Architecture essays

Collective Housing: Crossovers from Now and Then

Principal author

Paul Vladimir Văleanu

Profession

arhitect

Project description

This text presents different aspects of the Romanian collective housing from the communist era, emphasizing changes that happened in the post communist period. The subject is tackled from two angles: the one of my memories from my childhood and through a team faculty study. The two complementary topics, used as guidelines for the text, are: the in between the blocks space and the blocks themselves, comparing them with the classic modernist examples as Le Corbusier's Unite d'Habitation or the Neue Sachlichkeit ones. In the end of the text I have analyzed the term “collective housing” and compared it with both “social housing” and “collective living” ones, this time referring to the possible contradiction between the two terms of the first expression and to today's marketing driven architectural tendencies.

Text description of the author

I am an architect interested in both the theoretical and practical sides of the profession, working for the most of the time for museum programs or studies, preferring any architecture work that needs patience and comitment. Currently I am starting a bachelor in philosophy at the Bucharest University. I consider myself an autodidact, looking forward to make synthesis and to combine at some point these professions. For now, I want to develop and exercise writing, and maybe publish some of my already written various fields texts.

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