Description
Book SynopsisPost-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.
Table of ContentsContents: 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.
