The Minimum Dwelling Revisited: CIAM's Practical Utopia (1928-31)

Cover
Contents
List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction
	‘Contact zone’ and ‘practical utopia’
	Structure
1 Genealogies of the minimum
	Poverty, ‘human needs’ and ‘minimum’
	Habitation and ‘minimum needs’
	Early interventions and reform initiatives
	Existenzminimum
	The low-cost housing calculus
2 The ‘small dwelling’ between emergency and aspiration
	Size and dwelling
	The ‘small dwelling’ after the First World War
	From the ‘small’ to the ‘smallest’ dwelling (Kleinstwohnung)
	The pioneering cases of Vienna and Frankfurt
3 International expert networks and the housing question in the interwar period
	The IFHTP encounters the question of mass housing: Vienna, 1926
	The IFHTP congress in Paris, 1928: The trope of the ‘housing for the very poor’
	The IFHTP congress in Rome, 1929: Planning and financing mass urban housing
4 The ‘minimum dwelling’ as utopia
	The First World War as rupture: The space of utopia
	Interwar modernism as discourse: Minimum and optimum
	Architecture as revolution
	The private cell, the public sphere and what lies in between
	The Soviet experience: Pursuing the minimum in utopia
	The ‘dwelling ration’: Social utopia in disguise
	Frictionless living: The studies of Alexander Klein
5 CIAM2: The ‘minimum dwelling’ in focus
	CIAM and its ‘lesser’ congresses
	CIAM’s first steps and the question of dwelling
	Setting up the first ‘working congress’
	The 1929 Frankfurt congress (CIAM2)
	Language matters: The opacity of the Existenzminimum
	The aftermath of the Frankfurt congress
6 CIAM3: Dwelling as the unlikely hub of modern architecture
	From CIAM2 to CIAM3: Exploring scales in three-dimensional space
	The elusive theme(s) of CIAM3: The battle of the scales
	The Brussels congress
	The ‘minimum dwelling’ in CIAM3
7 The CIAM2 and CIAM3 exhibitions
	The exhibition field in interwar Europe: showcasing the ‘minimum’
	The minimum dwelling on show: Exhibiting CIAM2
	Exhibiting CIAM3
Conclusions
Notes
Bibliography
Index