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MODERN HOUSING PROTOTYPES by Roger Sherwood

MODERN HOUSING PROTOTYPES

By

Pub Date: Nov. 1st, 1978
ISBN: 0674579429
Publisher: Harvard Univ. Press

A handsome sourcebook for architects, practicing and prospective, incipient builders, and imaginative planners. Presented here are 32 trend-setting projects of this century, divided into the six major multi-family housing categories: tower, slab, block, party-wall, detached and semi-detached, and rowhouse. The last group, for instance, begins with J. P. Oud's 1927 Stuttgart Exhibition dwellings, ""typical Dutch workers' housing of the time""; includes a 1961 Kenzo Tange example (the Japanese input has interesting cross-cultural implications); and winds up with Neave Brown's Fleet Road housing built in London in 1967, which ""demonstrates that a high density form of housing with outdoor space for each dwelling can be achieved without giving up individual privacy."" The brief critiques are accompanied by floor plans, project drawings, and in most cases photos; the introductory section provides an exhaustive compendium of interior arrangement possibilities. Throughout, however, Sherwood's analysis concentrates on structural and aesthetic factors and takes only passing notice of social considerations, presenting as venerable prototypes some structures known to have failed in use. This, then, is for the informed practitioner, of whatever profession, who is looking for leads rather than for final answers.