Reading Socio-Spatial Interplay - Arkitektur- og designhøgskolen i ...

R E A D I N G S O C I O - S P A T I A L I N T E R P L A Y P A R T 2relation to staircases, corridors and elevators, the private balconies, and therelatively neutral base and the shape of the building volumes, make thebuildings look like slab blocks and point blocks. But the location of the newprojects, within an existing system of urban blocks, and the way the buildingvolumes are spatially organized, distinguish these projects from thearchitectural system of the satellite towns, as well as from, as propagandizedby Le Corbusier, the architectural model of “the city of towers”, with its openlandscape space, sunlight and apartments with a view; the city in nature andnature in the city. There’s an essential difference between most of the morerecent housing projects and for example the urban clearance projects of the1960s (cf. the slab blocks at Enerhaugen) or the abandoned plans for urbanclearance at Grünerløkka (most of them were based on the introduction ofslab blocks).In more or less all the new housing projects there are both relatively largeunderground parking garages and private balconies. This most often includedirect access from underground parking garages to the staircases/elevators ofthe apartment buildings. Such a segregation of the entrance traffic impliesthat the inhabitants no longer need to pass through communal outdoor spacesat ground level in order to get to their apartment.Changes in the economical organization of housing projects 368 impliesthat the National Housing Bank, and its standards for housing quality, haslost its former impact upon the production of housing. At the same time bothdevelopments in building technology and a boiling housing marked –particularly in central urban areas – has given as a result apartment layoutsolutions that probably wouldn’t have been approved in earlier times:A change towards smaller apartments can be observed, due to developers’aim of squeezing in as many apartments as possible. A part of thisdevelopment is the trend of making more tailored layout solutions that giveless flexibility for alternative uses of domestic spaces. Furthermore,mechanical ventilation and electric heating and lighting, no longer makes itnecessary, in terms of spatial organization of buildings and domestic spaces,to provide for natural ventilation, draught and daylight: Through-lit and -ventilated apartments are rarely produced these days. Particularly for smallerone- or two-roomed apartments (which amount to most of the newapartments) deep and dark one-way oriented layouts have become standard.Although most of the apartments have private balconies, only a few of themare exposed to sun for more than a few hours a day. At block level one thuscan speak of revival of dark, narrow and spatially subdivided backyard368 Many of the new housing projects are built by private developers, based on pre-paid deposits from futurebuyers/inhabitants. This means that most of the apartments are “sold” before the plans are formally approvedand realisation has started. Compared to how housing projects were realized before the premiums are smallerand the joint depth of the housing cooperatives is larger.230