The ‘New Socialist Way of Life’

The doctoral thesis “Architectural Types for the New Socialist Way of Life” analyzes the evolution of the architectural type “working-class housing with collective spaces” through 44 study cases located either in East and West part of the Iron Curtain.

The research, which has covered the number of 76 cities in 32 countries (only in Europe), has involved the “in situ” visit of study cases in a field investigation of more than 6 months and a total of 165,000 km. Thanks to this work, original plans of unpublished buildings have been found, the 44 buildings studied have been measured and redrawed at various scales, and a photographic collection of more than 14,000 original images has been created.

Information and documentation obtained firsthand on these trips or through personal contacts that have been established, is another of the great contributions of this research: graphic documentation (original plans of visited buildings, some of them never before published), photographic documentation (original pictures taken during trips “in situ” visits), and interviews with architects, managers from documentation agencies, teachers from European universities, tenants of the analyzed buildings.

Some of the investigated buildings have recently been demolished (or bombed in Ukraine), so the original information collected and the redrawing of their plans offer a posthumous testimony for posterity.

Author: César Daniel Sirvent Pérez