Modernist Collectivity in Evolution.

Abstract

At the start of the 20th century, the modernist residential district was designed as the new form for collective living to restructure society around modern productivity. Built in exponential numbers after World War II from 1945 to 1973, modernist residential districts engineered a universal collectivity based on the nuclear family and the minimal for existence. Today, this collectivity is culturally obsolete and physically aged. In the last quarter-century (1995-2020), we have witnessed an unprecedented number of modernist residential district adaptations worldwide. Following the analysis of one hundred case studies, this paper presents six distinct spatial strategies of adaptation: addition, subtraction, diversification, reprogramming, camouflage, and augmentation. Collectively, these strategies reveal how the universal, isotropic, and hegemonic modernist collectivity is splitting in multiple models driven by the specificity of the local sphere while preserving the modernist social capital: their communities.