 79, 162
Lijnbaan 164
Lillington Street estate 238
Lim Kim San 308
Lim Yew Hock 302, 305
Linz 44
Liu Thai-Ker 310
Liverpool 10, 69, 75, 83, 105, 107
Liverpool School of Architecture 73, 319
Liverpool University 2, 72; see also Liverpool
School of Architecture
Liverpool Workshop 2, 319
Lock, Max 74, 291
Lods, Marcel 225
London 17, 69, 159, 277
London Building Acts 75, 93, 99
London County Council 10, 17, 6987, 71,
72, 73, 79, 80, 97, 101, 237, 241, 246,
248, 252, 301, 310
Loos, Adolf 28, 36, 37, 38, 43, 44
Lourau, Ren 113, 123123
Loughborough estate 237, 241, 246
Lower Ngau Tau Kok 314
Lucas, Colin 241
Ludic 41, 136, 141, 144
Ludwig Boltzmann Institute 44
Lule 15
Lund, Kevin 100, 104
Lundin, Per 166
Luzzati, Luigi 259
Lynch, Kevin 187
Lyndon, Donlyn 204
Lyon-Perrache 178
MacCarthy, Fiona 238
Macchi, Giulio 26
MacLehose, Murray 300, 311, 313
Macmillan, Harold 84
Macmillan, Terry 97
Maki, Fumihiko 41
Manhattan 187
Maniaque-Benton, Caroline 18, 199, 319
Manieri Elia, Mario 263
Manchester 83
Mrkisches Viertel 18, 176, 177194, 178,
179, 182, 184, 193
Marmot, Alexi 86
Marne-la-Valle 126
Marseille 126, 149, 220, 224, 224225, 231,
241, 252, 270; see also Unit dhabitation
Marshall, David 302, 305, 309
Martin, Leslie 19, 83, 236, 238, 239, 247,

248254, 250
Marx, Karl 7, 17, 121, 137
Marxism 119, 121, 123, 124, 125, 181,
185, 189, 213, 285; see also Marx,
Austro-Marxism
Mat building 141, 146
Matera-La Martella 263
Matteotti village 19, 259, 263269, 266,
267, 268
Matthew, Robert 82, 86
Mattsson, Helena 18, 155, 319
Maurios, Georges 203205
Mauss, Marcel 114
May, Ernst 1, 10, 11, 12
Mayer, Bertram 41
Megastructure 16, 27, 33, 39, 41, 43
Mehr, Hjalmar 160
Meinhof, Ulrike 185
Melhuish, Clare 238, 240
Mends France, Pierre 231
Mentink, Hans 140
Messling, Derek 313
Mestre 262263
metabolists 29, 41, 144
Middle East 277, 278
Mietskasernen 190, 190191
Milan 260, 262, 263, 265, 270, 271; see also
Gallaratese 2
Milan Trienniale 15, 260, 264
Mille Clubs 13, 14
Mille Piscines 14
Mille Tennis 14
Miller, John 240, 241, 248
Milner Holland Report 99
Mills, C. Wright 202
Minneapolis 164
Minoprio, Anthony 291
Missing Link 41
Missoffe, Franois 14
Mitscherlich, Alexander 183
Mitterrand, Franois 213
mixed development 7377, 77, 78, 83,
8485, 8687, 97, 98, 100, 139, 237, 241,
251, 253, 301, 305
Molinari, Luca 19, 259, 319
Monnickendam 146
Montmorency 120
Moore, Charles 202203, 204
Morris, William 240
Morris Walk 101,
Morrison, Herbert 81, 240
Mortlake Road estate 101
Moscow 244
motoring 155, 164, 166, 170, 172; see
also cars, car parking, infrastructure,
motorways, traffic engineering
349
350
Index
motorways 155, 160, 164, 166, 168, 287;

