Josef Karel Říha: For the reform of housing and the construction of residential buildings
"EDITING OF CONSTRUCTION" introduces a special section of the newsletter dedicated exclusively to domestic issues of reform and economization of housing and the construction of residential buildings. In this section, it intends to bring critical articles on the ways of solving housing issues and traditional housing culture in various countries, on the recent developments in floor plans and block formations, on the reform of household economics, on the possibilities of standardization and normalization in construction and housing equipment, and a series of articles and papers dedicated to modern constructive systems, building materials, and their technology. In addition, this section will introduce a special record of literature related to these issues. At the same time, by introducing a special insert section, it seeks to provide designers and entrepreneurs with a practical handbook of new methods for solving and developing modern construction. Insert contributions will be subjected to editing and will take the form of concise articles with illustrations. The construction of small and medium-sized apartments is today the most serious issue in architecture, the shaping of cities, and society. The economics of construction, Non-residential! The economics of apartments and equipment.
Apartments, rooms, and their equipment and arrangement, the construction of houses, blocks, and streets are today's issues, questions whose solutions are more challenging for us because there has not been enough traditional effort to create various types of apartments fully appropriate to their time and its achievements. The question, contemporary to the efforts of the entire civilized world, is complicated by a certain primitiveness characteristic of the average apartment in our residential buildings. The standardization and normalization of structures is a premature endeavor if there is no good standardization of housing requirements, which is not possible without revising household life and domestic work, without changing the perception of apartment arrangements, i.e., if we do not know as a whole what and how we want to build. In the construction of residential buildings, there have been increasing attempts at modern constructive methods recently; the law on construction activity has, in a way, affected the development of floor plans; U.P. factories have attempted to produce nearly standardized furniture, and variously, there begins to be an understanding of the inadequacy of the old tradition of household economics. There are indeed a number of attempts that indicate the beginning of a new development in this important issue, the resolution of which can also uniquely reveal what requirements modern housing places on the formation of cities. There is also a lack of clarity in this matter, as the issue of residential building is still at the beginning of a new and unforeseen development.
Meanwhile, while ENGINEERING CONSTRUCTION of recent times, bridges, tunnels, silos, commercial buildings, factories, and other industrial objects HAVE DEVELOPED RATIONALLY, BOTH IN TERMS OF CONSTRUCTION METHODS AND IN TERMS OF THE USE OF CONSTRUCTIONS AND NEW MATERIALS, the construction of residential buildings has lagged behind. New materials in this field of construction are almost exclusively invented to serve traditional construction materials, and so besides the use of concrete beams, thin partitions, and not very significant reductions in the dimensions of constructions, OUR RESIDENTIAL BUILDINGS at the beginning of the new construction era post-war have not fundamentally differed from the methods by which THEY HAVE BEEN BUILT FOR MORE THAN 100 YEARS, i.e., from overcoming brick arch construction. No new material or method of construction has been sufficiently universal to allow for the desired upheaval in construction. The perception of the internal arrangement of apartments has remained equally conservative. It is remarkable that even amidst relative stagnation in the development of residential building THEY HAVE BEEN CONSTRUCTING FOR DECADES WITH MATERIALS ALMOST NEWLY USED IN TERMS OF FUNCTION AND PROCESSING FOR SHIPS, WAGONS, CARS AND AIRPLANES, in which the selection of material and construction of those parts necessary for the comfort of travelers is done based on advanced technological studies and cost calculations. This peculiar phenomenon can be understood when one considers that all such NEW BUILDINGS AND MEANS OF TRANSPORTATION have been constructed by a developed technical civilization, which caused their development precisely because quantitatively THEY LACKED ANY TRADITION OR PAST WHATSOEVER THAT WOULD WEIGH DOWN THEIR CONSTRUCTION with inappropriate customs, methods, and means of the time. In their construction and solutions, all possibilities that experimental material technology and clever industrial production could provide have simply been exploited. And this method of constructions and the use of materials still evokes a sense of something artificial, not entirely natural and suitable for building homes. This creates a double perspective on the possibilities of our own work, which we utilize while simultaneously doubting it, retaining two different opinions about construction and the requirements placed on its method. Thus, contradictions arise, a typical example of which may be that in Prague, they are constructing restaurant and sleeping cars with ingenious design for almost the entire railway of Europe, ensuring comfort for several hours spent on a train, while at the same time, buildings are being constructed in Prague from outdated materials with rooms and apartments that offer little to no special facilitation of the entire life spent within them. And in all of Prague, there are only a few buildings equipped with coal elevators or ash and garbage chutes.
