Contenu du sommaire : Small-scale Building Enterprise and Global Home Ownership

This article presents case studies of two apartment projects built in the Western Indian city of Pune (formerly Poona) in the 1970s and 1980s. While their architecture is unassuming, the histories of their realisation provide a powerful account of how transformations in building policy shaped notions of professional architectural practice in India at the time. In particular, the cases illustrate how rank-and-file architects found themselves caught in the tension between, on the one hand, a socialist state eager to apply welfare measures but unable to execute them autonomously and, on the other hand, private-sector entrepreneurship looking for opportunities to satisfy increasing demands for home ownership. The article begins with an exploration of how this tension resulted in an intensification of the building bureaucracy. The second part investigates how modes of this bureaucracy, in turn, affected architectural patronage, the daily tasks expected of architects, and built architecture itself. Going beyond traditional architectural references, the study draws upon building regulation, oral history, and bureaucratic correspondence retrieved from the previously undisclosed archives of the architects. The narrative revealed by these sources challenges dominant notions of architectural expertise while highlighting the agency of paperwork―correspondence, administrative forms, and plans―as producers, rather than factual representations, of architectural form. As such, this inquiry into everyday local contexts of production offers a new perspective from which to evaluate buildings that are conventionally dismissed as derivative or lacking any critical thinking.

This paper deals with a largely unknown episode in the prolific career of the internationally renowned planner Constantinos A. Doxiadis (1913-1975). Between 1962 and 1974, he operated the construction company Zygos S.A. with a view to take advantage of the opportunities presented by the proliferation of the polykatoikìa (a characteristic mid-rise apartment building in Greece) via antiparochì (a popular land-for-flats contract)Αs this paper analyzes, the story of Zygos offers a unique opportunity to unpack a series of important issues regarding housing production and urbanization processes in postwar Greece—and potentially other countries—where housing was neither undertaken by centralized mechanisms, nor promoted by the welfare state. It discusses how the self-propelling mechanism of antiparochì both created and drew on a system of social and economic interdependencies that enjoyed broad support across the political spectrum, while boosting the growth of a speculative real estate market, where amateurish contractors and small construction companies thrived. In fact, the growth of such a market owes a lot to the regulatory measures launched by Doxiadis while being in charge of the Greek Reconstruction and Recovery programs (1945-1951). Altogether, the story of Doxiadis's involvement in the Greek real estate market offers a striking example of how top-down incentives and bottom-up initiatives converged to create the conditions and framework within which Greek architects (including renowned ones) routinely operated. To contextualize the design and building process of polykatoikìes (a commonplace building type outside the realm of high architectural design), the paper draws on the concept of the “commonplace” as an umbrella term used to describe the socio-economic conditions evinced in the antiparochì mechanism and the everyday lived experience of a developing urban society.

This paper concerns the planning, design, and construction history of a postwar multifamily housing block in Ankara, Turkey, viewed from the perspective of the transnational and local networks behind its realization. Built by the Mintrak Building Cooperative (1957-1962) founded by executive engineers and managers of TürkTraktör, Turkey's first tractor manufacturing company established as part of the Marshall Plan (1948-1952), the block is one of the local examples of the International Style built throughout the country. It was the tallest housing block in the Esat neighborhood, with a reinforced concrete structural framework, pilotis, and a terraced roof with communal spaces. Besides adopting the formal characteristics and common construction materials of its time, as this paper suggests, the building is emblematic of the postwar housing production from policy and development to design, construction, and domestic culture. Built as part of a workers' housing cooperative advocated by postwar housing policy yet founded by the executives and US-educated employees of a transnational company, the block exemplifies postwar Americanization in Turkey in terms of transnational and local exchanges and their urban, architectural, and social imprints. Through content analysis based on archival sources, official reports and architectural drawings as well as oral testimonies collected from cooperative members and residents of the building, this paper questions the transnational extent of the Marshall Plan, to which a local housing cooperative could represent. It provides an in-depth analysis of the technocratic making of the housing block, through all different stages of its development, from founding “the cooperative in the wild” to building “Esat's Hilton,” as its initiators and residents called it. In this respect, the paper argues that the block is a transnational prototype of US-guided local modernization, based on the US-promoted self-help model that introduced an autonomous organization to housing production in Turkey.

