Tower and Slab

Histories of Global Mass Housing

Florian Urban

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136638497
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture résidentielle

Tower and Slab looks at the contradictory history of the modernist mass housing block - home to millions of city dwellers around the world. Few urban forms have roused as much controversy. While in the United States decades-long criticism caused the demolition of most mass housing projects for the poor, in the booming metropolises of Shanghai and Mumbai remarkably similar developments are being built for the wealthy middle class. While on the surface the modernist apartment block appears universal, it is in fact diverse in its significance and connotations as its many different cultural contexts.

Florian Urban studies the history of mass housing in seven narratives: Chicago, Paris, Berlin, Brasilia, Mumbai, Moscow, and Shanghai. Investigating the complex interactions between city planning and social history, Tower and Slab shows how the modernist vision to house the masses in serial blocks succeeded in certain contexts and failed in others. Success and failure, in this respect, refers not only to the original goals – to solve the housing crisis and provide modern standards for the entire society – but equally to changing significance of the housing blocks within the respective societies and their perception by architects, politicians, and inhabitants.

These differences show that design is not to blame for mass housing's mixed record of success. The comparison of the apparently similar projects suggests that triumph or disaster does not depend on a single variable but rather on a complex formula that includes not only form, but also social composition, location within the city, effective maintenance, and a variety of cultural, social, and political factors.

1 Social Reform, State Control, and the Origins of Mass Housing

Housing and the Social Question

The social question, formulated with increasing pressure in all industrializing countries since the mid-nineteenth century, was fundamental for mass housing programs. Among the diverse groups of social reformers were radical aristocrats, bourgeois philanthropists, and labor activists, who shared an awareness of the miserable living conditions in which the industrial cities’ lower two-thirds had to live, and the moral obligation to change them. The expressed commitment of the upper and middle classes to the poor went along with a protection of their own interests, including social stability and the prevention of workers’ uprisings. From the very beginning, social reform oscillated between charity and domination. Measures to house and feed the needy went along with more or less coercive methods to categorize, regulate, and discipline the masses, to enforce moral rule and social hygiene. Like any type of assistance, social welfare helped the underprivileged, but at the same time strengthened the rule of the dominant groups and restricted the receivers’ agency.

European countries started to introduce both state- and company-sponsored assistance around the turn of the twentieth century, and by the end of the Second World War had established comprehensive systems of social welfare of which mass housing would become a part. In Germany, the Verein für Socialpolitik (Social Policy Association, founded in 1873) united the most eminent proponents of state intervention in social and economic matters, who at the same time rejected socialist ideas. In France, the Musée Social (founded in 1894) came to be an important forum for similar approaches. General medical insurance for German workers was introduced in 1883, in the same year in which the Social Democratic Party was officially forbidden. In France, certain medical assistance was provided free of charge from 1893 and in Britain from 1911. The Societé française des urbanistes was founded in 1911 and the British Royal Town Planning Institute in 1914; the improvement of dwelling conditions subsequently became the backbone of municipal politics. In the United States, the “Progressive Era” of the 1890s and early 1900s spawned legislation on zoning, construction, and labor, and established the primacy of the state to regulate a variety of urban matters. Along with the rise of the social sciences, the smallest common denominator across national borders came to be the increasing reliance on comprehensive planning and state intervention. Policy relied mostly on quantitative analysis and scientific calculation to determine human needs and guarantee efficient remedy. The objective was to achieve what has never been achieved since the first cities were built: to provide adequate living conditions for all social classes.

These goals entered the architectural debate at the turn of the twentieth century. In the rhetoric of the modern movement in France, Germany, Britain, Russia, and the United States, housing assistance for the needy soon became inseparably connected with modernist architecture and urban planning. In France, Tony Garnier developed his proposal for a cité industrielle, in which the members of an industrialized socialist society would live in modular concrete homes. His ideas, which he worked out around 1900, anticipated the modular developments that were later built in many countries.¹ In the years after the Russian Revolution, visionary Soviet theorists such as Leonid Sabsovich, Mikhail Okhitovich, and Nikolai Milyutin thought of a thoroughly restructured urban landscape as the basis for a socialist egalitarian society. In Germany, architects such as Bruno Taut, Richard Riemerschmid, Hermann Muthesius, Hannes Meyer, and Peter Behrens thought of mass housing construction as the only way to mitigate the housing shortage and increase dwelling comfort for the disadvantaged. They took up the ideas of housing reformers such as Otto Schilling and Rudolf Eberstadt. Arguably the most consequential result of these efforts was the increasing foundation of public utility housing enterprises from the 1920s onward. All together believed in a strong and benevolent state that was to provide the regulatory framework for architects’ activity, enforce minimum construction standards, and curb the most detrimental side effects of the free housing market.² These essentials could nevertheless be provided by a diverse array of regimes from monarchy to socialism, and the political convictions of the housing reformers were accordingly diverse.

