Professional Documents
Culture Documents
O-0385
1 Full Professor, Tcnico - University of Lisbon, Portugal; Chair, Docomomo International, Portugal
2 PhD student, Tcnico - University of Lisbon, Portugal; Secretary General, Docomomo International, Portugal
Abstract
Post-war housing estates remains one of the most significant products of modernity representing efforts to
develop architecture as a vehicle for a better society.
In Europe, more than 41 million people still live in these sites. Currently endangered by its social, functional
and technical obsolescence, many of these housing estates remain the main focus of problematic urban
areas, housing low-income households, unemployed people and those from ethnic minorities,
infrastructurally and socially disconnected from the city. At a time when the socio-cultural reconstruction of
Europe is on the agenda, and when l'habitat pour le plus grand nombre seems to be in danger (due to issues
such as the refugee question), looking back to the housing estates built during the post-war reconstruction,
within the framework of the welfare state, is a fundamental step for an integrated discussion on the
sustainable development of European cities of the 21st century.
This paper present successful preservation strategies undertaken in three European post-war case studies.
The aim is to demonstrate how the rehabilitation of these structures, while addressing the demands of the
contemporary needs, can represent a tremendous potential achievement, in an overall context of economic,
social and environmental sustainability.
In 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights stated that everyone has the right to a standard of
living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing
and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment,
sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control. The
idea of a house for all, underlined in the Engels Housing Question (1872) and recalled in the context of
Europes post-war reconstruction within the welfare state, l'habitat pour le plus grand nombre seems to be
more and more in danger: in the overall context of neo-liberal policies, economic (private and individual)
*
Contact Author: Zara Ferreira, PhD student and Secretary
After the WWII, governments across Europe established ambitious social welfare programs in order to
improve the citizens living conditions and health standards. Envisaged as holistic creations, these post-war
housing estates were organised in such a way as to provide all the necessary facilities, ensuring that
residents had access to housing, education, health, work and recreation. Many of these programs involved a
new approach to architectural design, through adventurous experiments in the use of new materials and
techniques, space creation and social transformation. More than five decades after, these sites are facing a
dangerous state of social, functional and technical obsolescence, having become the main focus of problems
existing in urban areas, housing large numbers of low-income households, the unemployed and people from
ethnic minorities, being disconnected from the city in both infrastructural and social terms. On the other side,
they stand as symbols of architectural, technological and social aspirations, where 41 million people still live
in Europe.
Whether discussing demolition, or the growing phenomenon of heritagization, the debate has been mainly
centred on the question of how to keep these structures alive, while meeting contemporary standards of
comfort. Even if it is hard to find examples of rehabilitation works carried out that has globally addressed the
referred three main levels of obsolescence, we are now beginning to find very relevant efforts in addressing
some of them. This is the case of the work undertaken at the Deflat Kleiburg, in the Netherlands, trying to
promote social inclusion, the works by Druot, Lacaton & Vassal in France, addressing functional update, and
the building envelope renovation at the Cit du Lignon, assuring technic update in what concerns energy
performance.
Fig 1. DeFlat Kleiburg. Marcel van der Brug. Fig 2. DeFlat Kleiburg. NL architects and XVW architectuur.
Regarding functional updating, the rehabilitation strategy conducted by Frdric Druot, Anne
Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal, for the post-war housing schemes built in France, in response to
demolition policies, is already a worldwide reference. This strategy was first laid out in 2004, within the
publication PLUS - Les Grands Ensembles de logements. Territoires d'exception. Addition, Extension,
Transformation, a study-cum-manifesto challenging the initiatives led by the French government to turn down
a significant part of the post-war social housing stock and replace it by new, smaller and more expensive
dwellings. Through seven projects presented, PLUS reveals how such housing schemes can be adapted to
the current lifestyles, based on the principle never demolishing, subtracting or replacing things, but always
adding, transforming and utilising them. Starting with Tour Bois le Prtre, Druot, Lacaton, and Vassal have
been having the chance to test their conjectures in reality over the past years, transforming several post-war
Concerning technic upgrading, the applied research conducted at the Techniques et Sauvegarde de
L'architecture Moderne Laboratory (TSAM), at cole Polytechnique Fdrale de Lausanne (EPFL), stands
out for the exceptional rehabilitation plan developed for the Cit du Lignon, in Genve, Switzerland, between
2008 and 2011, contributing for its rehabilitation. The Cit du Lignon was a satellite city, commissioned to
the Georges Addor office, built between 1963 and 1971, to host 10.000 people, as a response to the
1960s-population boom. As one of the largest apartments complexes in the world, it is composed by 2700
apartments within an area of 28ha, distributed among a jagged 1km-long block from 11 to 15 storeys, two
towers of 26 and 30 storeys and community facilities: a school, two churches, a shopping centre offering a
wide range of services to the residents, a medical centre, a sports centre and a youth centre. Besides
working as a well socially-sustainable neighbourhood, the project presents remarkable technical and
constructive features, in line with the principles of industrial and rationalized structural systems, from the
reinforced concrete structure to the 125,000m2 of prefabricated curtain wall, composed by large panels (2.80
Fig 5. Cit du Lignon. Zara Ferreira Fig 6. Cit du Lignon. Zara Ferreira
This paper was developed in the framework of the research project Reuse of Modernist Buildings
Design Tools for Sustainable Transformations, funded by the European Commission within the
ERASMUS+ Programme 2016. Conducted by Docomomo International, HS OWL (Detmold, Germany), ITU
(Istanbul, Turkey), Tcnico-ULisboa (Portugal), University of Coimbra (Portugal) and University of Antwerp
(Belgium). Furthermore, it is part of the PhD research of Zara Ferreira, supervised by Professors Ana
Tostes and Franz Graf, with the aim of proposing a lexicon of architectural intervention for the housing
estates built in Europe after WWII within the framework of the welfare state. One of the goals of both
research projects is to demonstrate how rehabilitation can be used as a vehicle for the sustainable
development of 21st century sites, informing future projects and effective policymaking. To achieve that goal,
further actions are under development, according to the following steps: (1) to identify general and specific
factors that influenced the patterns of decline and resilience in European post-war mass housing estates; (2)
to create a checklist of items that have proven to be priorities for intervention within decisions taken in the
transformation of European post-war housing estates; (3) to produce a wide-ranging collection of successful
and unsuccessful interventions in European post-war housing estates over time; (4) to contribute for the
creation of a database containing details of successful methodologies undertaken in European post-war
mass housing estates, on three main dimensions: urban integration, social and functional use, and building
technology, properly characterized with their relevant parameters. This database will permit to find out which
measures have been taken in what context, and which can be expected to be successful. The ultimate goal
is to produce recommendations for improving the post-war housing estates in Europe and the well-being of
their users, through a comprehensive set of theoretically supported design solutions that can be used by
practitioners, researchers and policy makers.
References
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