ABSTRACT
This chapter narrows its scale of focus from the microdistrict to the home and explores the prescriptions forwarded by experts for the individual apartment unit. What social role was the apartment intended to serve, and what was the prescribed normative relationship between the resident and the living cell? Many writings from the mid-1960s onward emphasised the need to adapt to the rapid social and technological change of the Scientific-Technological Revolution (NTR). Against this backdrop, it was argued that the apartment provided respite from the informational and social overload of the urban milieu while simultaneously facilitating the socialisation of residents into the broader collective. This chapter discusses how the conceptual interpretation of the domestic space shifted away from the functionalist ‘process’ model, which conceived of the dwelling primarily as the site of functional processes, towards a ‘way of life’ model, which encapsulated notions of agency, choice and individuality. In the new understanding of dwelling, residents were to exert control over their domestic environment. This inverted the classic modernist formulation that had inscribed in material form the capacity for social transformation and had thus implied a certain dominance of the material environment over the people who inhabited it.
