The influence of traditional architecture on the design of social housing by masters of modernism

Abstract

The work is devoted to the study of the influence of folk architecture on the professional practice of housing design by modern architects. The study focuses on the use of traditional heritage techniques in the design of social housing in modernism in the period 1910-1970. The procedure of reproducing the experience of traditional (vernacular) architecture is described as a process of translation, which involves the decoding of folk heritage by professional architects in order to identify the characteristics and techniques relevant to the “modern movement”. The task of designing housing for the working class is observed throughout the period of modernism in various regional areas, from European countries and America to Egypt, Algeria and India. Historical analysis of the architecture of modernism helped to identify such valuable for its representatives’ qualities and properties of traditional architecture as: functionality, utilitarianism and archetypal. It has been proven that modernists were inspired by the architecture of traditional Mediterranean cities. It is shown that in the period of modernism, along with engineering innovations, architects introduced traditional design systems, materials, technologies and rethought their compositional potential, which significantly diversified the morphology of social construction and enriched its symbolic language. Thanks to the borrowing of traditional features, modern architecture has become clear to the consumer, and such morphological elements as a flat roof, white walls, simple rectangular columns and so on have become a new and quite understandable language of modern architecture.