Post-War Middle-Class Housing: Models, Construction and Change

ISBN-13: 9783034315944 / Angielski / Miękka / 2016 / 448 str.

Gaia Caramellino;Federico Zanfi

Opis

Post-war middle-class housing played a key role in constructing and transforming the cities of Europe and America, deeply impacting today's urban landscape. And yet, this stock has been underrepresented in a literature mostly focused on public housing and the work of a few master architects.
This book is the first attempt to explore such housing from an international perspective. It provides a comparative insight into the processes of construction, occupation and transformation of residential architecture built for the middle-classes in 12 different countries between the 1950s and 1970s. It investigates the role of models, actors and policies that shaped the middle-class city, tracing geographies, chronologies and forms of development that often cross national frontiers.
This study is particularly relevant today within the context of fragilization which affects the middle-classes, challenging, as it does, the urban role played by this residential heritage in the light of technological obsolescence, trends in patterns of homeownership, as well as social and generational changes.

Spis treści

Contents: Monique Eleb: Preface - Gaia Caramellino: Introduction. The Middle-Class Project: Designing New Ways of Living in the Post-War City - Lionel Engrand: The Middle-Class Dwelling Unit. Architectural Theory, Lifestyle and Marketing in France, 1945-1965 - Luca Molinari/Chiara Ingrosso: The 'Residential Park' as a New Model for the Emerging Middle-Class in Naples During the 1950s - Ioanna Theocharopoulou: A Social and Cultural Reading of the Athenian Polykatoikia 1949-1974 - Daniel Rincón De La Vega: Spanish Post-Civil War Middle-Class Housing. Limited Rent Flats in the Francoist Madrid - Anahi Ballent: Apartment Buildings for the Middle-Class. Cultural Transformation of Domestic Life and Urban Densification in Buenos Aires - Juliette Spertus/Susanne Schindler: Co-op City and Twin Parks: Two Models for Middle-Class Housing in the Bronx during the 1970s - Marieke van Rooij: Dutch New Town Almere Haven. A Search for the Accommodation of the Suburban Wishes of the Middle-Classes in the 1970s - Ana Vaz Milheiro/Filipa Fiúza/Rogério Vieira de Almeida/Débora Félix: 'Radieuse' Peripheries. A Comparative Study on Middle-Class Housing in Luanda, Lisbon and Macao - Eveline Althaus/Marie Antoinette Glaser: Legacies of Modernism. House Biographies of Large Post-War Residential Complexes in Switzerland - Els de Vos: Multiple Versions of Modernity in Post-War Belgium. The Housing Estate of Ban Eik - Filippo De Pieri: «Stories of Houses». Observing Post-War Middle-Class Housing in Italy - Jonathan Massey: Housing Risk: Neoliberal Homeownership in the United States - Matthew Soules: Deconstructing Liveability. Perspectives from Central Vancouver - Wouter Bervoets/Marijn van de Weijer: The Future of the Post-War Single-Family House: The Case of Flanders - Federico Zanfi: Afterword.

O autorze

Gaia Caramellino is Senior Research Fellow in Architectural History at the Politecnico di Torino and teaches History and Theory of Architecture at the Politecnico di Milano. She was national coordinator of the research project «Architecture for the Middle-Classes in Italy, 1950s-1970s», funded by the Italian government, and was visiting scholar at the CCA in 2011. Her research focuses on the history of 20th-century housing models, cultures, policies and practices and on their circulation between Europe and the U.S.
Federico Zanfi is Assistant Professor in Urbanism at the Politecnico di Milano. His design and research activity gravitates around the «post-growth» transformation of the 20th-century built heritage, with a focus on Italian urban systems: he has developed reform strategies for unauthorised southern settlements, for diffuse urbanization in central-northern regions, and for middle-class condominiums in the main metropolitan areas.