In home construction, we have not moved beyond the era of burned bricks. BURNED BRICK, a material so ingrained that it seems to be a completely natural product of nature, WAS ALSO AN INVENTION OF ITS TIME AND AN ARTIFICIAL MATERIAL and soon became more or less standardized. But to this day, essentially, this discovery has not been surpassed, as the constructive opinion on the method of construction corresponding to the possibilities of brick masonry has not been surpassed. Brick masonry is a material equally load-bearing and firm at any place where it is used. It is structurally uniform and does not conform to our knowledge that distinguishes parts of walls as load-bearing and parts that only isolate the internal space from the external space. The construction material with the constructive properties of brick may be suitable for the construction of small houses, where the distinction between load-bearing and only isolating parts is not so crucial and hence a uniform material may suffice. However, when constructing multi-story residential buildings, this is a backwardness, also supported by our building regulations. These are also evidence of how variously new and traditional buildings are viewed. While official regulations for the construction of industrial buildings are limited mostly to hygienic and fire safety requirements, they have a series of completely nonsensical constructive requirements for residential buildings. And the mistake caused by the unovercome past is also in searching for a new aesthetics and new beauty, derived from machines, by exchanging causes and effects, because it is only the development of technology of modern building materials that conditions new aesthetics of art, for which today we can find no sufficiently real basis.
BACKWARDNESS, which can be pointed out in the construction of residential buildings, is also inherent in the WAY WE LIVE, and how our living rooms are arranged and furnished. Their arrangement and sizes do not correspond to their purpose and significance for us. Also regarding the very purpose, we do not find the type of standardization that is so characteristic, for example, for English, Dutch, or French floor plans. The purpose is given to the rooms only by the inhabitant, and their furnishing consequently is costly and does not usually correspond to the choice of rooms and the cumbersome method of arrangement that meets the basic requirements for simple functionality, ease of cleaning, and complete hygiene. The accessories of the apartments, sometimes quite spacious, do not satisfy a series of needs simply due to the fact that they are not economical, and that many arrangements that facilitate household work are still not common at all. This lack of development, particularly characteristic of our conditions, is a very notable fact, considering that in the last century, due to high productive advancement and organization, the life conditions and the entire organization of human society's life and work have absolutely changed. Rational production based on applied science, saving in time, labor, energy, and materials are new criteria of material values conditioned reciprocally by the intensity of population and intensive production as well as circulation and turnover. The significance of these new living conditions is extraordinary for European civilization and society despite all the still unsurpassed social crises, whose population would be something unnatural in Europe, organized, for example, feudally, based on primitive agricultural production. These circumstances determine the significance of modern economic thinking, as well as the requirements for economy stemming from it, which is not intended as unproductive renunciation. Economy means recognizing the value and price of everything. Not doing anything unnecessary, working with the maximum of possibilities at a minimum of energy. The least amount of furniture. Reduction of rooms for occasional stays and household work and enlarging rooms for the all-day stay of all.
We do not need heavy walls and facades in the style of stone monumentality, but only light and inexpensive insulation against dampness and cold.
A personal elevator is a comfort in a four-story building, but a coal elevator and an ash chute are a necessity in a two-story house.
Mechanization! Cities must provide cheaper electricity and gas.
AMERICA: Household engineering. Canned food. Cooking without service. Perfect installations. France, England, Holland: Quick kitchen. Built-in furniture.
This imperative of the times applies to each of us in our work in the office, workshop, factory, or shop. But most people consider these demands appropriate for the workday, something that cannot be avoided, also in the street with the noise of cars, trams, and trains, but which due to apathy or resistance does not exist as soon as one crosses the threshold of their own apartment. As a result of this circumstance, the flow, having emerged from factories and scientific laboratories, has stopped before our apartments. AND OUR APARTMENTS, BOTH IN TERMS OF LIFESTYLE AND WORK IN THE HOUSEHOLD AND IN TERMS OF THE ARRANGEMENT OF ROOMS, their functions and sizes, BELONG STILL TO THE ERA OF HANDICRAFT PRODUCTION. For the imperfect construction method, we pay with money, higher rents, and a shortage of apartments, which has become the most urgent social issue due to the fact that as social development progresses, the total amount of housing requests made by society increases. The backwardness of apartments is paid for not only in money but also in time. There is a waste of coal, heat, furniture, fabrics, space, and above all, there is a waste of labor in ways we could not waste outside our apartment, because we could either not support ourselves with such work or lose our jobs. And thus this comfortable and senseless flight from the demands of modern civilization does not protect against the consequences of the dilemma it creates: against high costs of furnishings and maintenance and against a whole series of disturbances, the root cause of which, nonsensical energy consumption, remains hidden, yet undermines or limits energy and mass expansion. Life occupations compel through the force of their ruthless necessity and organization to maximum performance, while the apartments and domestic life simultaneously strive to make this as difficult as possible.
