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Housing, and what constitutes good housing, is an ever-popular topic in the architectural publishing world. Atlas of Houses: Europe in the 20th CenturyEuropean scholars Orsina Simona Pierini, Carmen Espegel, Dick van Gameren and Mark Swinnerton Swenarton’s new book offers a fresh perspective on the genre. It is more like a compendium or manual, promising the reader a “necessary” survey of twentieth-century housing projects through drawings.
It is in this respect that the book truly shines. The author presents 87 selected schemes with profound graphic clarity in three standard scales and formats. These beautiful drawings explore the relationship between the public and private realms, the city and the home, the city and the home. In this era of futile debates about “beauty” and the ever-present value engineering present in projects due to inflated construction costs, the spatial concept presented feels new and innovative.
Featured projects include notable examples such as the monumental Karl Marxhof in Vienna, Ricardo Bofill’s Walden-7 in Barcelona and the much-loved Babylon Arts Center in London designed by Chamberlain, Powell and Bang . These projects are closely related to projects that readers may be unfamiliar with. I love admiring the wild organicism of Torres Blancas in Madrid (designed by Francisco Javier Sáenz de Oiza) and the urban blocks and “street curtains” of Christian de Portzamparc’s Les Hautes Formes in Paris ” of carefully conceived features and precise fragmentation.
I’m particularly fond of two humble projects that use powerful methods to define the streets. Jan Wils’ Papaverhof in The Hague is a particularly forward-thinking urban approach within the garden city movement, with its clever design of two-way, back-to-back terraces that define a public courtyard. James Stirling’s earlier project, Avensham in Preston, provided a dynamic approach to achieving positive facades and articulation within a modest building. It has now been demolished, but it is at least still preserved in this book, which makes it feel even more important to me.
By presenting projects chronologically and with such rigorous graphic rigor, readers are able to compare and contrast schemes that would not normally be considered together and make connections between projects at different times. Through the timeline of this book, we can clearly see that the Siedlung Halen of “Atelier 5” is naturally the predecessor of Benson & Forsyth’s Branch Hill. Both were inspired by Le Corbusier’s “mat” projects from the 1940s.
The chronological format also helps bring to mind other projects not mentioned in the book. For example, you can see how JJP Oud’s De Kiefhoek’s rational approach to urban infill and the lessons learned from it form the through-line of contemporary housing projects such as Peter Barber’s Donnybrook Quarter.
The only real point of contention in this impressive book is that there are no named female architects among the 87 projects selected. This is not to ignore the contribution of female architects, such as Nathalie de Vries, who led the Silodam team at MVRDV, a project profiled at the end of the book. She, like fellow founding partners Winy Maas and Jacob van Rijs, remains anonymous. But confusingly, the authors did not see fit to include any projects that designated a female architect as lead designer.
An easy win would be projects that include Peter and Alison Smithson, such as Robin Hood Gardens. To his credit, Swenarton’s excellent paper on the rise and fall of residential streets in the 20th century discusses the Smithsons’ contribution. The preface also expresses the author’s desire to present both well-known and unfamiliar items – Robin Hood Gardens perhaps has quite a few pages devoted to its innovations and premature demise.
However, one particularly glaring omission is Kate Macintosh’s monumental Dawson Heights in Southwark. The project represents many of the approaches to housing design that Pierini explores in her opening essay, embodying through fragmentation her ideas surrounding the house such as monumentality, scale, variation and complexity.
Just down the road from Lambeth, Rosemary Stjernstedt’s Central Hill Estate is an outstanding example of a Zeilenbau (slab house) that makes the most of its inviting Attention-grabbing venue. Elsewhere in Europe, Jadwiga Grabowska-Hawrylak’s iconic Grunwaldzki Square development in Wroclaw recalls another project that could become a feature, exploring massive scale and technological innovation through prefabrication to enable a new space economy .
while reading Housing album I couldn’t help but be reminded of W Section Collective’s recent Women’s Work campaign, which aims to address the omission of women’s projects from maps and archives. While this book has its merits, it serves as a reminder that historically the work of female designers has not received the same status and recognition as that of their male contemporaries. Effectively erasing the contribution of women from this series of projects (in the context of the traditional Western architectural canon), Housing album unintentionally reflects historical biases and highlights the need for a more inclusive, diverse and critically reflective approach to architectural history.
Atlas of Housing: Twentieth Century Europe is published by Lund Humphries, 384 pages, RRP £65.
Betty Owoo is an architect at Be First and co-founder of PATCH Collective.The third batch of new architectural writer alumni
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