Experimenting With War

 

Experimenting With War

 

“European mass housing schemes as built before and after the Second World War were also considered experiments in a new architecture and urbanism. Still today, many millions of people live in the relentlessly uniform apartment buildings that came to cover urban fields from the Atlantic all the way to the far plains of Russia.”

 

While reading the article “Questions That Will Not Go Away” by Habraken I really thought about how buildings interact with time. It seams as though buildings are either designed to last or they are not. I feel like there are good arguments for both, personally I like the idea of buildings that have been built in a way that they can be manipulated and still be relevant to the changing times. I feel that designing this way is better from a value standpoint as well as has the ability to be rich with history. When you look at the ruins left after World War II, its clear that a lot of European history was erased. Then introduced are new styles of dense housing that is completely different from what had been there before yet was crucial to the success of the rebuilding of the continent.