Transforming of Communist-era apartment blocks that dominate Eastern Europe
bbc.com
bbc.com
Most likely the grandmas living around you had their radiators at maximum.
I have a relative who also doesn't turn on their radiator because otherwise it would be simply suffocating in there.
They've proven particularly useful when due to a mistake in reading the apartment plan the workers installed the radiator meant for the living room in my room.
The further western you go from the epicenter of this shitshow, the more amenities those things get
I don't know if the dials were there during communism as well, but I remember noticing that the radiator in my school did not have one (save for a hex key valve) and thinking it was unusual, so they were already common in the mid 90s.
In which country.
Form gets so much attention because the public conversation around housing is dominated by older and more wealthy NIMBYs who don't have to live in apartments, so their only consideration is how they look as they drive past them on their way to work.
It's Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
Beauty as an ideal should only be aspired to once the basics have been solved, which is adequate and liveable housing provision.
I view anyone who inverts this order with deep suspicion, and even cynicism. The needs they're catering to certainly aren't those of the people that have to live in these places. Especially in a modern context where an appeal to form is often weaponized by anti-housing activists, and where form is typically more than adequate but function and availability is not.
This is such a strange mode of thinking, one I don't subscribe to (I'm usually quite painfully utilitarian) that I struggle to understand it. But I suspect that just tells me I'm not quite "grokking it", and it's not that their values are just decadent and bourgeois. Though I will admit, this tendency does seem to show up strongest among the decadent bourgeois.
Aesthetics over matter, form over function is one of a well-know defining trait of fascism. Not the only one, but one of the main one. It create a hierarchical order, a new one, amongst structure, amongst objects, to enhance the society hierarchical order. Somehow, Fascism, despite sometime using "egalitarian" politics at first (i will note that those policies aren't really egalitarian, but meritocratic at first, even if in most historical cases this meant the same), manage to create the ultimate hierarchical society.
"Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life". ("Work of Art", W. Benjamin).
It's why Fascism is called "far-right". And it's why, dear friends from AF and other royalists, fascists _are_ more far-right than you, ultimately (sorry).
(i'm taking the standard definition of left and right here: left is a push toward egalitarianism, right is a push towards hierarchical society, whether it is economic, politic or other reasons that makes that hierarchy. Nothing to do with conservatism or liberalism or any -ism, so USians and the rest of the world can agree).
It's not the form that sucks (they don't have any), it's the build quality, the amount of indoor space -- everything is min-maxed to the limit and then still underdelivered even against soviet-grade cheapness (two bedroom, 55 sqm for a family with five kids on a peak of soviet glory).
And they also look bad on photos and in winter, when the greenery is gone and all you see is gray aged concrete, but hej, everything there looks depressing in winter to me.
Do skyscrapers dominate American cities? Well, yes, regardless of whether you like them or no.
Isn't it ironic when you move to a country that's 10x richer, but the real estate is somehow worse lol?
Moreover, the project isn't as "innovative" as it seems to be portrayed in the article. The quality of these buildings today depends on a variety of factors, such as the precise time they were built (during periods of a strong vs. weak socialist economy), the location (growing worker cities vs. peripheral cities), and their maintenance over the years. During socialist times and even up to today, these buildings were largely maintained by legal "cooperatives." The quality of management within these cooperatives can vary significantly. And management of those basically never changes through the decades.
There is also a notable difference in the quality of an average "block" among different Central and Eastern European countries. Having traveled through most of this part of the continent and living in Poland, I've observed that many Balkan Soviet blocks were of significantly lower quality, likely due to smaller economies and greater scarcity of materials at the time, which affected their ability to meet building standards (all these blocks were state-built).
For anyone interested in how these were made en masse in months, here's a link to an old Polish movie archive from 1976, which was pretty much the peak of building these in Poland, following a substantial loans from the western world. The video lacks subtitles, but you can still observe the manufacturing, quality control, delivery, and on-site assembly process.
Gas leaks - check, Fire hazard in the basement - check, Fire hazard through faulty (aluminum) electrical installation - check, Elevator out of order or just simply being scary - check, Often plumbing problems (no hot water for a month? check!)
and the list could go on and on. The last straw for me was when I installed a water filtration and filters basically turned black in a week and clogged. I just moved.
One of the big advantages of those buildings is often the location. Beats living with no public space (parks, playgrounds, walking space etc) and public utilities (like schools, commies, built those with every new district erected) and on the outskirts of the city
Mentioned above "district cooperative" flatly refused to remove an old asbestos roof from over the balcony and professional removals don't deal with 1x1m asbestos roofing. I removed it myself, standing on a chair on 10th floor balcony with an old grinder as it was permanently attached to the building through the metal frame, because of course it was.
I pushed it into the same basement as no one was interested in picking it up, no matter petitions, asking nicely, asking not so nicely, making threats or wanting to pay.
Oh, the times in the commie blocks :)
I mean, plain boiling water with Oats is a meal I eat a lot, but just because it's pretty tasteless, doesn't mean it's not an effective solution to hunger.
Worse circumstances were -- living in villages in their own houses, but that was against communist things. People had to live in public housing in a city and work in a factory, be mobile and be shuffled around whatever number of timezones and thousands of kilometers -- that was the whole point of ideology and was needed for industrialization too.
Life in a village sucked by design too.
Many cities were completely reduced to rubble, as were any villages that got in their way. Amsterdam still has their pretty Dutch Golden Age buildings because the war played out very differently there.
Soviets squeezed people into the cities and then gave them bare minimum housing there, yet people seem to prize them for it, while diverting all the resources from villages.
Huh? Once you fit in new windows and insulation in the form of a thick layer of styrofoam, commie blocks are already very efficient.
I grew up in one and we would maintain 22-24°C during the winter because the combination of insulation and district heating allowed for that at a low price.
Classic commie-block walls are 30-40 cm of bare (reinforced) concrete. The windows as they were put there are double glass in a wooden frame, which you have to glue over with a paper in winter. Sure, replacing windows and slappign styrofoam on a facade helps, but beating that doesn't seem to be hard when building now.