Housing in the Eastern Bloc | View | Architectural Review
▻http://www.architectural-review.com/view/housing-in-the-eastern-bloc/8684435.article?cm_ven=ExactTarget&cm_cat=AR_Reg_EM_17072015&c
Les photos, c’est presque comme dans un film !
▻http://www.architectural-review.com/pictures/226xAny/6/3/5/1433635_seskine-for-web.JPG
If the Soviet Bloc prefab craze seems absurd, it did solve a housing crisis
Once, way back in the depths of the 20th century, there was a very simple means of solving housing crises. It didn’t involve ‘informality’, it didn’t entail ‘letting developers build’, and it had, at least in the most brute quantitative terms, spectacular successes. It was best summed up by an anecdote credited to an unnamed British soldier, quoted by the late National Treasure and erstwhile Most Dangerous Man in Britain, Tony Benn, in the film The Spirit of ‘45, thus: ‘we’ve been using factories to make weapons to kill Germans with, why can’t we use them to build housing and hospitals?’ Cue industrialised housing, where factories were literally turned over from the making of bombs to the making of prefabricated housing. The half-hearted British experience, from the (still popular) single-family prefab to the collapse of the kit-of-parts tower Ronan Point, is notorious. Elsewhere, this was the entire history of post-war housing.
#architecture #ex-urss #soviétisme #union_soviétique #habitat
