Mark Swenarton

Tom Avermaete

Eve Blau

Dirk van den Heuvel

Architecture and the Welfare State

In the decades following World War Two, and in part in response to the Cold War, governments across Western Europe set out ambitious programmes for social welfare and the redistribution of wealth that aimed to improve the everyday lives of their citizens. Many of these welfare state programmes - housing, schools, new towns, cultural and leisure centres – involved not just construction but a new approach to architectural design, in which the welfare objectives of these state-funded programmes were delineated and debated. The impact on architects and architectural design was profound and far-reaching, with welfare state projects moving centre-stage in architectural discourse not just in Europe but worldwide. This is the first book to explore the architecture of the welfare state in Western Europe from an international perspective. With chapters covering Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Sweden and the UK, the book explores the complex role played by architecture in the formation and development of the welfare state in both theory and practice. Themes include: the role of the built environment in the welfare state as a political project the colonial dimension of European welfare state architecture and its ‘export’ to Africa and Asia the role of welfare state projects in promoting consumer culture and economic growth the picture of the collective produced by welfare state architecture the role of architectural innovation in the welfare state the role of the architect, as opposed to construction companies and others, in determining what was built the relationship between architectural and social theory the role of internal institutional critique and the counterculture. Contributors include: Tom Avermaete, Eve Blau, Nicholas Bullock, Miles Glendinning, Janina Gosseye, Hilde Heynen, Caroline Maniaque-Benton, Helena Mattsson, Luca Molinari, Simon Pepper, Michelle Provoost, Lukasz Stanek, Mark Swenarton, Florian Urban and Dirk van den Heuvel.

Maarten Mesman

Addresses the tensions between change and continuity from a historical-theoretical perspective. This book focuses on the larger scale of city and landscape. It draws attention to the scale of the building or building complex, and questions limits of re-use and flexibility.

Dealing with the Legacy of the Modern Movement

The Challenge of Change

Janno Martens

Víctor Muñoz Sanz

Habitat became a hotly debated topic in architecture in the 1950s, when this ecological term was introduced in the avant-garde circles of CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne) and Team 10. Next to rethinking the housing question the notion of habitat brought a profoundly new way to conceive architecture and urban planning. No longer could one consider cities and buildings as discrete, isolate objects but instead they were to be understood as part of a larger whole, an environment or habitat. In light of contemporary environmental awareness Habitat: Ecology Thinking in Architecture offers a transhistorical perspective to reflect on design principles from the recent past, reinvigorate current debates while offering suggestions for future architectural research. The publication contains contributions by Frits Palmboom, Erik Rietveld, Hadas Steiner, Georg Vrachliotis, and Leonardo Zuccaro Marchi, combined with generous visual documentations of the work of renowned architects Aldo van Eyck, Alison and Peter Smithson, Van den Broek & Bakema, and many more.

Ecology Thinking in Architecture

Habitat

Dirk van den Heuvel

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