The Origins of Industrialized Construction

Industrialized construction as was developed in the early twentieth century eventually became the fundamental technology for mass housing in most countries and simultaneously a stylistic principle for modern city design. Even in those contexts where industrialization did not become dominant—such as in Brazil or India—the underlying principles of these technologies inspired repetitive chains of production and determined the aesthetics of new design. There are two main characteristics of industrialized buildings as opposed to traditional site-built homes. First, they are assembled from prefabricated parts, and second, they are not constructed individually, but rather in series according to a rationalized process. Industrialized construction, in this sense, is an automated scheme that increases productivity through seriality and standardization. This definition also includes, for example, mobile homes or trailers and is not necessarily limited to multistory buildings. In any case, such a form of building not only invites production at a large scale but rather requires it, since the cost of the development of rationalized processes is very high and can only be amortized through large output that maximizes the cost-benefit rate.³ The definition of industrialized construction is imprecise to a certain degree, since the difference to traditional construction is gradual rather than categorical. Most traditional site-built homes employ an array of prefabricated parts. Windows and doors are produced in series, beams and posts are cut in standardized measures, and the brick can be deemed a form of prefabrication. Similarly, the traditional divisions of labor, for example that between bricklayers and roofers, already means a rationalization of workflow. However, industrialized construction as practiced by modernist architects in the early twentieth century refined both prefabrication and streamlining of procedures to an unprecedented degree and wedded them to their vision of a new society built on social equity. Hence in popular use industrialized construction is often connected not with a particular technology but rather with particular design principles and thus modernist architecture as such.

Some forms of prefabrication have been known since antiquity. Findings from Roman shipwrecks suggest that the elements for entire buildings were prefabricated at certain quarries and then transported to the construction site.⁴ Colonial expansion in the nineteenth century played an important role in the improvement of prefabrication, since it brought about the necessity to provide shelter quickly for large amounts of people in remote places.⁵ Along the same lines, military technology provided the basis for the civil use of mass-produced materials.

The industrialization of the construction process as we know it today was developed much later than that of materials. In the late nineteenth century, the engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1915) invented scientific management, rationalizing each separate step of production. Henry Ford (1863–1947) applied Taylor’s principles in his industrial plants. From 1913, his Highland Park Factory in Detroit produced motorcars on assembly lines. In the following decades, Fordist production became the model for the industrialization of the construction industry.⁶ Flows of work were refined according to scientific rules, and similar buildings were produced in great numbers. The French term grands ensembles, and its German equivalent, Großsiedlungen, for large housing projects reflects the imperative of scale that lay at the heart of these industrialized operations.

New materials and technologies developed in the late nineteenth century furthered the industrialization of construction. Two innovations were particularly consequential: steel frames and reinforced concrete. As a construction material, concrete was known by the ancient Romans, but fell into disuse in later centuries. The experiments of the French engineer François Hennebique were crucial for the construction of concrete homes. Hennebique relied on the experiments of the gardener Joseph Monier, who stiffened his cast planters with wires for additional stabilization.⁷ His 1892 patent on reinforced concrete opened the use of that material for large, industrially produced buildings. Other pioneers of concrete construction were the architect Auguste Perret, who in 1903 built his first all-concrete apartment house on Rue Franklin in Paris, and the Liverpool city engineer John Alexander Brodie, under whose auspices the apartment buildings on Eldon Street were built from prefab concrete slabs in 1905.⁸ Like the construction of prefab wooden houses, concrete prefabrication was also furthered by colonial expansion. The French company Lippmann, Schneckenburger & Cie in Bastignolles near Paris, which pioneered the construction of houses from hollow concrete slabs, first and foremost exported its products to the French colonies, starting in 1860 with the Caribbean island of St. Thomas.⁹ Their patents were taken over in 1893 by the Amsterdam firm Wittenburg, which also produced for export to overseas territories.

At the turn of the twentieth century, concrete slab construction was improved in England, Germany, France, and the US. Thomas Edison, the inventor of the lightbulb, experimented with the use of cast concrete. A series of two-story single-family homes were built in Philipsburg, New York, in 1909 according to his technology. The New York engineer Grosvenor Atterbury was best known for the further development of prefab concrete slabs. In 1908, he developed a construction system consisting of one-floor-high panels that were hollowed out for better insulation. Most famous was his Tudor-style townhouse community, Forest Hill in Queens, New York, which he designed from prefabricated concrete panels,¹⁰ and his 1918 design of two-story single-family homes in Long Island, New York.¹¹ Paul Schmitthenner’s traditionalist Garden City in Berlin-Staaken (1914–17) was built according to the latest development of standardization based on only five types.¹²

By 1920, the competition between steel frame and reinforced concrete construction was decided. In the eyes of most builders the advantages of concrete—it was inexpensive, resistant to corrosion and fire, and extremely stable—outweighed the disadvantages of its heaviness and the difficulty of transporting it. Many scholars also stress the political aspects of this development: the military industry depended on steel, which in many countries had become a rare commodity during the First World War.¹³ The path was therefore set toward concrete as the preferred material for multistory homes. The age of concrete was about to begin.