The paper is a study of house-building cooperatives in the Lithuanian SSR as a field of architectural experimentation in planning, design and construction of mass housing during the late Soviet period (1960s–1980s). The house-building co-operatives were re-introduced in the USSR in 1962 as a substitute for the cessation of private single-family houses in large cities. Politically and economically, house-building co-operatives were seen as a solution to the difficult situation posed by the well-known Soviet apartment shortage because co-operative apartment arrangements meant that residents contributed their own funds to the process of building their homes, thereby avoiding the waiting list. The important change that housing co-operatives offered was the possibility for better-to-do citizens to obtain housing luxuries that were previously available only to the privileged party nomenclatura. From an urban planning perspective such a concentration of previously single houses into multi-apartment buildings was meant to minimise the municipal land taken up for housing and reduce the cost of engineering infrastructure. At the same time the introduction of co-operative housing resulted in more varied residential building designs (including more comfortable apartment layouts and better selection of materials), engaging in the process departments of experimental design at the State Design Institutes. In this paper a hypothesis is proposed that the development of co-operative housing stimulated architectural experimentation for groups concerning both privileged residents (because the process of co-operative housing accelerated the concentration of more affluent urban dwellers) and architects, who wished to express more varied residential planning ideas. The paper is a study of house-building cooperatives in the Lithuanian SSR as a field of architectural experimentation in the planning, design, and construction of mass housing during the late Soviet period (1960s–80s). House-building co-operatives were re-introduced in the USSR in 1962 as a substitute for the stoppage of private single-family dwellings in large cities. Politically and economically, house-building co-operatives were seen as a solution to the difficult situation posed by the apartment shortage. The co-operative apartment arrangements meant that residents contributed their own funds to the process of building their homes, thereby avoiding the waiting list. The important change that housing co-operatives offered was the possibility for better-off citizens to obtain housing luxuries that were previously available only to privileged communist party elite. From an urban planning perspective, concentrating zones previously allotted to single-family dwellings into multi-apartment buildings was a means of minimizing the municipal land taken up by housing and reducing the cost of engineering infrastructure. At the same time, the introduction of co-operative housing resulted in more varied residential building designs (including more comfortable apartment layouts and better selection of materials). The departments of experimental design at the State Design Institutes were engaged in the process. In this paper, we suggest the hypothesis that the development of co-operative housing stimulated architectural experimentation for two groups of people: privileged residents (because the process of co-operative housing accelerated the concentration of more affluent urban dwellers), and architects, eager to implement more varied residential planning ideas.

This article shifts emphasis in the term “building” from its noun to verb sense, as exemplified by the Golconde dormitory conceived and built between 1935 and c.1948 in a French colony on India's south-eastern coast, Pondicherry. It contributes to a discourse on how cultures of architectural modernity are inevitably rendered plural when viewed through processes of their enactment. Arguably India's earliest exposed reinforced concrete architectural structure with a dynamic ventilation system, Golconde has been overarchingly co-opted into metanarratives on modern(ist) and tropical architecture. Yet why it took over a decade to build or what the experiences of this process were, remained to be asked. Believing such questions to be central to Golconde's history, this research argues that the project's ‘agency', contingent on the philosophy of the spiritual community (Ashram) that was its patron, critically held sway over the ideologies of its professional architect(s). Contemporary accounts of construction also reveal the embodied and felt experiences of Golconde's builders—mostly comprising members of the Ashram itself. Examining such aspects closely offers new insights into the project's material and social processes. Two interconnected histories of Golconde then emerge: how the self-build architectural project of Golconde was, equally, the self-building of those who participated in its making.