Stefi Orazi - Modernist Estates - Europe: The buildings and the people who live in them today

First published in 2019 by White Lion Publishing, an imprint of The Quarto Group.

The Old Brewery, 6 Blundell Street,

London N7 9BH

United Kingdom

www.QuartoKnows.com

Modernist Estates Europe:
The buildings and the people who live in them today
Text 2019 Stefi Orazi

Photography 2019 Stefi Orazi unless otherwise credited
Design: Stefi Orazi Studio

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from White Lion Publishing.

Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders
of material quoted in this book. If application is made in writing to the publisher, any omissions will be included in future editions.

A catalogue record for this book is available from
the British Library.

Digital edition: 978-0-71124-033-9
Hardcover edition: 978-0-71123-908-1

The buildings and the people who live in them today

by Stefi Orazi

Two weeks before the UK referendum on leaving the European Union, I made my first research trip for this book to the Werkbund Estate in Vienna, built in the early 1930s by thirty-two European architects. My next destination would see me in Berlin, to Hansaviertel to explore its Interbau57 buildings by no fewer than fifty-three architects from Europe and beyond. While Britain spent the next two years wrangling on how to withdraw itself from the EU, I spent it feeling grateful that I could easily travel from one country to the next, reflecting on how that freedom also allowed many of the architects featured in this book to share ideas across country borders. So what lessons can we learn from mass housing across the continent, what similarities, what differences do they share, and after nearly ninety years since the building of the experimental Werkbund Estates, are they still places people can and want to live in today?

Choosing the estates I wanted to feature was an easy task. My bookshelves are filled with architecture books from the 1950s70s of modern European housing, with black and white photography of crisp concrete or sharp brick buildings in cosmopolitan cities such as Berlin and Stockholm. I set across Europe wanting to explore some of the extraordinary estates and to find out if attitudes to modernist housing differs from country to country, meeting the residents who have chosen to live there and to see how these buildings have fared over the years.

The fifteen case studies in this book are of course only a snapshot and cannot by any means give a thorough picture or understanding of European housing. I was limited to featuring the estates where residents strangers kindly opened their doors to me, and regrettably was not able to get my foot inside anyones home in Eastern Europe, whose buildings I have no doubt could easily fill the contents of a book on their own.

In the interwar years, new housing design in Europe was driven by the pursuit of improved sanitation, community, family life and healthy living, following years of poor living conditions that had caused epidemics such as tuberculosis. Early examples include the Bella Vista housing complex in Copenhagen by Arne Jacobsen and the Werkbund Estates in six cities across Europe. These favoured the garden city approach of creating new communities on the outskirts of the city, typically white, sugar-cube-like houses with flat roofs that became synonymous with the Modern Movement.

This new building programme was short lived, however, as the Second World War broke out in 1939. The few countries that maintained neutrality during the war continued with their housing projects, albeit at a reduced rate, including Sweden, with influential schemes such as Backstrm and Reinius point blocks in Danviksklippan. When the war ended, the rest of Europe followed suit with drive and ambition to rebuild the bomb-damaged towns and cities and to rehouse its citizens in decent homes. There was a sense of clearing away the past in order to create a new, fairer society and architects and governments embraced modernism as the answer to the housing crisis.

I was surprised to see just how many of the schemes I visited were influenced by Le Corbusiers renowned slab block the Unit dhabitation in Marseille. However, rather than create carbon copies, architects often took on the same qualities and disciplines of the Unit, but tried to improve on them to fit the local landscape or demographic. For example, in Atelier 5s Halen in Bern, the alternative to the vertical building was to opt for low-rise housing in mat planning form, to fit closely with the local topography. In the Bloco das guas Livres building in Lisbon a more direct influence can be seen to the Unit, but here the architects made the proportions and materials of their building much grander for the middle classes that would inhabit it.

The majority of the schemes in this book are high quality prototypes in collective housing seminal examples and many of them are protected and recognised for their architectural importance, but in order to build quickly and cheaply the preferred method of construction during the post-war years was system-building. In the UK, house building by the welfare state peaked in the 1960s largely high-rise tower blocks at just over 400,000 a year. France had a similar approach with its grand ensembles, large-scale housing estates on the outskirts of its cities, and Sweden had its Million Homes Programme. This type of mass housing, which was initially met with approval and enthusiasm, was gradually displaced by doubts and criticised for creating inhumane and bland environments lacking communal facilities.

A number of architects in particular became critical of the welfare state in its creation of these mass-produced schemes and sought to offer an alternative, such as in Carlo Aymonino and Aldo Rossis Monte Amiata project in Milan, and Jean Renaudies Ivry-sur-Seine in Paris. The housing complex of Aymonino and Rossi looked to offer a complete new part of a city as a coherent urban element. It has over 100 variations of flat types across 440 units. In Ivry, Renaudie went even further, making no two units the same.

Of course such unique solutions in housing do not come cheap, and the question of who and how to fund homes is a pertinent one. The case studies in this book range from welfare state funded, such as Linksview House in Edinburgh, to privately funded schemes such as Halen outside Bern, with interesting models in between, including private/public collaborations. The Gallaratese II scheme, for example, was a financial investment by the Monte Amiata Mining company, who owned the land, but commissioned by the municipality of Milan. Aside from the Bloco das guas Livres and Arne Jacobsens work in Copenhagen, all of the schemes were initially conceived as being affordable, using industrialised materials and systems, and aimed at ordinary working families.

There is also the question of maintenance. These buildings are not cheap to maintain many of them were built using new innovative materials and construction methods and are at a crucial point where they need extensive refurbishment and restoration. They were built in an era of cheap energy, when conservation was not yet in the lexicon, with minimal insulation, single-glazed windows and ageing mechanical systems. Whether it be new windows, updating heating systems or treating concrete spalling, how do we best maintain these buildings, in a sympathetic way, preserving their architectural integrity while meeting modern standards, and who will foot the bill? As many of the buildings here are of exceptional historical importance, they are protected as architectural monuments and any work undertaken has to be approved. There is a fine line, however, between conservation and restoration, and ensuring people do not feel as if they are living in a museum.