The conceptions of housing are created by old formal traditions, and are predominantly based on the question of how an apartment should look and on the academic solution of the floor plan instead of the solution of the apartment being conditioned by considerations of simple functionality and economy. A modern apartment is an organism that serves a series of actions, purposes, that needs light, air, heat, ventilation, cleaning, at least a minimal possible mechanization of the most common tasks, that requires as many and as suitable installations and rooms that satisfy the maximum needs and are dimensioned, grouped, and arranged in proportion to the purposes for which they serve. Perfect compliance with these last requirements necessitates that before addressing this issue, a revision of the way of household life is also carried out, as it is precisely the lack of development of such views, the lack of housing culture, that has caused the backwardness of our housing in relation to the traditions of other countries and thus even more so in relation to the efforts of the ideal requirements of the future. And identifying these needs appropriate also to our environment, climate, and materials is essential, as it is absolutely certain that if we present their sum to a modern designer and require them to create everything we need for our apartment in proportion to our needs regardless of the past, they will comply effortlessly and commence a new era in housing. For technical civilization has already realized many utopias as soon as it clarified the type of task and the organization of the process.
SCHEMA OF WORK ORGANIZATION.
ARCHITECT: Creating apartments and houses as a unified and universal organism of their time. Searching for new constructive possibilities. Shaping the city.
TECHNOLOGIST: Improving the quality of materials, searching for new ones. Experiment. Testing.
PRODUCER: Industrialization of standardized production, improvement and cost reduction of it.*)
ENGINEER, BUILDER: Calculations, loans, and organization of construction work. Construction. Implementation.
*) This also includes some production of engineering that has yet to crystallize, similar to household engineering in America. Its task is also to design and invent installations for homes and households and to find machine and technical applications for all contemporary achievements. Lighting, water, heat, electricity, gas, ventilation, motorization, etc., the use of which in the most rational and practical way cannot be managed by the small craftsman, producer, and merchant simultaneously. Some of the current needs, whether appropriately or not well thought-out, are for example the usage and heating of warm water in small households; unified fireplaces or a series of mutually adjustable stoves for heating rooms, family houses, and small apartments; facilities for portable clothes drying in a normal laundry room of an apartment building based on ordinary fireplaces and so on.
Apartments, rooms, and their equipment and arrangement, the construction of houses, blocks, and streets are today's issues, questions whose solutions are more challenging for us because there has not been enough traditional effort to create various types of apartments fully appropriate to their time and its achievements. The question, contemporary to the efforts of the entire civilized world, is complicated by a certain primitiveness characteristic of the average apartment in our residential buildings. The standardization and normalization of structures is a premature endeavor if there is no good standardization of housing requirements, which is not possible without revising household life and domestic work, without changing the perception of apartment arrangements, i.e., if we do not know as a whole what and how we want to build. In the construction of residential buildings, there have been increasing attempts at modern constructive methods recently; the law on construction activity has, in a way, affected the development of floor plans; U.P. factories have attempted to produce nearly standardized furniture, and variously, there begins to be an understanding of the inadequacy of the old tradition of household economics. There are indeed a number of attempts that indicate the beginning of a new development in this important issue, the resolution of which can also uniquely reveal what requirements modern housing places on the formation of cities. There is also a lack of clarity in this matter, as the issue of residential building is still at the beginning of a new and unforeseen development.
