Mass Support: Dutch architect saw the potential of industrialized building

placesjournal.org

47 points·prismatic··8 comments

Interesting how post war housing blocks in Amsterdam are similar to housing blocks in former communist east europe.

The soviet mass-building style (Plattenbauten) is actually directly inspired by the Amsterdam neighborhood Betondorp. Translated: 'concrete village'

Betondorp is all low-rise buildings, while soviet style is all high-rise. I don't see many similarities.

The similarity is in construction technique, not architecture. Betondorp was one of the first large-scale prefab neighborhoods in the world.

Postwar NL needed houses, and quick because there was a population boom and the war had destroyed a lot of houses. They made some mistakes and learned hard lessons on what does and what does not constitute a viable way of creating new living areas. Not a lot of the practices of those days remain.

Compared to what I see in the former USSR countries (identical flats in the thousands to the point that there are jokes and movies about how cookie-cutter the results are) there is plenty of variation here and the same goes for the period just after the war. Betondorp may have served as an inspiration but it is only a very small fraction of what was built in those days and much of it still stands and is in fairly good shape.

Soviets built both high- and low-rise buildings, both in great numbers. Not sure where you're getting the high-rise only idea from?

Because it simply is the solution that makes the most sense when the problem is "build lots of housing quickly".

The development of techniques for re-enforced concrete masonry is what drove this style. very efficient building for mass housing.

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