see also cars, car parking, infrastructure,
motoring, traffic engineering
Mourenx 119
Mller, Hans 178
Munich-Neuperlach 184
Nanterre 121, 123
Nantes-Rez 117
Narkomn ats, 244
National Health Service 70, 83
National Building Agency 104
NATO 14, 144, 200
nebulous city 17, 51, 52, 53, 62, 65; see also
nevelstad, citt diffusa
Nedaco 143
needs 17, 113127, 138, 160, 185, 186, 194,
229
neoliberalism 2, 8, 16, 46, 139, 157, 170,
185, 321; see also privatisation
neighbourhoods 2, 53, 54, 62, 65, 70, 95,
96, 97, 99, 123, 126, 186, 191, 193, 222,
231, 277, 279285, 286287, 305, 312
Neuklln 188
Neutra, Richard 28
New Deal 11, 43
New Songdo 293
new towns 1, 3, 6, 13, 18, 19, 54, 95, 119,
120, 230231, 232, 263, 277295, 280,
287, 289, 294, 301, 303, 305, 307, 309,
311, 313, 314, 315, 316; see also Ang Mo
Kio, Basildon, Bishan, Cumbernauld,
Harlow, Mourenx, Queenstown,
Skrholmen, Stevenage, Tema, Toa Payoh,
Woodlands
Newcastle 105
Newham 93, 94, 99108
Newman, Oscar 136
nevelstad 54
Ng, John 313
Niederrhein Kollege 178
Nissen huts 96
Nkrumah, Kwame 279, 285, 288, 290
North, Tom 95107, 95
Northland Center 164
Oatley, J. W., 71
Oberhausen 178
Ocean Street estate 78, 81
Oliver, Lawrence 76
OMA 4
one million programme 168169
Ong Eng Guan 306, 307
Oostduinkerke 56
Opbouw 139
Open Society 1718, 133134, 136,
137138, 290, 291
Opration Million 126, 231

Oran 229
orphanage 134, 143
Ossulton Street estate 75
stberg, Kjell 158
Osti, Gianlupo 264
Otelngen 120
overspill 98, 100, 304, 309
Owens, Ruth 87
Oxford Handbook of the Welfare State 7
Paddington 80, 84
Palace Green ats 246
Palmer & Turner 313
Pampus 139
Pangratz, Friedrich 39
Paris 120, 199, 228, 231, 241, 277
Park Hill 134
participation 19, 105, 123, 126, 202,
264269, 274, 281285
pavillon 120, 121123
Pelkonen, Eeva-Liisa 319
Pepler, George 84, 304
Pepper, Simon 17, 69, 319
Per Albin Hansson estate, 39
Perec, Georges 119
Perry, Clarence 186
permissive society 136
Pessac 122
Petit Sminaire 126
Pevsner, Nikolaus 238
Peyre, Christiane 119
Pichler, Hermann 40
Pichler, Walter 40, 41
Piet Blom Museum 149
pillarization 5165, 139, 144
Pimlico estate 83
Plato 137
Plattenbau 186, 299
Plender Street estate 248
Plessow, Gnther 183
Polyani, Karl 6
Ponti, Gia 262
Pop Art 41, 146
Poplar 80, 99
Popper, Karl 18, 137138, 139140
postcolonialism 232, 277295, 299305,
321; see also colonies and colonialism
postmodernism 15, 140, 146
Powell & Moya 83
prefabrication 40, 75, 84, 96, 168, 169,
199, 262, 266, 284, 299, 301, 312; see
also Camus, concrete, construction,
industrialized building, Larsen-Nielsen,
National Building Agency
Preston 265
Prezlauer Berg 190
Index
privatisation 6, 7, 43, 46, 87, 149, 192, 193;