Meanwhile, while ENGINEERING CONSTRUCTION of recent times, bridges, tunnels, silos, commercial buildings, factories, and other industrial objects HAVE DEVELOPED RATIONALLY, BOTH IN TERMS OF CONSTRUCTION METHODS AND IN TERMS OF THE USE OF CONSTRUCTIONS AND NEW MATERIALS, the construction of residential buildings has lagged behind. New materials in this field of construction are almost exclusively invented to serve traditional construction materials, and so besides the use of concrete beams, thin partitions, and not very significant reductions in the dimensions of constructions, OUR RESIDENTIAL BUILDINGS at the beginning of the new construction era post-war have not fundamentally differed from the methods by which THEY HAVE BEEN BUILT FOR MORE THAN 100 YEARS, i.e., from overcoming brick arch construction. No new material or method of construction has been sufficiently universal to allow for the desired upheaval in construction. The perception of the internal arrangement of apartments has remained equally conservative. It is remarkable that even amidst relative stagnation in the development of residential building THEY HAVE BEEN CONSTRUCTING FOR DECADES WITH MATERIALS ALMOST NEWLY USED IN TERMS OF FUNCTION AND PROCESSING FOR SHIPS, WAGONS, CARS AND AIRPLANES, in which the selection of material and construction of those parts necessary for the comfort of travelers is done based on advanced technological studies and cost calculations. This peculiar phenomenon can be understood when one considers that all such NEW BUILDINGS AND MEANS OF TRANSPORTATION have been constructed by a developed technical civilization, which caused their development precisely because quantitatively THEY LACKED ANY TRADITION OR PAST WHATSOEVER THAT WOULD WEIGH DOWN THEIR CONSTRUCTION with inappropriate customs, methods, and means of the time. In their construction and solutions, all possibilities that experimental material technology and clever industrial production could provide have simply been exploited. And this method of constructions and the use of materials still evokes a sense of something artificial, not entirely natural and suitable for building homes. This creates a double perspective on the possibilities of our own work, which we utilize while simultaneously doubting it, retaining two different opinions about construction and the requirements placed on its method. Thus, contradictions arise, a typical example of which may be that in Prague, they are constructing restaurant and sleeping cars with ingenious design for almost the entire railway of Europe, ensuring comfort for several hours spent on a train, while at the same time, buildings are being constructed in Prague from outdated materials with rooms and apartments that offer little to no special facilitation of the entire life spent within them. And in all of Prague, there are only a few buildings equipped with coal elevators or ash and garbage chutes.
In home construction, we have not moved beyond the era of burned bricks. BURNED BRICK, a material so ingrained that it seems to be a completely natural product of nature, WAS ALSO AN INVENTION OF ITS TIME AND AN ARTIFICIAL MATERIAL and soon became more or less standardized. But to this day, essentially, this discovery has not been surpassed, as the constructive opinion on the method of construction corresponding to the possibilities of brick masonry has not been surpassed. Brick masonry is a material equally load-bearing and firm at any place where it is used. It is structurally uniform and does not conform to our knowledge that distinguishes parts of walls as load-bearing and parts that only isolate the internal space from the external space. The construction material with the constructive properties of brick may be suitable for the construction of small houses, where the distinction between load-bearing and only isolating parts is not so crucial and hence a uniform material may suffice. However, when constructing multi-story residential buildings, this is a backwardness, also supported by our building regulations. These are also evidence of how variously new and traditional buildings are viewed. While official regulations for the construction of industrial buildings are limited mostly to hygienic and fire safety requirements, they have a series of completely nonsensical constructive requirements for residential buildings. And the mistake caused by the unovercome past is also in searching for a new aesthetics and new beauty, derived from machines, by exchanging causes and effects, because it is only the development of technology of modern building materials that conditions new aesthetics of art, for which today we can find no sufficiently real basis.
BACKWARDNESS, which can be pointed out in the construction of residential buildings, is also inherent in the WAY WE LIVE, and how our living rooms are arranged and furnished. Their arrangement and sizes do not correspond to their purpose and significance for us. Also regarding the very purpose, we do not find the type of standardization that is so characteristic, for example, for English, Dutch, or French floor plans. The purpose is given to the rooms only by the inhabitant, and their furnishing consequently is costly and does not usually correspond to the choice of rooms and the cumbersome method of arrangement that meets the basic requirements for simple functionality, ease of cleaning, and complete hygiene. The accessories of the apartments, sometimes quite spacious, do not satisfy a series of needs simply due to the fact that they are not economical, and that many arrangements that facilitate household work are still not common at all. This lack of development, particularly characteristic of our conditions, is a very notable fact, considering that in the last century, due to high productive advancement and organization, the life conditions and the entire organization of human society's life and work have absolutely changed. Rational production based on applied science, saving in time, labor, energy, and materials are new criteria of material values conditioned reciprocally by the intensity of population and intensive production as well as circulation and turnover. The significance of these new living conditions is extraordinary for European civilization and society despite all the still unsurpassed social crises, whose population would be something unnatural in Europe, organized, for example, feudally, based on primitive agricultural production. These circumstances determine the significance of modern economic thinking, as well as the requirements for economy stemming from it, which is not intended as unproductive renunciation. Economy means recognizing the value and price of everything. Not doing anything unnecessary, working with the maximum of possibilities at a minimum of energy. The least amount of furniture. Reduction of rooms for occasional stays and household work and enlarging rooms for the all-day stay of all.
