Post-Crisis Social Housing: Between Goals and Contemporary Architectural Trends

Abstract

The first step the governments do at the end of political, economic and social crises, is to reform the damages in all fields, and the social housing is one of them.

The article presents three examples of social housing which were realized after the crises in the twentieth century, accompanied by an introduction to the architectural movements which shaped them. Narkomfin building in Russia represents the constructivism between the two World Wars. Whereas l’Unité d’habitation de Marseille represents a functionalist-based design after the second World War. But the third example represents such local case related to an internal crisis which took place in the UK at the acme of brutalist architecture.

The following analytic study aims to recognize the way the architect used to approach his architectural principles with the strategic goals of the governments sponsoring these projects on one hand, and to show how had he translated these goals into components which composed the architectural programme on the second hand.

Despite of the modernity of its examples, this chronological study, will clarify the requisite data in order to make local proposals about the post-war social housing.