Tower block

A tower block, block of flats, or apartment block, is a multi-unit high-rise apartment building.

Because apartment blocks have important technical and economic advantages, they become a distinguished form of housing accomodation in virtually all densely populated urban areas around the world. In contrast with low-rise and single-family houses, apartment blocks accomodate more inhabitants per unit of area of land they occupy and also decrease the cost of municipal infrastructure.

Apartment blocks around the world

United Kingdom

A tower block in Cwmbrân, South Wales

Tower blocks were first built in the UK after the Second World War, in many cases as a "quick-fix" to cure problems caused by crumbling and insanitary 19th Century dwellings or to replace buildings destroyed by aerial bombing. Initially, they were welcomed, and their excellent views made them popular living places. Later, as the buildings themselves deteriorated, they grew a reputation for being undesirable low cost housing, and many tower blocks saw rising crime levels, increasing their unpopularity. One response to this was the great increase in the number of housing estates built, which in turn brings its own problems. In the UK, tower blocks particularly lost popularity after the partial collapse of Ronan Point in 1968. The city of Glasgow in Scotland contains the highest concentration of tower blocks in the UK, and also some of the most notorious of such developments - examples include the derided Hutchensontown C blocks in the Gorbals, and the tallest tower blocks in Europe - the 31-storey Red Road flats in the city's north east, which have recently been earmarked for demolition.

In recent years, some council or ex-council high-rises in the United Kingdom, including Trellick Tower, Keeling House and The Barbican Estate, have become popular with young professionals due to their excellent views, desirable locations and architectural pedigrees, and now command high prices. After a gap of around 30 years, new high-rise flats are once again being built in Glasgow, London, Leeds, Manchester and Liverpool, this time for wealthy professionals. Their developers market these properties by using the American term 'apartment buildings', perhaps in an effort to distance these newer buildings from the older tower blocks from the 1950s and '60s.

Asia

The unpopularity of tower blocks in the UK is in marked contrast to many Asian countries. In Singapore and urban Hong Kong, for example, land prices are so high that almost the entire population lives in high rise apartments.

United States

In the United States tower blocks are commonly referred to as midrise or highrise apartment buildings, depending on their height. While buildings that house fewer flats (apartments), or are not as tall as the tower blocks, are called lowrise apartment buildings.

John Hancock Center, a 100-story mixed office/apartment complex, Chicago, USA.

The government's experiments in the 1960s and 70s to use high-rise apartments as a means of providing the housing solution for the poor resulted in a spectacular failure. All but a few high-rise housing projects in the nation's largest cities, such as Cabrini-Green and Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago, Penn South in New York and the Desire projects in New Orleans, fell victims of the "ghettofication" and are now being torn down, renovated or replaced.

In contrast to their public housing cousings, commercially developed high-rise apartment buildings continue to flourish in cities around the country largely due to high land prices and the housing boom of the 2000s. The Upper East Side in New York City and Chicago's Gold Coast, both featuring hi-rise apartments, are the wealthiest urban neighborhoods in the United States.

Former communist countries

Tower blocks were utilised by socialist governments to provide affordable housing for its citizens. Most of them are in countries like Russia, China and North Korea, and provide the bulk of public housing. Modern, well maintained tower blocks are very clean, comfortable and prove to be excellent housing type with many advantages over urban sprawl.

Such housing plans become popular during the presidency of Nikita Khrushchev in USSR. Here is the popular quote of Khrushchev on this matter:

We must select a smaller number of standard designs .. and conduct our mass building programs using only these designs over the course of, say, five years .. and if no better designs turn up, then continue in the same way for the next five years.

What's wrong with this approach, comrades?

File:Moscow strogino.jpg

Tower blocks in Moscow, Russia.

File:Mamut 1.jpg

Mamut in Zagreb, Croatia. One of the largest commieblocks in the world.

The suburb Tensta north of Stockholm, Sweden.

Ideal socialist cities were built around Central and Eastern Europe, like Dunaújváros in Hungary and Ostrava in former Czechoslovakia. These cities show that one can find national influences in them as well, as in Nowa Huta, Poland. Czech renaissance sculpture and imagery exists in Ostrava in what could be called, "Soviet imperialist grandeur with local additives." [8] The streets were made just a little too wide in Dunaújváros, highlighting the reality of "things are beyond your control… keep that in mind." Hungarian incorporation of the Danube and decent central planning in Dunaújváros (meaning ‘'New Danube Town’' make this city one of the success stories of socialist planning, though gives the impression that one is living in a large kingdom, ruled by the Soviets.[9] A Soviet ‘pure socialist’ city called Magnitogorsk was brought to life in Stalin’s first 5 Year Plan, and was built on a ‘linear model’ for short commutes from flat to work and back, with varying success. Here the cold of winter made a linear pattern ridiculous, turning nature "into just another source of hostility." [10]

If for no other reason, and there are plenty, East European blocks of flats are considered uniquely abhorrent because of the sheer volume of their presence upon the modern urban landscape, always appearing as they do in some sharp geometric forms somewhere between a solid cube and a three dimensional rectangle, be it vertically or horizontally oriented. The Berlin based European Academy of the Urban Environment estimates that,

Large estates with prefabricated apartment blocks are the outstanding characteristic of the cities of the former communist countries. In total it is estimated that some 170 million people live in more than 70 million flats, usually in large housing complexes on the outskirts of cities.[11]

Thus, from Szczecin on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic, and from Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin to Vladivostok on the Pacific coast, 170 million people wake up looking at what are essentially Le Corbusier’s "machines for living in".[12]

Other names

The name commieblock (Communal Blockhouse) has recently come into use to refer to a standardised tower block with serial design, often highrise apartment used for public housing.

See also

• Brutalist architecture - an architectural style that spawned from the modernist architectural movement and which flourished from the 1950s to the 1970s.
• Gemeindebau - large scale public housing in Austria
• Prefabrication
• Panelák - the equivalent in Czechoslovakia
• Plattenbau - the equivalent in East Germany
• Cutie de chibrituri - meaning Matchboxes in Romanian is the equivalent in Romania

External links

• Sustaining Tower Blocks
• World's tallest residential towers
• East European blocks of flats today