Tom Avermaete and Dirk van den Heuvel | ‘Obama, Please Tax Me!’: Architecture and the Politics of Redistribution
Abstract 
Article [free PDF]
This issue of Footprint is based on the conference session ‘The European Welfare State Project – Ideals, Politics, Cities and Buildings’ as organized by the editors at the first EAHN Conference in Guimarães, Portugal in 2010, and as elaborated in the second EAHN Conference in Brussels, Belgium in 2012 (together with Mark Swenarton). These sessions were proposed as part of the research programme ‘Changing Ideals – Shifting Realities’ at the TU Delft, which aims to further disclose, map and question the architectural culture of the second half of the twentieth century. It focuses on how the welfare state in Western Europe represents a unique time frame in which manifold shifts within the modernist discourse in architecture and planning were paired with societal changes that established new assemblages between producers, designers, governments, clients, builders and users. It is part of the editors’ assumption that the current crisis of capitalism puts the politics of redistribution back on the agenda. In re-investigating the vast legacy of the welfare state, it seems only natural to look for new models for collectivity, not to dwell in nostalgia, but indeed to find alternatives to suit the new situation. At the intersections of building practice, architectural viewpoints, national and local cultural contexts, a nuanced image of welfare state architecture emerges.
Lucy Creagh | From acceptera to Vällingby: The Discourse on Individuality and Community in Sweden (1931-54)
Abstract Article [free PDF]
The Swedish suburb of Vällingby, completed in 1954, culminated an investigation into the housing problem which can be traced back to the functionalist manifesto acceptera of 1931, where the issue of finding a ‘Middle Way’ between the individual and the mass, the personal and the universal was presented as being as central to the project of modern architecture as it was to Social Democracy as a whole. The ebb and flow of discourse on housing and policy during the 30s and early 40s engaged directly with the binary of private individualism/public collectivism, drawing on the thinking of figures such as Ellen Key, Torgny T. Segerstedt and Lewis Mumford to arrive at neighbourhood planning as a suitable foil to both the laissez-faire of the capitalist system and the monotonous and alienating results of early attempts at mass social housing. While Vällingby provided improved dwellings and amenity, setting new standards in terms of efficiency, economy and convenience, these very qualities, it is suggested in conclusion, also mask the ‘unfreedoms’ of the modern welfare state, which in the case of Vällingby might be seen as the Social Democratic bias towards a ‘group society’ at the expense of true self-determination.
Sven Sterken | Architecture and the Ideology of Productivity: Four Public Housing Projects by Groupe Structures in Brussels (1950-65)
Abstract Article [free PDF]
The field of public housing in Belgium formed the backdrop for two crucial phenomena in the shaping of the welfare state: first, the general compartmentalization along ideological lines of all aspects of society, including housing policy and town planning; second, the adaptation of the nation’s industry, and the building trade in particular, to postwar economic conditions. In the study of welfare state housing policies in Belgium, the latter aspect has so far been overlooked. This paper therefore proposes to look into a couple of public housing projects by Groupe Structures, the largest architectural firm in the country in the postwar period. As it will be argued, the stylistic and typological evolution of these schemes reveals the growing impact of a ‘productivist ideology’ on public housing in the 1950s. Paralyzed by the steeply rising building costs, the central buzzwords became standardization, industrialization and prefabrication. However, as the paper argues, the productivity doctrine failed to live up to its expectations as the sector’s turnover remained too marginal to put sufficient pressure on the construction industry.
Mark Swenarton | Reforming the Welfare State: Camden 1965-73
Abstract Article [free PDF]
The housing projects built by the London Borough of Camden in the years 1965-73 belong arguably to the most substantial investigations into the architecture of social housing undertaken in the past half-century. Under borough architect Sydney Cook, Camden aimed to establish a new kind of housing architecture based, not on the Corbusian tabula rasa, but on a radical reinterpretation of traditional English urbanism. The outcome was a series of projects, including Fleet Road, Alexandra Road, Highgate New Town, Branch Hill and Maiden Lane, designed by members of Cook’s team, including Neave Brown, Peter Tábori and Gordon Benson and Alan Forsyth, as well as projects designed by up-and-coming private architects like Colquhoun & Miller, Edward Cullinan and Farrell Grimshaw. While it began in what Hobsbawm called the ‘golden age’ of postwar capitalism, the Cook years (1965-73) saw the onset of the crisis of the 1970s and with it the rise of the New Right and the Hard Left, both of which viewed the Camden housing projects as a legitimate target for attack. Based on archival research and interviews, the paper explores the ways in which the Cook projects both mediated and articulated the emergence of these fissures within the British welfare state.
