Still Standing

Essay, Eytan Levi, High Density, Politics and economics, Technology and fabrication, Urban Paradigms

Accessibility, Architect’s role, Architecture, Architecture’s challenge, Building regulations, Climate change, Collective housing, Collective identity, Community, Concrete, Construction, Domesticity, Essay, Housing, Industrialization, Investigation, Migration, Moscow, Optimized living, Political implications, Population, Prefabrication, Production, Public Catalyst, Public housing, Real Estate, Renovation, Resources, Russia, Sharing economy, Standarization, Technology, Transformation, Urban environment, Urbanism

This piece was originally written in fall 2020 for HIS-4399 Architecture and Construction: From the Vitruvian Tradition to the Digital, a class taught by Professor Antoine Picon at Harvard Graduate School of Design. It subsequently served as one of many ingredients for Still Standing, a graduate thesis about the renovation of Soviet mass housing from the 1960s co-authored by Eytan Levi and Ben Hoyle between the MIT Department of Architecture and the MIT Center for Real Estate. The author would like to thank the people behind the MIT-Russia Program and at APEX Project Bureau for supporting fieldwork in Russia during the summer of 2019.

Of all the construction programs carried out globally during the 20th century, the Soviet drive to address its domestic housing shortage through prefabricated construction and separate dwelling units is by far the most ambitious in terms of output: between 1960 and 1975, 1.55 billion square meters of new housing were erected, and two out of every three inhabitants in the USSR were rehoused. Despite its scope, the buildings were often low quality, and the program did not manage to rehouse the entire population. In the time since the dissolution of the USSR, the Soviet approach to mass housing construction has been perpetuated and adapted. To this day, mass housing is still troubled by issues of material decay, financing, and governance. New civic initiatives are required to improve the lives of the countless post-Soviet citizens who live in these structures.