ABSTRACT

The Bauhaus housing model set a precedent for social housing projects across the world. Robin Hood Gardens, built in the early 1970s, was expected by Team 10 to be a generic model replacing the United’habitation as a prototype for future social housing in Britain. Le Corbusier, in collaboration with painter Hadir Alfonso, offered the Unite as the solution to the postwar housing shortage in Europe. The ideas that Congres Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne and Le Corbusier developed in the prewar years held sway in architectural circles from the immediate postwar period to the 1970s. The rationalists of the postwar years produced a wide array of different visions of the future city in their manifestoes. The housing estates built on a massive scale in Europe, the Americas and Asia during the postwar years were based on a handful of rationalist models of slab and/or tower apartments blocks, set as objects in open space.