ABSTRACT
No type of modern domestic architecture has been more widely debated than the high-rise towers so often constructed by public authorities in the 1960s and 1970s. Inspired by the early writings of Le Corbusier about the need for apartment towers in wide green spaces, and by the later writings of Team Ten and the Smithsons about the possibilities for creating “streets in the air” (Figs. 64, 65), postwar builders and government agencies turned to high-rise structures (see also Fig. 4) as a solution to housing shortages and the need for minimal dwellings – as a solution to the need for mass housing, especially for the poor. The rapid evolution of steel and concrete construction and the perfection of the electric-powered elevator now made such buildings cheaper to build than they had been in the earlier twentieth century. Alison Ravetz sketches the outlines of this development and shows the great disillusionment of the public and of government agencies with high-rise housing, which came to be seen as a breeding ground for crime and social alienation. Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1963), a corrosive novel of teenage crime and violence in urban apartment towers, highlighted and probably contributed to this public disaffection, as did Stanley Kubrik’s 1971 movie based on the novel (Figs. 66, 67). There soon followed a series of highly-publicized demolitions of housing towers in both Britain and the United States; the best-known of these was the demolition of Pruitt-Igoe housing (1955) in St Louis in 1972 (Figs. 68, 69). Yet social welfare specialist James S. Fuerst, writing in 1985, found widespread satisfaction among high-rise apartment dwellers in New York public housing, and sociologist David Popenoe, studying the Swedish new town of Vällingby, where tiny apartments were constructed in both high-rise and low-rise versions (Figs. 70, 71), observed extremely positive reactions, together with a comfortable sense of being “at home”, among all the residents there.
