Housing and City: Old Problems, New Approaches

Abstract

In the course of the 20th century, housing became a science due to the huge efforts of progressive architects and their great interest in addressing this issue that had been raised with major political impact by Engels in the first half of the 19th century. The concern of modernist architects with these new problems facing the population, prompted advanced designs that are still regarded as exemplary in the history of urbanistics. In the 1930s, housing complexes in Moscow, Berlin, Frankfurt and Rotterdam constituted role models for other cities. They even became banners of housing and a strategy of social innovation in Vienna, with Karl Ehn’s Karl-Marx-Hof, and in Amsterdam, with Michel de Klerk’s Het Schip. Housing design became something rational, almost like a science, and the CIAM (International Congresses of Modern Architecture) provided the framework of discussion for the functionalist vanguard that channeled this concern. However, the misuse of these models by commercial architecture and the scant adaptation of their proposals have turned this experience into something from the past that requires fresh consideration. In this respect, and in view of present-day society’s new paradigms, this article aims to cast some light on new approaches that can be introduced in response to the old problems existing between housing and city.