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>He was thinking big: houses built in factories (like cars) and delivered to the site by helicopter. You could roll out a whole neighborhood in a week or two.
by m4rtink 7y ago
>He was thinking big: houses built in factories (like cars) and delivered to the site by helicopter. You could roll out a whole neighborhood in a week or two.
Eastern block panel building settlements were built from per-fabricated segments mass produced in a factory. Then assembled on site from these segments by cranes rolling on rails.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panel%C3%A1k https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panel%C3%A1k
You can actually tell quite easily in many cases where the crane rails were & that their most efficient location was the factor, not stuff like ergonomy or aesthetics.
The end result was indeed a lot of housing capacity built at record time. On the other hand the quality of the flats was often disputable and the new high density neighborhoods often lacked basic public amenities, at least initially.
In a more modern context there are also issues with lack of parking space (no one expected so many cars back then) and lack of thermal isolation (usually fixed by replacing the windows by modern ones & isolating the sides).
>hyper-efficient "fog" showers. ( Legend has it that the project was spiked because it would put too many electricians and carpenters and so on out of business. )
Modern Japanese showers are pretty much like that. Japanese toilets are also much much more water efficient than what you can see here in Europe, not to mention mostly including bidets and other civilized living amenities still mostly considered extraodrinary around here.
- jacquesm 7y agoAs bad as the 'Blocks' are they are to this date housing many millions of people and despite 30 years of capitalism there has been no equivalent to date. The money is there but it is far more concentrated now. The communist system was terrible in many ways, and economically a complete disaster. But: you had a (very small and cramped) place to live, petty crime was next to non existent (corruption though, was rampant) and your pension was guaranteed. When the wall fell it became a free-for-all overnight, all that security went out the window and not much was done to replace it. A couple of people got obscenely rich and plenty of people dropped well below the poverty line. It is that which powers the rise of assholes like Orban: the people that yearn for the bad situation they were in before because at least they knew just how bad it was.
- carapace 7y agoI heard a joke from that time, "Everything they told us about Communism was a lie, but everything they told us about Capitalism is true."
- sudosysgen 7y agoDamn, that's quite striking.
- rvp-x 7y agoI lived in a similar place and I somewhat miss it. It isn't just parking spaces, the neighborhood was designed with walking in mind. Many streets had shops at the bottom floor, and I could do all my errands on foot. My elderly grandparents still live there. In a small radius around their building is a grocery store, medical clinic and a bus stop. They could live independently for a long time after they lost the ability to drive.