11/20/12

Social Housing

By: Denver Sells


            Public housing to me has always been something a bit distant and unknown.  Growing up in a small town, public housing to me are small-scale government projects that are extremely small, brick duplex’s.  Nothing in comparison to the large oversized muti-family housing units presented by Le Corbusier with his Unité d’habitation or Mis van der Rohe’s Weissenhof Siedlung.  But, these offer and interesting alternative, especially for the large scale of the European urban fabric, to the typical sprawl associated with urban growth.
            To start with, I find it extremely interesting and thought provoking was the comparison of Le Corbusier’s Unité d’habitation to an ocean liner.  Even in its intention design of this relationship, it serves as a dual meaning. On the one hand, it represents the design of the time and the 5 points of architecture as defined by Corbusier.  On the other, it represents the essential function of one of those large ocean liners of that time.  It was meant to efficiently compact that large amount of people into one space and carry them safely to a new life.  To me, I find the concurrence with Corbusier’s function too striking to ignore.  Whether it was intentional by him or not, it works very well, and it adds a whole new deeper layer of complexity.  The function of this social housing was to provide this new level of living for these people that may not have been able to afford something of such quality before, and “carry” them to a new place in their lives, the same with Jean Nouvel’s social housing.  This is an interesting angle to look at this to me, and it also parallel’s the mantra of the time “form follow function.”  In this case, I believe that statement circles back on itself several times and thus perpetuates itself in how the shape, function and use of the space is carried out.
            As far as the modern way of looking at this with BIG architects, the new use of computer modeling has eased the conveyance of these ideas, but has not really changed the whole idea, just provided a new way of looking at it.  Their approach seemed to just make sense.  Their conveyance was spot on and their analysis of the space, site, program and every other feature was just amazing. Their method of layering each piece seemed so radical, but if you look back at Corbusier’s ideals of his perfect city, you find the same things and realize that it is not a new idea, just a new way of looking at it.  Thus, the idea of architecture perpetuating itself comes back into perspective and informs us a little bit on where the future of architecture might go next.  One thing is for sure though, there will always be a “new” way of building a large social housing project, but the same idea exists.  The cheapest idea, for the greatest amount of people, which uses the space and materials in the most efficient way as possible: this is the genesis of architecture: adapt, overcome, and solve the next puzzle.





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