The Minimum Dwelling ─ L'Habitation Minimum = Die Kleinstwohnung : The Housing Crisis, Housing Reform

Karel Teige (1900-1951), one of the most important figures of avant-garde modernismof the 1920s and 1930s, influenced virtually every area of art, design, and urban thinking in hisnative Czechoslovakia. His Minimum Dwelling, originally published in Czech in 1932, and appearingnow for the first time in English, is one of the landmark architectural books of the twentiethcentury.The Minimum Dwelling is not just a book on architecture, but also a blueprint for a new wayof living. It calls for a radical rethinking of domestic space and of the role of modernarchitecture in the planning, design, and construction of new dwelling types for the proletariat.Teige shows how Gropius, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and others designed little more than newversions of baroque palaces, mainly for the new financial aristocracy. Teige envisioned the minimumdwelling not as a reduced version of a bourgeois apartment or rural cottage, but as a wholly newdwelling type built on the cooperation of architects, sociologists, economists, health officials,physicians, social workers, politicians, and trade unionists.The book covers many subjects that arestill of great relevance. Of particular interest are Teige's rejection of traditional notions of thekitchen as the core of family-centered plans and of marriage as the foundation of moderncohabitation. He describes alternative lifestyles and new ways of cohabitation of sexes,generations, and classes. The detailed programmatic chapters on collective housing remain far aheadof current thinking, and his comments on collective dwelling presage communal living experiments ofthe 1960s and 1970s, as well as the communal facilities in contemporary condominium buildings andretirement communities.