Known simply in architecture as slab blocks, these densely packed, multi-unit edifices are arguably the most iconic template for arranging dwellings articulated to modernism and its sustaining doctrines linked to industrialization: standardization, modularity, repetition. They are symbolized by a sweeping aggregation of flats stacked to form linear, sinuous, and seemingly endless patterns. Characterized by slim double-loaded corridors and the liberated ground plane surrounding them, these monuments shaped a mass-void proportion that completely disrupted classic city planning. Narrow floorplates, associated with slabs, were sometimes also fed by elevated catwalks giving access to single-sided flats.
A normalized floor plan supported by some type of open large-spanning skeletal structural system made it possible to alternate lodging typologies and organizational patterns within the same structural grid. The post and beam, post and slab, or the panel and slab are the most common. Prefabrication and industrialized construction relate to these slabs as design was condensed to expressing an axis onto which dwellings were connected as if conveyed by an assembly line into their permanent position. Modular volumetric, panel systems or a combination of both strategies were used to relate affordability through duplicating regulated types for both dwelling units and normalized components for all other building systems, particularly for elevations. Le Corbusier’s Unité d’habitation at Marseille (1952) or Marcel Breuer’s ZUP de Sainte-Croix at Bayonne (1968) typify the unit to whole relationship of theses territorial edges standing vertically as monolithic hives dominating extended landscapes.
Providing flats at a mass scale attached to common services or amenities communicated the long-standing analogy between large cruise ships of the early twentieth century and the modern slab block buoyantly touching ground, its body filled with ergonomic cells and its rooftops imagined as gardens for leisure. Defined by some modernist architects as open racks onto which manufactured units would simply be inserted foreshadowed megastructures, Japanese modernism’s answer to postwar rebuilds. Slabs come in a myriad of scopes and scales but all feature an extruded or sweeping shape creating a hedge of dwellings. Alvar Aalto’s Baker House (1949) or even Ralph Erskine’s inhabitable wall proposal for Resolute Bay (1973) demonstrate the vast social and environmental possibilities of these straight or sinuous lines defining urban form.
Unité d'habitation (top left); ZUP de Sainte-Croix (top right); Baker House (bottom left); Resolute Bay proposal (bottom right)
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