Pedro Baía | Appropriating Modernism: From the Reception of Team 10 in Portuguese Architectural Culture to the SAAL Programme (1959-74)
Abstract Article [free PDF]
This paper aims to map the relations between the Portuguese appropriation of Team 10’s architectural ideas and the housing policies launched by the state, especially through the SAAL programme, which stood for Ambulatory Support to Local Residents Programme and ran for a brief period between 1974 and 1976. Through an intellectual speculation based on an analysis of the historical discourse, this paper seeks to demonstrate how the critical and interpretative reception of Team 10’s ideas by the Portuguese architectural culture played an important role in the process leading up to the SAAL programme. The aim of this approach is to open up a hypothesis for reflection on this reception in its various senses, even if it is mixed with other narratives, in an attempt to understand the way in which Team 10 was critically interpreted, disseminated and assimilated. One could say that the relation between the Portuguese context and Team 10 is an oblique one. However, it is possible to identify some resonances that confirm the importance and pertinence of Team 10’s presence.
Pierre Chabard | La Défense / Zone B (1953-91): Light and Shadows of the French Welfare State
Abstract Article [free PDF]
Planned as early as 1958 by the Etablissement Public d’Aménagement de La Défense (EPAD, the first such agency in France), the business district of La Défense is a typical urban result of the French version of the welfare state: centralism, modernism, alliance between public and private elites. But with its vertical skyline, this district – called Zone A – constitutes only a small part of the operational sector of the EPAD; the other part, Zone B, coincides with the northern part of the city of Nanterre. In the shadows of the crystalline skyscrapers of La Défense, Zone B was not only a kind of ‘back-office’ of the business district, but also an urban laboratory for public housing ‘paved with good intentions’. From the slab projects of Le Corbusier and his epigones to the urban compositions of postmodern architects, along the proliferating textures of Jacques Kalisz, or the humanized ‘grands ensembles’ of Emile Aillaud, the many EPAD projects for Zone B, built or not, constitute a complete collection that documents the evolution of the ‘architecture urbaine’ from the mid 1950s to the turn of the 1990s.
Cor Wagenaar | The Odd One Out? Revisiting the Belgian Welfare State
Abstract Article [free PDF]
Michael Ryckewaert publication Building the Economic Backbone of the Belgian Welfare State. Infrastructure, planning and architecture 1945-1973 describes the evolution of the welfare state and Belgium, more specifically its spatial characteristics. This by now historical socio-political model had decidedly collectivist traits, culminating in the provision of social security networks and a vast expansion of the public domain. If collectivism was one of the key elements of the welfare state, the absence of centralized planning appears to make the Belgian variant somewhat problematic. Whereas in countries like the Netherlands, Germany and France, modernism became the house style of the welfare state, thanks to the massive investments in public housing, this did not happen in Belgium. Here, the De Taeye Act of 1948 sponsored the construction of individual, detached houses; not surprisingly, most clients preferred traditional architecture and refrained from modern experiments. Industrial parks, office buildings and shops, on the other hand, developed into the cornerstones of Belgian modern architecture after 1945. Both the low-density sprawl and the industrial parks depend heavily on the use of the car, which was accommodated by the construction of a network of highways.
Janina Gosseye | The Multiple Modernities of Sweden
Abstract Article [free PDF]
This article reviews the book Swedish Modernism. Architecture, Consumption and the Welfare State, edited by Helena Mattsson and Sven-Olov Wallenstein. In this volume, the editors plea for the construction of ‘multiple modernities’, following which a more diversified understanding of the European welfare state can be constructed. Through twelve contributions by a group of international scholars, Mattsson and Wallenstein aspire to initiate the construction of an emblematic Swedish modernism. The book offers an intricate and diversified reading of the history of the Swedish Folkhemmet, including political history, social sciences and media studies. When it comes to the built environment, however, the volume focuses largely on the home, with a few excursions to exhibition spaces and into corporate culture. In this volume, Mattsson and Wallenstein answer many questions, but raise an equal amount of new questions and thus leave the reader wanting more, as any good book should.
Tahl Kaminer | The Ruins of the British Welfare State
Abstract Article [free PDF]
The subjects of Owen Hatherley’s A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain are architecture and urban development. The book addresses also some broader cultural, political and economic references, as well as personal anecdotes and memories. It includes many encounters with the remnants of the British welfare state. As an extension to his blog postings and a sequel of sorts to his previous Militant Modernism, Hatherley’s antagonist here is the semi-official architecture of New Labour, which he terms ‘pseudomodernism’: an unimaginative, inferior, and, in its own specific way, also tacky architecture of white stucco, steel and glass. He attacks the Faustian bargain of Richard Rogers and his allies with neoliberalism, a pact that produces a modernism devoid of social content, reflected by the unimaginative, speculation-driven architectural design. While Hatherley produces the promised indictment of recent British architecture, the book is, at the end of the day, primarily a eulogy to the disappearing postwar architecture he so evidently loves.
