From technocrats to laymen: Community planning and self-help housing for workers in Marshall Plan countries

With the introduction of the Marshall Plan to Europe after the Second World War, architectural practice for workers’ housing faced a paradigmatic shift by means of procedural approaches and spatial strategies as well as roles of planner, architect and community in housing production. By the promotion of community participation and cooperation for self-help housing in the postwar period, the technocratic activity of modernist architects of the interwar period for state-led rental housing shifted to a popular practice for home ownership, of which has pioneered the current social housing provision and speculative housing development based on mortgage system in many countries. This shift is argued to be assisted by the transnational activity on planning and housing as part of the reconstruction and development discourse of the United States, the United Nations and other transnational organisations to build welfare states in Europe. Approaching the Public Housing Program of the American New Deal, postwar workers’ housing policies were developed on state-employer-worker collaboration as a means of self-help for low-cost housing construction while utilizing community planning to integrate workers in housing production and neighbourhood unit for suburban development. In this regard, postwar workers’ housing programs in Europe utilised the notion of community as both ‘object’ and ‘subject’ of industrial development by making workers as builders and owners of housing in ‘self-sufficient’ neighbourhoods. As the notion of community is again at the agenda for housing of the 21st century, a historical inquiry on dated yet up-to-date notion of self-help housing is essential to recall community as the evergreen actor of urbanisation. Within this framework, this paper discusses postwar workers’ housing policies and programs in two Marshall Plan countries (France and Turkey) in relation to transnational discourse and activity, and aims to reveal the transnational grounds of the programmatic shift from ‘architecture for community’ to ‘community in architecture’ with reference to housing built by workers via housing cooperatives in the postwar period.

How the Labour Self-Build: Marshall Plan and Workers’ Housing Cooperatives in Turkey

Sila Karatas Basoglu

This presentation aims to discuss the transnational activity and discourse behind the programmatic shift in spatial production and layout of workers’ housing in Turkey from the state-financed model of the interwar period to the assisted self-help model by the introduction of the Marshall Plan after the World War II. In particular, the paper argues that the ideological and spatial activity and discourse of the Marshall Plan indoctrinating ‘democracy, cooperation and freedom’ instrumentalized workers’ housing cooperatives for the promotion of postwar Americanization. Turkey, like other participating countries of the Marshall Plan, witnessed domestic migration and rapid urbanization, and thus a great housing shortage and informal construction boom at the peripheries of cities due to industrial and infrastructural development as well as to agricultural mechanization. This postwar development activity was guided by financial and technical assistance programs of the United States and related multilateral organizations. Cooperative housing was popularized by the state as a low-cost and efficient construction model against the housing shortage and as an element of Fordist decentralization, but rather to construct the productive and affluent middle class ‘worker’ of the postwar welfare state through home ownership in especially single-family housing. Based on workers’ pension funds released from the Workers’ Insurance Agency and loaned by the Mortgage Loans Bank, the legislative and institutional layout of this self-help model eliminated the state-financed technocratic practice of the interwar period for free/rental housing in factory site. Instead, it introduced an assisted community practice of workers for home ownership by providing free/cheap land and construction loans but also by casting a role for worker inhabitants as builders, which pioneered the current real-estate development as it channelled workers into informal systems of capital, construction, and home ownership. This housing practice also guided modern urbanization and urban sprawl through specific settlement morphologies and architectural typologies in urban peripheries. Single-family detached house promoted in the initial years of the model shifted to multi-family housing block due to the rise of land prices and construction costs, which made apartment block on individual parcel as the common practice of modern housing in Turkey. The presentation refers to official documents and reports prepared by foreign experts as well as to practices of political parties, social policy officials, planners, architects, and labour unions next to exemplary cooperative settlements. Therefore, it aims to highlight the role of the Marshall Plan and related transnational activity on local policy, program, and architectural practice of workers’ housing as well as the political and spatial instrumentality of cooperatives for postwar Americanization.

