Archivo de la etiqueta: Structures

NOTES ON FOUNDATIONS AND STRUCTURES IN RAILWAY DWELLINGS BUILT BETWEEN 1949-1989 (II)

At the end of the 1950s, with the development of capitalism, there was an unimaginable growth of large cities and therefore the need to generate mass housing. The 1960s was the decade of housing estates inspired by the most perverse functionalism, works carried out by the Ministry of Housing, by the Obra Sindical del Hogar (OSH) or subsidised housing such as that of the railway workers, which had no other aim than to provide cheap accommodation for the labour force that was arriving in the cities in waves (Grau, 1993). In the case of railway housing, this second period, 1965-1989, is characterised by workers’ cooperatives as the promoters of their housing.

Unlike the first period analysed in a previous entry, the substantial socio-economic change occurring in this second period gives importance to regulations, especially those of an urban planning nature and to the design and quality of social housing, as the only limit to speculation, and, although we can detect evolution with respect to the regulations existing in the previous period, their drafting is far removed from the theoretical studies of sociologists and architects, being basically driven by two motors: Increases in the social pressure of the user and the demand of capital for higher and higher capital gains. The result is poor, rigid and unimaginative regulations which, on a technical level, encourage the repetition of design solutions and, therefore, of construction solutions which become standards where cost and profitability are the basic premises (Paricio Ansuátegui, 1973). Sigue leyendo