Living with High-Rise Modernity: The Modernist Kiel Housing Estate of Renaat Braem, A Catalyst to a Socialist Modern Way of Life?

Abstract

ABSTRACTPublic housing of the reconstruction period is generally considered a poor imitation of the modernist housing of the interwar period. The pressing housing shortage and the urge for rapid reconstruction initiated the rationalization of the construction process. Still, postwar housing production has often been blamed for having turned into a purely technocratic and pragmatic undertaking and for having lost the leftist ideals in which the modernism of the Modern Movement was engrained—providing all people with decent housing. Complaints of drabness, disorientation, inhuman vastness, isolation, and monotony have been raised. For many protagonists in the housing debate, high-rise projects have been consistently perceived as being maladjusted for families with children. However, does all postwar housing fit that picture? Was life in a high-rise apartment really that harmful for families with children? What did those kinds of buildings do to their inhabitants? By means of a Belgian case study—the modernist, well-promoted high-rise public housing blocks of the avant-gardist Renaat Braem at the Kiel Estate—the article questions this picture. Going from the macro-scale of Belgian postwar housing policy to the micro-level of the home of two occupants of Braem's apartments, I reveal the interactions and tensions between the opinion of some politicians, design discourses, the architecture of the building, and the living practice of the inhabitants.