see also neoliberalism
Prix, Wolf 40, 41
protests, 6, 14, 15, 85, 102, 103, 104, 183,
189, 191, 193, 320, 303
proto-welfare state 1013, 16; see also welfare
state typologies
Provo 15, 142, 143144, 146, 149
Provoost, Michelle 19, 277, 319
Prouv, Jean 13
Pruitt-Igoe 180
psychoanalysis 124, 125126
Phringer, Michael 41
quadrangles 251; see also courts and
courtyards
Quaroni, Ludovico 262263, 264, 265, 269,
270
Quarry Hill 69, 80
Queenstown 310, 305, 308
Querrien, Anne 127
Rabenhof 33, 34
RAI 265
Rainer, Roland 40
Rambouillet 204
Randall, T. G. 76, 78, 81, 82
Rapoport, Amos 122
Raymond, Henri 119
Reagan, Ronald 16
Red Vienna 16, 2638, 32, 33, 34, 37, 39,
43, 44, 46, 300
Reiser, Jean-Marc 212
Reith, Lord 75
Renner, Karl 29
renovation 115, 119, 126, 190, 192
rents 40, 79, 186, 189, 190, 192, 193, 231,
272
Requat & Reinthaller 42
RIBA 73, 81, 83, 104, 248, 249
RIBA Symposium on High Flats 8385
Richmond Park estates 84; see also Alton
West estate
Ridol, Mario 262, 265, 269
Rimini 265
Road Fund Act, 55
Robin Hood Gardens 4, 5, 134, 147, 149
Roehampton estate 246; see also Alton West
estate
Roma Tiburtino 263, 265, 270
Rome 263, 265, 269, 270
Ronan Point 17, 102104, 103, 311
Roosevelt, Franklin D. 11
Rossi, Aldo 19, 263, 269274, 272, 273
Rssler, Carl 40,
Rotterdam 133, 138, 139, 140, 164
Rowe, Colin 136, 140
Royaumont 147
Rudloff, Carl 12
Russell, Gordon 238, 240, 253254
Russell, R. D. 240
Ryckewaert, Michael 54
Salford 301
Saltsjbaden 158
Samon, Giuseppe 263, 264
Samuel, Godfrey 74
Samuely, Felix 246, 248
Sandys, Duncan 8384
Sartre, Jean-Paul 16
Sawade, Jrgen 183
Scarpa, Carlo 263
Scharoun, Hans 178, 244, 246
Schmid, Heinrich 33, 34
Schmitter, Phillippe 158
Schneberg 188
schools 1, 6, 10, 29, 70, 79, 97, 139, 141,
144, 162, 180, 183, 188, 192, 260, 279,
283, 285, 288, 290, 293, 294, 304; see also
education
Schudnagies, Heinz 184, 187
Schuster, Franz 39
Schut, Wim 140
Schwagenscheidt, Walter 184
Schweitzer, Renate 44
Sea Ranch 204
Second World War 2, 4, 6, 7, 8, 14, 16, 51,
53, 69, 7582, 94, 114, 119, 133, 185,
219, 286, 302
self-build 199214, 290, 293
Segal, Walter 247
Sert, Josep Lluis 120, 278
Svres 126
Shanghai 178
Shankland Cox 107
Sharp, Dame Evelyn 84, 85
Shaw, R. Norman 244
Shasmoukine, Annie and Pierre 207
Shepheard, Peter 77, 78
Sheffield 134
Shep Kip Mei re 307
SHoP 293
shops and shopping 18, 33, 43, 77, 79, 97,
139, 141, 144, 159, 160, 162, 163, 164,
165, 166, 169, 171, 180, 185, 186, 188,
192, 239, 247, 279, 283, 284, 288, 293;
see also consumerism
Shoreditch 77
Sibthorp, Thomas 248
Siedler, Wolf Jobst 183, 185
Siedlung Halen 265
Sigtuna 227, 228
Silkin, Lewis 73, 74, 75, 77, 81, 86
Silvertown 93, 96
351
352
Index
Simbck, Hermann 41
Simmel, Georg 137
Simony, Stephan 39
Sin Ming Court 314
Singapore 20, 295306, 303, 306, 308310,
311313, 309, 310, 314, 315
Situationists 16, 29, 141
Sittmann, Tassilo 184
Sive, Andr 221
Skrholmen 18, 154, 155172, 156, 157,
161, 162, 163, 166, 167, 169, 171
Skeffington Committee 105
skyscrapers 70, 74, 252 see also high-rise,
tower blocks
slum clearance 15, 70, 73, 74, 84, 98, 99,
100, 102, 301, 320
Smithson, Alison 136, 146, 147, 225
Smithson, Alison and Peter 4, 5, 18, 133,
136, 138, 147, 168, 247, 252
Smithson, Peter 147
social housing see housing
Songjiang 295
Southdale Center 164
South America 6
Southwark 107
Spangen 133
sport centres see leisure
St Louis 180
St Michaels estate 309
St Pancras 248253, 250
Stalinallee 187
Stalder, Laurent 319
Stam-Beese, Lotte 133
Stanek, ukasz 17, 113, 319
Stefan, Hans 184
Stepney 75, 78, 82
stepped section 36, 38, 43, 247, 249, 251
Stevenage 159
Stillman & Eastwick-Field 100
Stirling, James 1, 240
Stirling & Gowan 265, 266
Stockholm 155, 159, 168, 277
Stockholm Chamber of Commerce 158,
164, 165
Stockholm City Planning Office 161,
164165
Stockholm Retailers Association 164
Stoke Newington 70, 71, 79
Stratford 94
Strauven, Francis 55
streets 30, 33, 34, 41, 43, 97, 121, 123,
134, 138, 141, 143, 148, 162, 163, 164,
170, 187, 191, 192, 244, 253, 281, 290,
293
streets, interior 134135, 135, 170, 247
streets in the air 134, 149, 252
Strnad, Oskar 36, 37, 38, 43
Strombeek-Bever 64
students 14, 15, 33, 40, 61, 86, 140, 180,
181, 183, 184, 185, 193
Sui Wo Court 313
Sun Chui estate 312
Superstudio 40
Swedish Association of Architects 172
Swenarton, Mark 2, 19, 237, 238, 319
Svenska Bostder 160, 162, 164, 172
Tby 159, 165
Tafuri, Manfredo 30, 38, 44, 263
Tai Hang Tung re 307
Tange, Kenso 41
Taut, Bruno 178
Taylor Woodrow-Anglian 101
Taylorism 33, 38, 136
Team 10 1, 17, 29, 133134, 136, 138, 143,
146149, 168, 263, 264, 265
Tecton 80, 83
Teh Cheang Wan 309, 310
Tehran 278
Teige, Karel 11
Tema New Town 19, 277295, 280, 287,
289, 294
Tema Village 276, 281285, 282, 283,
291293, 292
Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) 19,
220225, 222, 223, 228, 232
Terni 263269, 266, 267, 268
Terrade 229
Terrassenhaus 36, 37, 38, 43, 44
Thamesmead 134
Thatcher, Margaret 15
Theissen, Volker 176, 181, 182, 183
Tiburtino see Roma-Tiburtino
Tidal Basin 93, 96
Tielemans, Franois 60
Tiergarten 188
Tilbury 96
Toa Payoh 309
Tnnies, Ferdinand 137
Toulouse 231
Toulouse-le-Mirail
Tournon-Branly, Marion 231
Town and Country Planning Act (1947) 95
Town and Country Planning Act (1968) 105
Town and Country Planning Association 80
tower blocks 17, 40, 98, 100, 102, 114, 117,
177, 178, 180, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189,
190, 191, 238, 253, 301, 304, 307, 310,
313, 314; see also high-rise, skyscrapers
Tower Hamlets 107
traffic engineering 167168; see also cars,
car parking, infrastructure, motoring,
motorways
Tudor Walters Report 11
Index
Turin 262
Turnbull 204
Turner, John 290
Twente University 140
t Karregat 144
Unal, Jel 209
Ungers, Oswald Mathias 177, 178, 182, 187,
188, 270
Unit dhabitation 19, 117, 149, 220, 224,
224225, 229, 241, 244, 247, 252, 253,
254, 270
United Nations 10, 226, 278, 304
University College London 73
Universit de Paris VIII/Universit de
Vincennes 213
University of Florence 263
University of Rome 263
universities 1, 140, 144, 146, 148, 149, 178,
181, 188, 250, 251, 263, 264; see also
education
Unwin, Raymond 11
Urban, Florian 18, 177, 319
Urbino 264, 265
Valkenswaard 134
Vllingby 15960, 164, 165
Van den Broek 1
Van den Broek and Bakema 1, 138, 139
Van den Heuvel, Dirk 2, 17, 133, 319
Van Duijn, Roel 146
Van Eesteren, Cornelis 133
Van Eyck, Aldo 16, 18, 133, 134, 135, 136,
138, 143, 144, 146, 147
Van Klingeren, Frank 144
Van Mechelen, Frans 64
Van Nuffel, Sigfried 64
Vayssire, Bruno 14
Venice 44, 262, 263, 270
Venice Biennale 4
Vermeulen, Paul 64
vernacular 39, 147, 203, 205, 206, 209, 240,
253, 278, 286
Vienna 6, 16, 2746, 31; see also Red Vienna
Vienna Actionists 40
Vietnam War 14, 200, 202
villes nouvelles see new towns
Virilio, Paul 203
Volvo 160
Vorgartenstrasse 40
Wa Fu 307
Wagner, Martin 178
Wagner, Otto 33
Walcott, William 77, 78
Wall Street crash 11
Walker, Cyril 81, 82

