The concept of terraced multi-family housing in socialist Yugoslavia: Sustainability perspective

Abstract

In the housing culture of socialist Yugoslavia in the early 1970s, the application of novel sustainable dwelling solution — terraced construction, was aimed to provide individuality and humanity to multi-family housing through the use of rooftop terraces with green gardens. Until the mid-1960s, Yugoslav dwelling architecture was perceived exclusively in the context of general growth of Yugoslav society with the goal to facilitate the building of apartments in typified settlements by mass, industrial production and prefabricated construction. The critique of functionalist approach as well as functional and formative actualization of high-quality traditional housing concepts, Ottoman agglomerations and Mediterranean architecture, resulted in the need for the introduction of open green spaces in the structure of collective housing apartments with an idea to achieve qualities of one-family housing, such as intimate connection with the surroundings and sustainable balance between artificial world of urban structure and natural environment. Terraced multi-family housing provided an opportunity to create settlements that would meet both, the demands to increase population density in urban areas and the ambient values of landscapes, with good insulation, view, natural light, and individual space of green terrace. This paper shows the implementation of environmental and social sustainability in high population density housing in the architectural projects that were based on the principles of terraced construction. The humanization of multi-family housing was the key starting point of terraced housing concept of Yugoslav architects, which was achieved through the development of ambient that bring humans back to the nature and through the individualization of collective housing. The relevance of these concepts is supported by the contemporary examples of “housing hills” and “vertical villages” that are conceived on the premise of sustainable development.