We do not need heavy walls and facades in the style of stone monumentality, but only light and inexpensive insulation against dampness and cold.
A personal elevator is a comfort in a four-story building, but a coal elevator and an ash chute are a necessity in a two-story house.
Mechanization! Cities must provide cheaper electricity and gas.
AMERICA: Household engineering. Canned food. Cooking without service. Perfect installations. France, England, Holland: Quick kitchen. Built-in furniture.
This imperative of the times applies to each of us in our work in the office, workshop, factory, or shop. But most people consider these demands appropriate for the workday, something that cannot be avoided, also in the street with the noise of cars, trams, and trains, but which due to apathy or resistance does not exist as soon as one crosses the threshold of their own apartment. As a result of this circumstance, the flow, having emerged from factories and scientific laboratories, has stopped before our apartments. AND OUR APARTMENTS, BOTH IN TERMS OF LIFESTYLE AND WORK IN THE HOUSEHOLD AND IN TERMS OF THE ARRANGEMENT OF ROOMS, their functions and sizes, BELONG STILL TO THE ERA OF HANDICRAFT PRODUCTION. For the imperfect construction method, we pay with money, higher rents, and a shortage of apartments, which has become the most urgent social issue due to the fact that as social development progresses, the total amount of housing requests made by society increases. The backwardness of apartments is paid for not only in money but also in time. There is a waste of coal, heat, furniture, fabrics, space, and above all, there is a waste of labor in ways we could not waste outside our apartment, because we could either not support ourselves with such work or lose our jobs. And thus this comfortable and senseless flight from the demands of modern civilization does not protect against the consequences of the dilemma it creates: against high costs of furnishings and maintenance and against a whole series of disturbances, the root cause of which, nonsensical energy consumption, remains hidden, yet undermines or limits energy and mass expansion. Life occupations compel through the force of their ruthless necessity and organization to maximum performance, while the apartments and domestic life simultaneously strive to make this as difficult as possible.
The conceptions of housing are created by old formal traditions, and are predominantly based on the question of how an apartment should look and on the academic solution of the floor plan instead of the solution of the apartment being conditioned by considerations of simple functionality and economy. A modern apartment is an organism that serves a series of actions, purposes, that needs light, air, heat, ventilation, cleaning, at least a minimal possible mechanization of the most common tasks, that requires as many and as suitable installations and rooms that satisfy the maximum needs and are dimensioned, grouped, and arranged in proportion to the purposes for which they serve. Perfect compliance with these last requirements necessitates that before addressing this issue, a revision of the way of household life is also carried out, as it is precisely the lack of development of such views, the lack of housing culture, that has caused the backwardness of our housing in relation to the traditions of other countries and thus even more so in relation to the efforts of the ideal requirements of the future. And identifying these needs appropriate also to our environment, climate, and materials is essential, as it is absolutely certain that if we present their sum to a modern designer and require them to create everything we need for our apartment in proportion to our needs regardless of the past, they will comply effortlessly and commence a new era in housing. For technical civilization has already realized many utopias as soon as it clarified the type of task and the organization of the process.
SCHEMA OF WORK ORGANIZATION.
ARCHITECT: Creating apartments and houses as a unified and universal organism of their time. Searching for new constructive possibilities. Shaping the city.
TECHNOLOGIST: Improving the quality of materials, searching for new ones. Experiment. Testing.
PRODUCER: Industrialization of standardized production, improvement and cost reduction of it.*)
ENGINEER, BUILDER: Calculations, loans, and organization of construction work. Construction. Implementation.
*) This also includes some production of engineering that has yet to crystallize, similar to household engineering in America. Its task is also to design and invent installations for homes and households and to find machine and technical applications for all contemporary achievements. Lighting, water, heat, electricity, gas, ventilation, motorization, etc., the use of which in the most rational and practical way cannot be managed by the small craftsman, producer, and merchant simultaneously. Some of the current needs, whether appropriately or not well thought-out, are for example the usage and heating of warm water in small households; unified fireplaces or a series of mutually adjustable stoves for heating rooms, family houses, and small apartments; facilities for portable clothes drying in a normal laundry room of an apartment building based on ordinary fireplaces and so on.
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