ABSTRACT

Architecture and the Housing Question examines how the design and provision of housing around the world have become central both to competing political projects and to the architecture profession. 

How have architects acting as housing experts helped alleviate or enforce class, race, and gender inequality? What are the disciplinary implications of taking on shelter for the multitude as an architectural assignment and responsibility? The book features essays in the historiography of architecture and the housing question, and a collection of historical case studies from Belgium, China, France, Ghana, the Netherlands, Kenya, the Soviet Union, Turkey, and the United States. The thematic organization of the collection, interrogating housing expertise, the state apparatus, segregation and colonialism, highlights the methodological questions that underpin its international outlook.   

The book will appeal to students and scholars in architecture, architectural history, theory, and urban studies.

chapter |17 pages

Introduction.Architecture and the Housing Question

Specific Histories

part I|61 pages

Whose History? Rethinking the Expert

chapter 1|18 pages

Housing and History

The Case of the Specific Intellectual

chapter 2|20 pages

Humanitarian Homemaker, Emergency Subject

Questions of Shelter and Domesticity

chapter 3|21 pages

“Oh, but This Isn't Architecture!”

The Paradoxical Heritage of French Public Housing

part II|70 pages

Housing and the State

chapter 4|27 pages

Inventing Socialist Modern

Housing Research and Experimental Design in the Soviet Union

chapter 5|17 pages

“Production First, Living Second”

Welfare Housing and Social Transition in China

chapter 6|24 pages

“Pillars” of the Welfare State

Postwar Mass Housing in Belgium and the Netherlands

part III|43 pages

(De)Segregation and the Housing Enclave

chapter 7|20 pages

Housing the People Who “Lived Free”

Inhabiting Social Housing in the Tin-Can Neighborhood

chapter 8|21 pages

Public Life and Public Housing

Charles Moore's Church Street South

part IV|44 pages

Land, Property, Colonization

chapter 9|22 pages

Landing Architecture

Tropical Bodies, Land, and the Invisible Backdrop of Architectural History