Ward, Neville 240, 253
Ward & Austin 240; see also Ward, Neville
wars 7, 8; see also Cold War, First World
War, Second World War, Vietnam War
Webb, Philip 240
Wedding 188
Weeber, Carel 54
welfare state typologies 8, 18, 5354, 155,
157158, 301, 319; see also corporatism,
Esping-Andersen, proto-welfare state
Wells, Alfred 226
Werkbundsiedlung 246
Werkgruppe Graz 40
West Ham 17, 92, 93108, 94
West Ham Park estate 78
West Kentish Town 248254, 250
Westminster 80, 83, 238
Weston, J. C. 84
Westwood, Herbert 79, 80, 81, 82
Wheeler, E. P. 70
Whitaker, Richard 204
White City estate 72, 72, 74
Whyte, William 238
Wigforss, Ernst 159
Wijk bij Duurstede 146
Willis, Margaret 84
Wilmot, John 81
Wilson, Colin St John 241, 248, 249
Wilson, Hugh 3
Windbrechtinger, Wolfgang and Traude 43
Wogensky, Andr 219, 200
Wohnen Morgen 44, 45
Wohnpark Alt-Erlaa 41, 42, 43
Woningwet, 10
Woodberry Down 68, 6987, 71, 73, 79, 80
Woodberry Park 85, 86
Woodlands 309
Woods, Shadrach 1, 10, 146, 147, 187, 193,
219, 220, 224225, 225229, 231; see also
Wrle, Eugen 39
World Bank 10, 278
Yale University 202203
youth clubs see leisure
Yorke, F. S. R. 246
Zaandijk 146
Zeilenbau 30, 39, 72, 79; see also CIAM
zomes 208, 210, 211
zoning 11, 76, 77, 107, 144, 262, 277, 279,
284, 289, 305
Zublena, Americo 125
Znd-up 40, 41
Zurich 120
353

