Architektúra & Urbanizmus – JOURNAL
The journal publishes research results in the fields of architecture and urban planning.
The present text is a continual reaction to the increasingly free understanding of the idea of “design” and its justification. Design and its reflections are faced with a wide range of methodological problems, ensuing from the essential character of the subject of discussion, which is not helped in the least by linguistic codification. The English […]
In 1707, the year in which the Act of Union between the Scottish and English crowns formally constituted the kingdom of Great Britain, the population of Scotland stood at around one million, a sixth of the whole. By then, driven initially by the post-Reformation Calvinist church, Scotland’s renowned education system was already established. Allied to […]
Bratislava, like other regional centres of the former Hungarian Kingdom, experienced extensive construction development at the end of the 19th century. As a result of its historical traditions, the town had a special status within the country. While the question remains open for future cultural and historical research as to whether efforts to build the […]
In March of 2012, after two years of restoration, the renowned Villa Tugendhat was opened once again to visitors. After over eight decades, it is now possible to see the house in the condition that it enjoyed shortly after its construction in 1930. Thanks to recent research findings regarding the wider context of its urban […]
Modern Tradition and Liturgy The Ways of Modernism in Hungarian Church Architecture in 20th Century Hungarian church architecture of the 20th century accurately reflects the European historical and artistic development processes of the given period. Though this century was typified by its enriching of the region by presenting the values of individuality, at several points […]
Henrieta Moravčíková, Mária Topolčanská, Peter Szalay, Matúš Dulla, Soňa Ščepánová, Slávka Toscherová, Katarína HaberlandováBratislava, atlas sídlisk. Bratislava, Atlas of Mass HousingBratislava, Slovart 2011, 344 p.ISBN 978-80-556-0478-7
Art Looks at Mass-housing Mass-housing has become an oft-employed motif in the art of the last decades: photographs, videos, installations, movies, and literature have all made a significant place for the urbanity represented by large prefabricated housing blocks. Revealed or transfigured through the artistic gaze, mass-housing conveys a series of questions about politics, society and, […]
A common lament about the legacy of communism in Europe is the damage that it did to the built environment. Particular ire is directed at the concrete prefabricated housing blocks, known in Czech and Slovak as paneláks (structural panel buildings), groups of which were arranged in housing estates (sídliště in Czech and sídlisko in Slovak) […]
Cumbernauld New Town, widely regarded as the most ambitious of the second generation of planned New Towns in the UK, was designated in 1955 with an initial target population of 50,000, was begun in 1957, and was largely built during the 1960s and ‘70s. Yet despite being internationally acclaimed – receiving the prestigious American Institute […]
In 1990 a newsreel which documented the emergence of new types of services arising after the fall of socialism in Poland showed a private company working on a security scheme for the Przyczółek Grochowski Housing Estate in Warsaw. Bending over the plan of meandering buildings, the guards tried to establish effective procedures for protecting the […]
The article presents, documents, and analyzes the housing mega-blocks in the centre of New Belgrade (Serbia). Constructed in the socialist period, the blocks form the core of the new modern city and provide housing for some 50,000 inhabitants. In the six decades since its inception, this complex of modernist mass housing constructed on the marshy […]
Living and construction, a historical background for large-scale housing in Denmark Between the wars, Copenhagen was strongly affected by the urbanisation that had begun with the industrialisation of the city in the middle of the 18th century. The city consisted of overcrowded areas with a mixture of buildings for accommodation and for businesses, both in […]
Mass housing and the Alternatives in the Soviet Period in Tallinn The story of Soviet mass housing is generally well known – including Khrushchev’s enthusiasm for the establishment of industrial building practices in the second half of the 1950s, the striking contrast between the prefabricated housing developments and earlier academic Stalinist buildings, and the uniformity […]
A special area of post-1945 mass housing was the type-planning of homes, especially in socialist countries where the compulsory use of standardized projects was implemented to simplify the production of new housing within the centrally planned economy. The changes in the floor plans of Hungarian standardized housing closely reflect the alterations of the domestic political […]
The mass housing project of the Cité de la Muette in Drancy, near Paris This article deals with the pre-war Cité de la Muette at Drancy, in the suburbs of Paris, as one of the key harbingers leading to the international post-war phenomenon of mass social housing. It constitutes a reflection on the clash between […]
The present study analyses the circumstances of the construction, and the urban, architectural and structural qualities of the Bratislava residential colonies of Unitas and N ová doba, two of the most important works of ‘left-wing architectural Functionalism’ in Slovakia. In addition, it aims to present the social situation in the era along with the professional […]