They are a great affordable housing and the blocks are designed for people to have everything close buy. Beats American style suburb 8/10 times IMHO
They are actually based on some Danish designs adapted to USSRs standards.
Beats American style suburb 8/10 times IMHO
Only if you’re lucky enough to live in one of the few well-maintained ones. At least in Russia, many are falling apart with loose handrails, water damage, sketchy elevators and mold.
That’s because Russian regime is even more retarded then what we got in the US…
Although looking at Florida condos… Maybe not lol
Snark a side… the issue is maintenance not the design
At least in Russia, many are falling apart with loose handrails, water damage, sketchy elevators and mold.
Handrails and elevators can be replaced during building repair. In mine and my grandma’s homes elevators were replaced somewhere in 2008-2015. Not so sure about water damage and mold.
There was an architect, Le Corbusier. He was a socialist, so his projects of future cities involved a lot of public spaces where people spend their free and working time, while a person’s home was just a small area for sleeping and eating breakfast. The Soviets took the idea of small personal homes, and dropped the “nice public areas” part.
- It’s cold in the winter because the walls are quite thin
- You can hear your neighbours loudly speaking
- I was lucky to have a normal-sized room in a later “Brezhnevka” house, but many of my classmates had rooms (if they had a separate room at all) where you had a bed, a cupboard+desk combo, and a chair in the middle, that you have to remove to get to the window. Japan-sized stuff.
Speaking of Le Corbusier, as his main (I know, that’s subjective) achievement was a technical approach to ergonomics - all sizes in his projects were based on human sizes and proportions. Meaning that a height of a ceiling is a height of an average adult man raising his hands, + some space. It worked, and it’s cost-effective, but you really like some extra space, and have more than 3 sq.m. toilet.
All fair criticism and that’s why I prefer to have 600k visiable homeless in the US with likely another 1 million living in their cars.
SInce you knew all of this would also know All of this is fixable with modern technique and extra investment.
You would also know that north American style construction with shiti wood frame for both houses and apts are a lot worse for noise . Furthermore they only gotten properly insulated for in the 1990s so all the stock prior to that is beyond inefficient.
Literally boomer 2mmilion mcmension and you still hear guy walking upstairs…
Like wtf y’all paying for
Oh yes, I’ve heard of (but haven’t experienced myself) a low quality of a “standard” us house, but personally I really value the amount of space over many things. When the covid started, we rented a shitty thin-walled summerhouse to get out of the 5M city and keep some freedom of movement. And it was so awesome I didn’t care how much firewood we burned, or how I could hear the kids through 2 walls. Because I could step out of the door and still stay within “my territory”, my place. And in most of small apartments, not just the soviet ones, you feel trapped in those 2 or 3 concrete boxes you call home.
And if you build a house for yourself, you have a chance to make use of all the modern technologies, and some things are not that much more expensive - I know because I did plan to do it, and I even have a giant excel file with calculations and choices made. Never happened because we moved to another country.
Oh god I already feel claustrophobic knowing everything in that tiny space would be made for people half a foot shorter than me, it’d be living in that fucking RV all over again
If you’re tall, then yes, it won’t be pleasurable as well. Especially sad because houses of earlier Stalin period were awesome. It doesn’t make Stalin any better, and he wasn’t solving the problem of overpopulation by building houses (sad joke), but the houses from tgat period are well built, have high ceilings, thick walls, sometimes nice things like second entrances and garbage chutes, etc. This was connected with the industrial and economical boom after the war (so, generally the same stuff that happened in the us, only in the us people got a bigger piece of pie).
I converted the heights for you:
- Khruschevka ceiling: 2,5m, 8,2ft
- Stalinka ceilings - 3-4m, 9,8-13.1ft