The Modernist Movement in the Interwar Period: The First Mass Housing Developments in Germany, France, and England

In the decade before the First World War, when mass-produced lamps, pens, typewriters, and automobiles already proliferated in British, French, and American cities, buildings were still erected as they had been a thousand years earlier: one at a time, and each by an individual builder. The only concession to the industrial age was the use of repetitive plans and façade models that were similar but not identical—to date the main feature of the now cherished late-nineteenth-century neighborhoods in New York, Paris, Berlin, and other cities. This apparent anachronism did not go unnoticed. In Germany and France, architects such as Walter Gropius (1883–1969), Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969), and Le Corbusier (1887–1965) realized that traditional construction was not able to generate the output required by massive country-to-city migration and raged against obsolete building methods.Industrialization, for them, was the mandate of the time. Supported by seductive images, they propagated standardized construction as both superior technology and signifier for modern life.

In Germany, where the Werkbund debate on standardization had peaked before the First World War, industrialized construction was increasingly brought to practice from the end of the war. Traditionalists such as the Staaken Garden City designer Paul Schmitthenner (1884–1972) played a similarly important role as the modernists associated with the Bauhaus. Walter Gropius and many of his colleagues espoused the aesthetics of the machine-produced good. They not only promoted standardization as the precondition for efficient factory-based production, but also cultivated a particular formal language that for its teachers embodied the spirit of industrialization: raw materials, geometrical shapes, and lack of ornamentation. The Swiss architect Hannes Meyer (1889–1954), Gropius’s successor as director of the Bauhaus and one of the school’s most radical architects, assigned such design a normative value, pointing out that typization and standardization were “the alphabet of socialist architecture” and most appropriate for a society without class differences.¹⁴ Meyer held that the demands of the proletariat were absolutely equal and therefore required normalized buildings that were exclusively determined by their function. For him, a building was “neither beautiful nor ugly, just right or wrong.”¹⁵

The new architecture was to be mass-produced in factories. In his 1926 article Der große Baukasten (The Great Construction Kit), Walter Gropius famously called for the industrialization of the entire construction industry.¹⁶ Together with his colleague Konrad Wachsmann (1901–80) he developed numerous prefab construction systems.¹⁷ For Ludwig Mies van der Rohe industrialization was “not so much a question of rationalizing existing working methods as of fundamentally remolding the whole building trade.”¹⁸ Mies van der Rohe thus called for a “total destruction of the building trade in the form in which it has existed up to now” and an adaptation to industrially produced materials.¹⁹ Other Bauhaus teachers formulated similar ideas. Ludwig Hilberseimer (1885–1967), who taught at the Bauhaus from 1929, thought of modular new towns,²⁰ and Marcel Breuer (1901–81) developed various design schemes for modular housing. For them, building high blocks was a mandate of the time and supported by scientific calculations.²¹

The new technologies were carried out on an urban scale. In 1924 Martin Wagner (1885–1957) carried out the Splanemannstraße development in Berlin, the first Siedlung (residential development) from large precast concrete slabs. It inspired other ensembles of standardized residential buildings in Germany, such as Gropius’s model ensemble in Dessau-Törten (1926–28) or the Horseshoe Development (1925–31) in Berlin by Wagner and Bruno Taut. These projects were heavily influenced by the British garden city movement, which since the late nineteenth century had promoted the idea of a lifestyle that remained connected with nature within modern industrial cities. Arguably the most successful serial developments of the 1920s were Ernst May’s Siedlungen, which he planned during his tenure as municipal official for residential construction in Frankfurt between 1925 and 1930, and which included the serial developments in the Frankfurt suburbs of Praunheim, Westhausen, Bornheim, Römerstadt, and Niederrad. These Vorstadttrabanten (suburban satellites) were the first housing developments that constituted entire neighborhoods on the urban periphery; at the same time they pioneered the use of prefab concrete elements.²²

Like their German colleagues, the architects in the newly founded Soviet Union also theorized principles of rationalization and standardization as a solution to an exacerbated housing shortage—and as the fulfillment of the socialist promise of equal housing standards for everyone. They c...