PS26 Affordable Housing Design: Histories of Cross-Cultural Practices

The Marshall Plan’s role in the socio-economic reconstruction of Europe is undisputed and sufficiently documented. In West Germany, as of 1953, 15 housing estates had been erected with funding from the European Recovery Program. The estates were conceived as stimuli for new housing in Germany and were considered paragons of efficient and affordable construction; My research identifies the fact that the knowledge gained in Germany was transferred to occupied Austria. In 1953, the housing specialist William K. Wittausch relocated from Essen to Vienna to work for the US Special Mission for Economic Cooperation . His task was to make Austria competitive with other countries in the prefab industry. A model housing estate (1952–54) on Vienna’s Veitingergasse constituted an attempt to expand the market for prefabricated homes and to make them products for mass consumption. The Americans also used this housing form to foster home ownership – as an attempt to immunize the Austrian population against communist ideology. By fostering home ownership, the Americans sought to bring about socio-political change in Vienna’s communal housing politics. In contrast to these efforts, the Social Democratic city government pursued “restorative” reconstruction, which drew on adapted housing models of Red Vienna and on those of the authoritarian regimes of the corporative state (Ständestaat) and of National Socialism. From the very beginning of his architectural career, Roland Rainer – one of the architects in charge of the Veitingergasse housing estate –  associated himself with the respective ruling powers: beginning in 1936, he worked for the National Socialists in Berlin, then, from 1945, for the Red Army, and subsequently for the Americans and Austria’s Social Democrats.

Between 1947 and 1952, the National Building Research Institute of South Africa conducted extensive research about affordable housing for ‘nie-blankes’, or ‘non-whites’. Moving towards a ‘developmental’ attitude post World War II, the government assumed responsibility for re-housing Africans outside cities such as Johannesburg, Cape Town and Port Elizabeth. Stimulated by European ideas about minimum standards in public housing—specifically the first CIAM conference in Frankfurt in 1929 on the Existenzminimum—architects such as Paul Connell, Betty Spence and Douglas Calderwood and sociologists like Hans van Beinum conducted research about ‘human need’ in housing to establish minimum standards of accommodation; what is the minimum amount of space, the minimum amount of day lighting a person needs? Serving to cut down expenditure as much as possible, as well as to preserve a minimum level of ‘decent human living’, the minimum standards set by the National Building Institute occupied a precarious balance between a modus vivendi and a modus non moriendi. 

Resulting in several minimum standard housing types with names such as ‘NE 51/6’— non-European, 1951, type 6—constructed as ‘experimental units’ in townships as Kwa-Thema, this paper explores how the pre-war European concept of minimum standards in public housing functioned as a system to negotiate between ‘human needs’, economic constraints and political beliefs in South Africa’s apartheid regime. Positioning architecture as a scientific discipline, using tools from the social sciences such as social surveys, the National Building Research Institute claimed competence, and most of all, set up a structure to limit uncertainty and risk by constantly evaluating the housing projects. At the same time, as I will argue in this paper, the ‘objective’ nature of these minimum standards of accommodation recast racial—and spatial—inequality in scientific terms, highlighting, for example, the 'ineffeciency' of the beehive shaped hut. 

 

 

This paper reveals the confrontation of East German technocratic housing monoculture with demands of globalization. Propelled by devastations after WW II authorities eagerly took up Soviet guidelines of industrialized mass housing. Subsequently state run planning offices developed concrete-slab types for maximal time and cost efficiency. The leaders alleged that this would, matching an egalitarian lifestyle, also be conducive to new socialist esthetics.

Simultaneously, architects became active abroad, making substantial contributions to the country’s struggle for international recognition. At that point a focus was put at the support for left wing Third World countries following an agenda of “Socialist Solidarity”. This approach linked a longing for a strategic standing in the Cold War with a benevolent modernization doctrine that became particularly meaningful when it came to housing designs. In the long run commercial interests became predominant, what raises questions about a shift in planning practices.

In recent years researchers explored East German housing projects in Vietnam, North Korea, Tanzania and Mozambique separately. In contrast this paper, including less known projects in countries as North Yemen and Nigeria, analyzes in a comparative perspective and against the background of inner East-German and international debates, how GDR-planners tried to adapt to different local situations and how addressees responded.

European partners like Poland acquired prefabrication-patents, being able to build and to arrange the houses autonomously. But when involved in non-European countries the Germans had to lower their sights on precast construction and to experiment with local technologies. The major contribution of this paper is to show how architects not only tried to manage issues of climate and construction, but also how they approached housing typologies, floor plans and shapes specific to social and religious settings in return, transforming their own basic socialist attitude.

In 1950 Jawaharlal Nehru inaugurated the Hindustan Housing Factory in Delhi that would leave its mark on most of the government housing in Delhi over the next few decades built as part of India’s socialist alignment in the 1960s. Khrushchyovkis was the nickname for the Soviet prefab apartments built during Khrushchev's rule. This paper will explore the place and meaning of the political and social forces that laid the grounds for the Khrushchyovkis of Delhi, prefabricated housing blocks modeled after their Soviet namesakes that were sometimes built directly from molds shipped from the USSR. During Khrushchev’s reign, the Khrushchyovkis represented a desirable accommodation for people who were moving there from the Stalinist  kommunalka (commune) apartments to private dwelling units. Similarly in Delhi these Government Quarters, which represented a break from the previous joint family dwelling to a nuclear family structure, were very desirable accommodation with a waiting line measured in years. Prefab Housing in Delhi is often ignored by architectural historians as an isolated event, but in making it contemporary with its progenitors in the USSR through their social and political roles, we can develop an understanding of himself that shows how little the model changed as it was transposed across cultures. This interpretation demonstrates a Ricœur-ian purpose in conquering a remoteness, a distance between the the Soviet cultural  epoch to which the Khrushchyovkis belongs and their manifestations in the Indian multi-cultural context.

This paper aims to interrogate dialogues around the design for governmental, low-cost housing built in the new city of Chandigarh—a canonical project, as the call highlights. The fourteen types designed to shelter state employees, from the governor’s single-family house (sector 1) to the laborers’ row houses (sectors 22, 23), have been examined by several scholars, including Joshi (1999) and Casciato/Avermaete (2014), to mention a few. Yet, their evidence as a space of fraught encounters between the political brief, the local culture of the newly emerging nation, and the architects’ universalizing ideals has not been investigated. My goal is to show that the cross-pollination between the architects’ wish to be modern and the state agents’ quest for engagement with local sources forms the core of a productive dialogue, whose interlocutors, words, and architectural effects are as yet unrevealed.

 

Witness to this exchange was the Album Punjab, the journal Le Corbusier kept during his initial three weeks in India, in late February-March 1951. The Album details days of relentless conversation among the designers, namely Le Corbusier, Jeanneret, and Fry, and the two advisers to the government of Punjab, the engineer Varma and the state commissioner Thapar. Following a preliminary discussion of the essential features of Le Corbusier’s grid plan, the dialogue moves to the normative and spatial aspects of minimum housing types. Subsequently, specific housing schemes for affordable housing are confronted, comparing Varma’s model against Thapar’s and Fry’s. Le Corbusier would never be directly involved in housing design at Chandigarh; the Album’s dialogue instead reveals how preoccupied he is by establishing overall rules to guide his partners. The Indian officers counter Corbusier’s rule-making by suggesting local models of domesticity, which the architects in turn absorb and reject in the process of standardization and modularity that will then command their design.