2021

Construire à distance

Habib Sayah

Through a case study, this research aims at contributing to the historic understanding of the international architecture after the Second World War. It is based on the monographic analysis of the projects realised by the Geneva agency Addor & Julliard in Lebanon during the years 1950 to 1960. The general theme of "constructing at distance" embraces and problematizes two types of considerations: on the one hand, the challenges that international architecture of the years 1950-1960 had to face when the operations of conception and execution where realised in different contexts (i.e. functional and technical challenges due to climatic imperatives; logistical challenges linked to the characteristics of the local culture of construction ; strategic challenges in relation to the specific political and economic situation in the developing countries) ; on the other hand, the specific creative opportunities that the internationally active agencies were able to seize abroad and of which also their local production took advantage (treatment of prestige programs and ambitious operations with partners open to avant-garde experimentations). The operations realised at distance by the Geneva agency Addor & Julliard in Lebanon constitute an architectural corpus of approximately ten buildings in the urban and suburban zone. These realisations, which are not well known in the circles of researchers and architects, both locally and internationally, deserve to be analysed in detail, as they are very representative for the atmosphere of experimentation during the years 1950-1960 in Lebanon and generally in the other contexts of north-south collaboration. The work of the agency Addor & Julliard is still not well known in Geneva, with the exception of some publications on important projects like the Cayla campaign, or the Budé and Lignon blocks. Especially, the importance of the profitable interactions that the agency was able to establish between its two fields of activities in Geneva and Lebanon, and its significance for the development of this big agency, have not been stressed enough. The introductory part of our work situates the actuality of the problematic, in relation to the specific stakes of the protection of architectural and urban heritage in Lebanon. Still today, the heritage of the 1950-1960's is insufficiently understood in its cultural significance. It is also very much threatened. When it is not destroyed, it suffers from a camouflage that makes it totally unrecognisable. We then present the abundant documentation that we have gathered. This work on source material is necessary to counteract the superficial prejudice with which this architectural corpus is confronted. This part is then followed by a historical chapter on the agency Addor & Julliard before the opening of its Lebanese branch, as well as an overview of the Lebanese context between the beginning of the XXth century and 1960. These elements allow us to assert that the decisive factor allowing the agency to develop its foreign activity is to be found in the profile of particular competencies that it displayed by closely associating the architectural project and the real estate management. The apartment- and office-building realised in 1954 in Geneva the Zschokke enterprise, with its easily adaptable spatial organisation, played the trigger role : it encouraged the first Lebanese clients, the Beydoun family who had financial relations in Geneva, to mandate the agency for a project involving a multifunctional building in Lebanon. The Lebanese context of this period is characterised by a strong economic boom and a political stability conducive to investments. The real estate sector was in full growth and asked for innovative typologies and modern architectural images. This allowed the agency Addor & Julliard to emancipate itself from the still quite regionalist references that it was entertaining in Geneva and to direct itself resolutely towards the international tendencies. These elements of historic information are then followed by the detailed survey of the agency's Lebanese production. Several buildings were realised in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, but it is in Lebanon that the principal operations are concentrated, which explains that the survey limits itself to this country. The inventory concerns the ten buildings that have been spared from the destruction of the Lebanese War (1975-1991) and of which the archive documents have been preserved. The description of each object includes the history of the commission, the urban situation, the legal and regulatory situation, as well as the project variants when they exist. Then, the realised variant is analysed in detail by paying attention to the distributive, constructive and stylistic aspects. This survey then leads to a more interpretative reading that aims at evaluating the impact of these constructions on the urban development of Beirut. Addor & Julliard never had real town-planning mandates in Lebanon. But even though their realisations limited themselves to the architectural scale, they nevertheless contributed to the concretisation of a resolutely modern representation of the city, especially because they succeeded in treating orders of a considerable symbolic importance. The theme of "constructing at distance" is addressed via a comparative method that integrates the Lebanese, Geneva and international projects of the same period. This chapter also deals with the contribution of the buildings of Addor & Julliard to the local Lebanese construction culture on both the technical and expressive level. The demonstration is based on the curtain-wall that Addor & Julliard used twice in two very different buildings: the STARCO centre (1954-1962) and the Lebanese Bank (1962-1963). The in-depth analysis of the conception and the realisation of the curtain-wall, emblem of the "international style", allows to discover that in Beirut its use resulted much less from the importation of generic and abstract solutions than from a skilled synthesis between technical resources, which were locally available, and the aimed-at iconic effect. We thus perceive that "constructing at distance" is more complex than a simple knowledge transfer from one environment to another. The local differentiation of constructive elements of the international repertoire between 1950 and 1960, such as the curtain-wall, prompts us to question and complement the analysis of Hitchcock et Johnson on these phenomena in their famous publication "The International Style" of 1932, which seems too superficial. Our study finishes with an advocacy for the protection of the projects of Addor & Julliard in Lebanon. Without being exhaustive, this advocacy is based on the examination of the transformations touching these projects until today and establishes a series of recommendations for their protection. It is said that in Lebanon modern architecture of the years 1950 to 1960 constitutes the witness of the efforts undertaken in this period by the local actors in order to emancipate their country from a certain marginality in international relations. For this reason, the modern heritage fully belongs to the Lebanese history. The annexes especially contain the data bases, which we have constituted during the inventory of the projects and the archives, as well as some particularly important documents: The contract established between the architects and their first client represents the start of their work in Lebanon, whereas the minutes of the press conference of 21 March 1963, during which the Society of engineers and architects of Beirut criticizes the work of Addor & Julliard in Lebanon, symbolises the end of their Lebanese collaboration. Finally, an album exposes the photographs of the buildings of Addor & Julliard at the time and in their present state. ------------------------------ 3 Imm. Zschokke à Genève. In Werk, Bauen & Wohnen, 1957: pp. 367-368. 4 Lambert, S., STARCO Center, Beirut, Lebanon. UK, in Architectural Design, Mars 1963: pp. 138-140.

