History Of Apartment Building Design Part II

History Of Apartment Building Design Part II
In previous article, I wrote about luxurious apartment design and now about low income apartment design to accomodate lower class residents which was dominant in early 20th century.

LOW INCOME BUILDING DESIGN
For low- and middle-income tenants, apartment building design was a combination between aesthetic and economic viability, even sometime abandoned the sanitary concern and aesthetic to get more profit. Apartment building was great issue in social and housing reform.

This was a challenge for architects, they used this apartment buiding design to explore new materials, prefabricated structural system to provide affordable worker housing. The government also took part by sponsoring the housing projects. Examples can be seen from:
1. The housing policy of the Weimar Republic generated pioneering modern apartment buildings for German cities
2. J.J.P.Oud’s Kiefhoek housing (1925), an International Style garden apartment complex built in
Rotterdam. Both the garden apartment and the high-rise form of the apartment building
were explored by architects throughout the mid-20th century.
3. A key high-rise example in London is Highpoint I (1933–35), designed by Berthold Lubetkin and Tecton.

These two primary apartment building design forms—the mainly urban high-rise and the suburban garden apartment—became internationally prevalent by the 1930s. They distributed the rising cost of elevators, ventilation, and other systems-related apparatus by using modern building materials to create taller structures with more living units. Garden apartments were suitable for lower-density development on the urban periphery, where land was less expensive.

POST WAR PERIOD
In post WW II period, the housing crisis became the great issue and the European government again sponsored the construction of housing projects, to move the economy as well. And then followed by Us government. During this period, the dominant style was the international style modernism particularly slab-form high-rise developed by Le Corbusier.
as we can see from Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation (1947–53) at Marseilles, France. Unite d’Habitation is a 12-story horizontal slab raised on heavy tapered.

Noteworthy examples of apartment buildings done in a postwar modernist vocabulary include ATBAT housing (1951–56,Shadrach Woods and J.Bodiansky) in Morocco and Peabody Terraces (1964, José Luis
Sert) in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

During the postwar period, large-scale developments, including multiple high-rise apartment buildings, site planning, and amenities such as shopping and recreational facilities, became more prevalent.

By qsepti
source: 20th century architecture