Floor Area. Customizing the Socialist Standard of Good Life in a Soviet Summer Cottage
Floor Area. Customizing the Socialist Standard of Good Life in a Soviet Summer Cottage

Summary/Abstract: Standardization of housing was a universal tool of twentieth-century social modernization, not least in the Socialist bloc where it provided the dominant economic model for housing construction during the Cold War era. While twentieth-century modernists were keen to express the formal qualities of architecture, they showed a relative inability to establish a vocabulary defining the social qualities of modern architecture. Nonetheless, terms such as “floor area” and “mikrorayon” became the key concepts in Soviet housing programs, designating a utopia of social equality to be materialized by means of central planning, standardization, and industrialization of construction. Adapted from the pan-European idea of minimum dwelling, the fundamental architectural measure for addressing housing needs in the Soviet Union determined that just nine square meters of livable “floor area” (жилая площадь in Russian) were required for a satisfying and healthy life.

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