Architecture and The Welfare State (Myebookshelf)

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Architecture and The Welfare State (Myebookshelf)

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

ARCHITECTURE AND THE

Mark Swenarton is James Stirling Professor of Architecture at the University of

Edited by Mark Swenarton, Tom Avermaete and

First edition published 2015

Cultures and continuities

From Red Superblock to Green Megastructure:

The Welfare State in Flanders: De-Pillarization and the

The Beginnings of High-Rise Social Housing in the Long 1940s:

West Ham and the Welfare State 19451970: a Suitable

Critiques and contradictions

Who Needs Needs? French Post-War Architecture and its Critics

The Open Society and Its Experiments: The Case of the

Where the Motorways Meet: Architecture and Corporatism in

The Mrkisches Viertel in West Berlin

10 Alternatives to Welfare State: Self-Build and Do-It-Yourself

National and international

11 From Knoxville to Bidonville: ATBAT and the Architecture of

12 High Density without High Rise: Housing Experiments of the

13 Matteotti Village and Gallaratese 2: Design Criticism of the

14 Exporting New Towns: The Welfare City in Africa

Appendix: Outcomes from the Liverpool Workshop 2012

Mark Swenarton, Tom Avermaete and Dirk van den Heuvel

Mark Swenarton, Tom Avermaete and Dirk van den Heuvel

Mark Swenarton, Tom Avermaete and Dirk van den Heuvel

Mapping the welfare state

economic growth, and intense population increase.17 These radical transformations

Mark Swenarton, Tom Avermaete and Dirk van den Heuvel

According to Ian Gough (2008), the emergence of welfare states is to be understood

Mark Swenarton, Tom Avermaete and Dirk van den Heuvel

wider geographical reach. Industrialization in Britain, the pioneer industrial nation,

Pre-history of the welfare state

Mark Swenarton, Tom Avermaete and Dirk van den Heuvel

The built environment and the welfare state

Mark Swenarton, Tom Avermaete and Dirk van den Heuvel

Critiques and crisis of the welfare state

Mark Swenarton, Tom Avermaete and Dirk van den Heuvel

Cultures and continuities

Critiques and contradictions

Mark Swenarton, Tom Avermaete and Dirk van den Heuvel

National and international

Mark Swenarton, Tom Avermaete and Dirk van den Heuvel

Mark Swenarton, Tom Avermaete and Dirk van den Heuvel

This page intentionally left blank

Cultures and continuities

From Red Superblock to Green Megastructure

Red Vienna: municipal socialism as model

It was the Austro-Marxists broad concept of culture as encompassing all aspects

From Red Superblock to Green Megastructure

From Red Superblock to Green Megastructure

From Red Superblock to Green Megastructure

From Red Superblock to Green Megastructure

Post-war welfare state: Austrification

From Red Superblock to Green Megastructure

From Red Superblock to Green Megastructure

From Red Superblock to Green Megastructure

A true megastructure, or group of megastructures, Wohnpark Alt-Erlaa is

From Red Superblock to Green Megastructure

From Red Superblock to Green Megastructure

16 For the Terrassenhaus projects, see Blau, Red Vienna, 299303.

From Red Superblock to Green Megastructure

Hilde Heynen and Janina Gosseye

Housing in the post-war period

The Welfare State in Flanders