The rhetoric of shelter - housing design

Architectural Review, The, Oct, 1995 by Peter Blundell Jones

The grand, oversailing roofs of these two blocks give unsentimental grace to a low-cost housing scheme which makes the most of owner participation.

'In forms of dwelling the social ambitions of mankind are most clearly expressed ... The bourgeois felt the struggle for a renewal of dwelling-form as an attack on his cultural image, and not least as a threat to his social and political ideas. But those who felt threatened in the realm of dwelling by the principles of new building did not hesitate to obey the same spirit in the technical realm ... Whenever it is a question of developing power in the material realm, of raising performance capability on a technical level ... the bourgeois class... understand form as a process which expresses technical thinking. But as soon as the same principle begins to encroach on the area in which the bourgeois class expresses its ideals, they feel increasingly disturbed ... The bourgeois cultural image is orientated to the past, not developed with reference to life, but from books and museums.'

Looking back over half a century of Modernism in 1946, Hugo Haring saw a battle far from won, and 50 years later it is still raging. We are told that the market gives people what they want, but do they have a real choice?

And even if a nostalgic folksy style does make them feel at home, do they get the best living conditions in terms of space, light, sound, room layout, freedom from overlooking and other such criteria?

The great experiments of the 1920s that gave us Siemensstadt and the New Frankfurt seem to have been forgotten along with the egalitarian political ideas behind them. One would think, too, from the way they are ignored, that the extensive studies of room sizes and arrangements, of daylighting, servicing and so on, pursued in such detail for the first time in history, are no longer valid, and that the enormous changes in building technology over the past 70 years had never taken place. But suppose the investigations of the Modernists were valid and that one wanted to take them further, using the latest technology in a humane and efficient but unsentimental way, adding some user participation? Suppose that one's aim was to avoid lapsing into 'Biedermeier folksiness' (Giencke's term for the Austrian equivalent of the half-timbered cottage). Perhaps from the pursuit of principle a new image would arise.

Karl Spitzweg Strasse is in a southern suburb of Graz, an old residential area in which blocks of flats have gradually been taking over from villas with gardens as the density increased. The narrow streets are lined with mature trees, and there is plenty of greenery. Giencke's project, comprising 49 dwellings in two linear blocks, fills what had been a backland site in the middle of a large block. It won a limited competition as part of the Modell Steiermark housing policy (see p4ff). Under this policy, low-income people from the housing list become owner-occupiers, paying off a mortgage which is subsidised through a low interest rate.

The architects have chosen to present the site plan boundary-less as a figure-ground contrast but it is approximately rectangular. The approach road is a cul-de-sac arriving from the west, which enters the site just north of the west end of the long block, leading to a turning and parking space. The short block runs parallel to the northern site boundary, but the long one is skewed on to the diagonal. This is partly to make it face more nearly south, partly to connect the entrance of its semi-underground garage to the incoming road. Both the space to the south of the long block and that between the two are left as communal gardens. The blocks are relatively narrow to allow all flats a double outlook and to avoid producing any blind rooms. They are four storeys high to avoid the need for lifts, the upper two floors being maisonettes with stairs rising to a shared roof terrace. The semi-underground car-parking is open on both sides for light and ventilation, setting each block on a slightly raised concrete base. The ground-floor flats open off this base on the north side, while upper flats are paired off a series of projecting stairs with shallow-pitched oversailing glass roofs. A ramp at the west end of each allows access for bicycles and prams, while steps in several places connect directly down to the garden, the long ones also suggesting use as seats.

The basic structure is reinforced concrete cast in a repetitive, completely orthogonal form with dividing walls at 6m centres. The 5.8m bays so created can be living/dining rooms or pairs of bedrooms. Single-person flats take a single bay, while larger ones take two side by side on the lower floors, or one above the other on the upper: some maisonettes take three. The secondary partitioning is non-structural and varies with the owner's wishes. To keep pipe-runs economical, and to avoid cutting into the concrete structure along with the subsequent problems of re-sealing holes, all services are added outboard on the north side in a series of towers that lie between the main structure and the steel stairs. These house all bathrooms, lavatories and wind-lobbies and service ducts for the kitchens. The original intention was that they be totally prefabricated and brought to the site plumbed up, but no manufacturer could be found to do it for the money available, so they were assembled on site in the conventional way.