Mass Housing: Modern Architecture and State Power - a Global History

Description

Shortlisted for the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion 2021 (The Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain) "It will become the standard work on the subject." Literary Review This major work provides the first comprehensive history of one of modernism's most defining and controversial architectural legacies: the 20th-century drive to provide 'homes for the people'. Vast programmes of mass housing - high-rise, low-rise, state-funded, and built in the modernist style - became a truly global phenomenon, leaving a legacy which has suffered waves of disillusionment in the West but which is now seeing a dramatic, 21st-century renaissance in the booming, crowded cities of East Asia. Providing a global approach to the history of Modernist mass-housing production, this authoritative study combines architectural history with the broader social, political, cultural aspects of mass housing - particularly the 'mass' politics of power and state-building throughout the 20th century. Exploring the relationship between built form, ideology, and political intervention, it shows how mass housing not only reflected the transnational ideals of the Modernist project, but also became a central legitimizing pillar of nation-states worldwide. In a compelling narrative which likens the spread of mass housing to a 'Hundred Years War' of successive campaigns and retreats, it traces the history around the globe from Europe via the USA, Soviet Union and a network of international outposts, to its ultimate, optimistic resurgence in China and the East - where it asks: Are we facing a new dawn for mass housing, or another 'great housing failure' in the making?

Miles Glendinning is Professor of Architectural Conservation at the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, University of Edinburgh, UK.

It is the great achievement of this project that it takes a truly global perspective while also stressing the distinctive differences that separate one nation from another... No serious student of modern architecture can afford to be without Glendinning's Mass Housing. It will become the standard work on the subject. * Literary Review * This book should find a place on the shelves of many; politicians, policy advisers, civil servants and, as an invaluable textbook for advanced students in a range of disciplines. It is lavishly illustrated with full-colour photographs and is unlikely to be superseded for many years. * Journal of Contemporary European Studies * Magisterial and illuminating ... Glendinning is a compelling storyteller ... Mass Housing is an extraordinary achievement. * C20 Society Journal * This book will prove invaluable as a new resource for housing historians. In skilfully relating architectural form to the broader social and political contexts, it will also be insightful for academics and students in a range of disciplines and policy makers concerned with housing delivery and heritage conservation. * Journal of Contemporary History * Both sweeping and detailed, Mass Housing is about more than massive housing or even housing for 'the masses'. It is an ambitious and broadly-comparative inquiry into the globally-felt political need to undertake such quests, revealing and illustrating surprisingly diverse architectural expressions. * Lawrence Vale, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA * This book comprehensively dismantles the caricatured view of modernist mass housing as homogenous, repetitive and ill-suited to the diversity of contemporary urban life. In its place, Miles Glendinning offers a fresh perspective on the formal inventiveness, social complexity, global reach and sheer problem-solving spirit that this architecture embodies. * Stephen Cairns, ETH Zurich, Switzerland / Future Cities Lab, Singapore *