USSR-CCCP 1930 Starting with the year 1932, all residential complexes with more than 20 apartments will be required to include collective social and cultural facilities, such as communal dining rooms, laundries, children’s crèches, baths, and eventually clubs. The most common housing type in large Soviet cities is the fivestory-high apartment house. Site planning favors the open-block solutionand—more recently—row housing designed as fully integrated communiyies, districts, and zones.
Socialist housing. Soviet large collective housing block
the practical consequences of his actual work on this statement, and instead is content to take the easy way out and escape into the future through a diplomatic back door. The idea of the collective dwelling, which currently occupies a prominent place in the deliberations of the architectural avant-garde, is actually not new. Embryonic forms of collective houses can be detected already in English boardinghouses, Dutch “flats,” American apartment hotels, student hostels, and transatlantic cruise ships, as well as convalescent homes and sanatoria. Le Corbusier was one of the first architects to grasp the architectural significance of this type, and he has developed it further in his Immeuble-villas. Others to be mentioned in this connection are Hans Scharoun with his Wohnheim in Breslau and Walter Gropius with his boardinghouse project. Of course, the improvement of this specific dwelling type owes much to modern architectural and technical progress and thus is characteristic of the next stage in the rationalization of housing. At that point, technical progress will create the instrumental conditions for the practical implementation of a socialist way of dwelling. However, this does not mean that we will arrive at a socialist type of dwelling by way of technical achievements alone. That assumption would be a big mistake, since the most difficult obstacle to the full exploration of all the new technical possibilities is their current abuse and perversion in the service of the interests of the bourgeois order. In that sense alone, any improvement that is contrary to the interests and the ideology of the bourgeoisie tends to be prevented from being put to use, and any progressive architectural form filled with genuine revolutionary, socialist content will invariably either be rejected or be condemned to remain on paper only. The solution of the collective dwelling as a singular cultural expression of proletarian dwelling will become possible only as a sovereign act of proletarian culture and as a genuine product of the creative forces of a self-assured and organized proletariat: it will represent a new architectural type, responding to a new social and cultural content.
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