Inhabiting Modernities: Learning from Late Modernist Mass Housing

Abstract

Conservative projections state that while a little over a half of the world’s population currently lives in urban areas, the next thirty years could see that number rise to more than two-thirds. Furthermore, that growth will largely concentrate around lower-income areas, resulting in an unknown number of slums with over 10 million residents. This is not, however, the first time that humanity has faced a housing crisis of this scale. The years immediately following World War I saw decimated cities in need of reconstruction, with as much as 15% of the world’s population living in slums during the 30’s. This thesis seeks solutions to the current crisis by looking back to a prior one, analyzing the design solutions that were born out of the post-war years and the Modernist aesthetic movement. During this period, from 1930 to 1970, the global establishment of government entities funded, designed, constructed, and managed mass housing complexes. The widespread private-public cooperation produced large scale housing developments that promised an equitable future for all, but ultimately fell into disrepair as public opinion and government funding declined. This thesis seeks to critically analyze three late-modernist housing projects - Sarceles- Lochères in Paris, Tlatelolco-Nonoalco in Mexico City, and Co-op City in New York City - with the aim of reevaluating these often maligned and marginalized spaces. Despite historic and ongoing perceptions that these housing projects dehumanize people and incubate crime, their amenity-dense and resilient designs still allow for many of the conditions that can support a vibrant urban community and, more importantly, provide an example of how to build housing at a scale that may soon be necessary world-wide.