EPFL2007

L'oeuvre de Leandro V. Locsin (1928-1994), architecte à la recherche de l'identité élusive de l'architecture philippine du second après-guerre

Jean-Claude Girard

Filipino architect Leandro Valencia Locsin (Silay1928 - Makati 1994) produced an architectural work that involved 250 projects, of which at least more than half were completed and mostly in his country of origin. A graduate in architecture of San Tomas de Manila University in 1953, his career began after the Second World War, which left the capital city all but destroyed following airstrikes by the allies that served to liberate the Philippines from the Japanese occupying forces. Following his studies, Locsin is immediately solicited with requests which leads him to open his office and give up the idea of completing his graduate studies in one of the prestigious American universities, which at the time had welcomed great masters who had sought exile from Europe to the United States in the 1930s. For a member of a privileged social class, this atypical career path makes Locsin a singular figure in the architectural landscape as he will immediately focus his interest on questioning the specificity of Filipino architecture. In a 1989 interview, Locsin confirms his career-long interest in researching the boundaries between local culture and international influences. The study of the vernacular tradition in his country will orient his work towards defining certain architectural principles to allow for the emergence of a new contemporary Filipino architecture. The post-war period, involving innovations in technical resources and favorable political and economic conditions for urban development, will serve to render all the more complex a body of work that is difficult to apprehend and qualify. In a 1964 text, Locsin refers to the elusive identity of the Filipino architectural spirit which, according to him, is the result of an assimilation of various external influences, given the geographic positioning of the Philippines and its colonial past. His work never ceased to reflect this quest for identity in built representations. While Leandro V. Locsin has been called "the poet of space" for the quality of his projects characterized by a great attention given to the sense of space, abstraction, symmetry, proportion, and materiality linked to the use of concrete and traditional materials his work has never been the subject of a complete study. Few scientific contributions exist and remain partial, in that they focus on certain specificities of his production. Further, there are no studies that offer a complete review of his office archives, a necessary step towards uncovering and highlighting the unique characteristics of a multiform production. The objective of this dissertation is to provide a complete overview of the work of Leandro V. Locsin, notably through a survey of his projects, and an analysis of the condition of their production in a local and international context, in order to render explicit the specific qualities that make this work a unique example of architecture of the period and from the Philippines.

EPFL2018