THE MINIMUM DWELLING, Foreward
excerpts from The Minimum Dwelling, by Karel Teige
FOREWARD
"The minimum dwelling has become the central problem of modern architecture and the battle cry of today's architectural avant-garde. As a slogan, it is announced and promoted by modern architects, because it sheds light on a situation that has reached a point requiring the radical reform and modernization of housing; as a battle cry, it calls for answers to the question of the current crisis of housing."
"The international collective cooperation of modern architects, stimulated by the congresses and guided for some years by CIRPAC [Comite International pour la Realisation des Problems d'Architecture Contemporaire], has contributed very effectively to the elaboration and clarification of the problem of the minimum dwelling and has helped shed new light on the questions of popular dwelling in many of its aspects, for the question of popular dwelling is not only a special concern of architecture alone but, if we are to understand it in all its complexity, needs to be dealt with by the full interdisciplinary cooperation between architects, sociologists, economists, health officials, physicians, social workers, politicians, and trade unionists. It cannot be considered separately from questions of production, societal conditions, the prevailing economic crisis, the material standard of the strata of the "subsistence minimum" (particualrly the proletariat and working intellectuals), the level of salaries and wages and their dynamics, and —more generally—the wage system as a whole. The housing question would be viewed one-sidedly, wrongly, and distortedly if one failed to deal with it according to its relationship to the economic system and the structure of society, on the one hand, and with respect ot the given state of the family and the domestic household, the ruling ideology, prevailing morality, customs, and the legal order, on the other hand. To deal with the question of the dwelling for the subsistence minimum—that is, the question of a popular and (most of all) worker's dwelling—is possible only synthetically, in all its aspects and within the context of all its economic, hygienic, ideological, and sociopolitical ramifications."
"In parallel with the work of CIRPAC, the book will discuss the following themes:
The objective conditions of actual difficutlties that may be encountered in trying to sove the problem of and to postulate policies for the design and planning of popular dwellings (e.g. production conditions; social structure of the popluation of cities and villages; popular settlements; functional aspects of housing, work, transportation, and supply in residential agglomerations; the relationship of wages to rent, speculation, social, and political legislation, etc.).
The social content of contemporary housing (e.g., the patriarchal family, its household, and its disintigration).
The principles guiding functional architectural solutions, which adhere to the principle of a dwelling minimum. In contrast to the usual small apartment floor plan types (e.g., room and a nook for cooking),which happen merely to be conventional adaptations of bourgeois floor plans, and which represent merely a quatitative change of the traditional bourgeois or farmer's dwelling, shoehorned into a small area and designed without first having established functionally valid norms for the dimensions of a dwelling area for an average household, this calls for a new postulate: for each adult man or woman, a minimal but adequate independent, habitable room. Just as particular types of small apartments, such as those with a live-in kitchen, a small kitchen, or a living room with a cooking nook, are not simply commensurate variants and alternatives—each corresponds to a different lifestyle and a different socially determined world—so too, at a given stage, an apartment without a kitchen suggests a dwelling where each adult individual is provided with a separate dwelling cubicle, which may be considiered the most developed and most progressive form of modern dwelling: one that transcends the framework of the traditional household type, one that is in effect the specific dwelling form intended for the working intelligentsia and the proletariat, and one that represents in embryonic form a new conception in the culture of dwelling.
The same applies to the dicussion about low-, medium-, or high-rise buildings, as we discover that these are not really separate housing categories: the freestanding family house, the duplex, the row house, and the medium-size rental apartment house with stairwells or balconies, not to mention the large apartment house, are actually only different variants of accepted models of contemporary architecture, each determined by its own particular economic attributes. Thus it is not a matter of just mechanically citing dimensions and numbers of stories: instead, what is important is which of these housing types either does or does not allow for, or promote, the concept of collective dwelling, by allowing the individual dwelling cell to be complemented by a scheme of central collective facilities and by incorporating all the required economic and cultural institutions in a single coordinated housing complex.
Site plans must be judged on the basis of similar criteria. Whether we are considereing a closed or open block, or row housing, all must be combined in an organic fashion with the plan of a linear city, as recommended by Miliutin in his proposals for socialist settlements.
Finally, we shall critically examine a new type of housing: the collective dwellilng. We intend to elucidate various and hitherto controversial solutions of this new type, and to sketch out the course of its future development under new social conditions: this is meant expressly as an answer to the various "ideal proposals, to be realized in the future" that are referred to in the questionnaires of CIRPAC.
At a time whe the world is divided, when there exist side by side two types of economies, two civilizations, two societies, two cultures, and therefore also two architectures and two dwelling cultures—one decaying, even though it may have a modernistic surface appearance; the other progressive, advancing, and victorious—the author will not be satisfied by comparing in a neutral manner the various achievements of contemporary architecture but will pass his own judgment on the various individual systems of housing, site planning, and urbanism. We shall make a distinction between aravistic and decadent figurations, hidden behind the facade of modernistic outward appearances, and shall examine all those figurations from which it may be possible to extract certain usefula dn cohesive principles for the establishment of future patterns, so that nothing would go to waste that is of value in modern culture, that is healthy and perfect—in short, the best of the best. In addition, the book attempts to sketch out a prognosis of emerging in embryonic form from the most progressive manifestations of the present. This will also include presenting the reader with examples of emerging new forms of housing and the city, new lifestyles, and the anticipation of new social relationships. However, it is not the intent of this book to make idle prophecies; instead, it is more important to read the story of tomorrow between the lines of today's realities."
"The question of the minimum dwelling, the question of settlements for the broad strata of the subsistence minimum, where currently hundreds of thousands, nay millions, in our so-called civilized world do not have access to adequate housing, is not only a question of architecture, or a matter of building cheap new apartments; it must be considered on of the most important social questions in general, topped only by the questions of nutrition, work, and clothing. All this has been confirmed beyond doubt by the copious data of any research study of social health and by statistics on prevailing living standards. This point leads us directly from the study of the problem of popular housing to the study of today's production relations and related social phenomena. We are aware of the fact that if we want to get to the bottom of the problem and find a key to its solution, the form and structure of human dwelling—the house, the agglomeration, the city—cannot be viewed as isolated factors. Instead, it is necessary to view dwelling and the city as the sum total of certain relationships between people and social classes, and as a process that reflects the counterplay of social forces actiong dynamically in the change of one set of forms into elements and structures of a higher order. For these reasons, any architecutral or urban solution must be mainly the result of all these complex relationships, if we want to get to the bottom of the problem and find a key to its solution.
The title of this book, The Minimum Dwelling, is therefore an attempt to review and formulate the housing question as it exists today in all its complexity, dynamics, and actuality. Instead of offering generel recipes and examples of how to improve and equip small apartments, we shall make an attempt to focus first on those aspects which shed a light on the general question of housing; we shall identify all those requirements and premises that are essential, before we can begin to consider questions of architectural and construction solutions in order to arrive at answers to a housing situation that will be truly social, homan, and cultured and genuinely dedicated to the service of all the people in a new society."
Posted by Sam at December 15, 2004 10:36 AM
