Editing the Socialist Dwelling: Catalogues of Housing Type Projects in the 1960s and 1970s Romania

Dana VAIS
Editing the Socialist Dwelling: Catalogues of Housing Type Projects in the 1960s and 1970s Romania
Abstract: 

Catalogues of type projects have been essential to mass housing production in communist Romania. The paper investigates how they evolved during the 1960s and the 1970s, the centralized system of institutions that designed, disseminated and applied them, the research activity that was invested in them, their problematic relationship with prefabrication, the international context that influenced them, and their hierarchizing effect on places and on architects. Researching these catalogues can provide a better understanding of the large housing estates that have shaped Romanian cities since the early 1960s and which define them even today.

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