7 ms·

Transforming of Communist-era apartment blocks that dominate Eastern Europe

36 points by ranit 3y ago

probably_jesus 3y ago
[flagged]
- waffleiron 3y ago
  Home-ownership rates are really high in most (ex-)communist countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_home_ownership_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_home_owne...
- kurthr 3y ago
  I think it's more a question of authoritarianism rather than "Communism". If the state (or a corp) can take away anything you have without reason, then it's really hard to plan for the future. In some places all land is considered state land and you can only lease it, in other places the politics are so fluid your property could be handed out to an oligarch in good with the regime. Both of them have major discontinuities that disrupt decision making.
- revert_to_test 3y ago
  Anecdotal data from Poland : mostly, yes, they are owned by people living in them, or by people renting them (people having small amount of apartments that they are renting). Mind you - in post-communist countries, in cities houses are not as popular as apartments, as we do not have USA-style suburbs. There is issue on the housing (apartment?) market, but it has nothing to do with communism, mostly with capitalism - big funds are buying apartments en masse (mostly new ones) and a lot of people started buying previously cheap apartments and renting them, causing prices to skyrocket in the last years.
- Broken_Hippo 3y ago
  Just to clarify: Folks buy them in the US as well, much like you are likely to be able to rent an entire house with a yard. You'd miss this if you, say, lived in small-to-medium sized housing in the US simply because there isn't a lack of land in cities surrounded by farmland. But if you go to Indianapolis and especially Chicago, you can own an apartment. Of course, they might not call it an apartment, row house, or whatever - it might be called a condo instead.
- rambojohnson 3y ago
  where in the US and its late-stage capitalist collapse is communism alive?
wsgeorge 3y ago
Just from a visual perspective, it's amazing what a colour palette can do
Tade0 3y ago
> But as the blocks age and become inadequate in terms of energy efficiency, there's the question of what to do with them – demolish or retrofit? Huh? Once you fit in new windows and insulation in the form of a thick layer of styrofoam, commie blocks are already very efficient. I grew up in one and we would maintain 22-24°C during the winter because the combination of insulation and district heating allowed for that at a low price.
- Muromec 3y ago
  The price of district heating may not reflect the actual efficiency of insulation zo. Classic commie-block walls are 30-40 cm of bare (reinforced) concrete. The windows as they were put there are double glass in a wooden frame, which you have to glue over with a paper in winter. Sure, replacing windows and slappign styrofoam on a facade helps, but beating that doesn't seem to be hard when building now.
Tenoke 3y ago
Ive grown up in a block like that in Bulgaria, and currently live in a similar but worse and smaller block in Berlin. They are great and pretty cost-efficent. I'm glad there's a movement to renovate them.
- Rinzler89 3y ago
  >Ive grown up in a block like that in Bulgaria, and currently live in a similar but worse and smaller block in Berlin Isn't it ironic when you move to a country that's 10x richer, but the real estate is somehow worse lol?
rambojohnson 3y ago
I actually find brutalist architecture charming, and not sure why the BBC opted to use such overloaded language such as "~ apartment blocks that DOMINATE Eastern Europe" lol relax.
- hackerlight 3y ago
  I dislike that the conversation around apartment tends to be centred around form instead of function. Does it have better insulation, ventilation and sound proofing? That's all that matters. Form gets so much attention because the public conversation around housing is dominated by older and more wealthy NIMBYs who don't have to live in apartments, so their only consideration is how they look as they drive past them on their way to work.
  - synecdoche 3y ago
    I do not agree. Beauty is a necessary prerequisite for a healthy and prosperous life and by extension society. Rich or poor.
    - Joker_vD 3y ago
      Which is, no doubt, is the reason why brutalism was invented in post-WW2 Great Britain. The Soviets kept building in "socialist classicism" style around that time; those apartment blocks from the article were Khrushev's invention, after the guy condemned the "architectural excesses" and disbanded the Soviet Academy of Architecture.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - hackerlight 3y ago
      You can't appreciate beauty if your room has no sunlight, the highway noises wake you up, the trapped VOCs from cooking give you respiratory illness and the lack of insulation inflates your power bill eating into what little of your paycheck you have left for groceries. It's Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Beauty as an ideal should only be aspired to once the basics have been solved, which is adequate and liveable housing provision. I view anyone who inverts this order with deep suspicion, and even cynicism. The needs they're catering to certainly aren't those of the people that have to live in these places. Especially in a modern context where an appeal to form is often weaponized by anti-housing activists, and where form is typically more than adequate but function and availability is not.
dvh 3y ago
I bought mine in 2011 for $37k (single room apartment with kitchen and bathroom/shower, interior freshly renovated). Exterior renovated in 2020 (free, mix of utilities and eurofonds). In the 2022 winter I didn't turn on radiator once during the winter and temperature remained above 22°C. When I search similar apartments now they cost $90k. Tax/trash/utilities are $150/month. Everything is walking distance away.
- Tade0 3y ago
  > In the 2022 winter I didn't turn on radiator once during the winter and temperature remained above 22°C. Most likely the grandmas living around you had their radiators at maximum. I have a relative who also doesn't turn on their radiator because otherwise it would be simply suffocating in there.
  - Muromec 3y ago
    Oh that's not how commie blocks and heating work. You can't turn the radiators on and off in a classic commieblocks. There is no valve, there is no anything -- your only regulator is a window. The local government picks a day in a calendar once in 5 years when the turning on and off happens. People who talks about efficiency, insulation and all that have no idea.
    - Tade0 3y ago
      It's true that the municipal heating services turn the heat on but there are definitely dials you can turn - I lived in four different commie blocks and in every one the radiators had dials. Nowadays they even have wireless sensors to bill you for the heat you actually used and of course enforce the requirement to have them on most of the time so as to not become a heat sink. They've proven particularly useful when due to a mistake in reading the apartment plan the workers installed the radiator meant for the living room in my room.
      - Muromec 3y ago
        This sounds like a difference between ussr proper and the more broader “eastern block”, as I haven’t seen a single dial on those things in a whole country. The fact you even meter those per-apartment makes me believe even more. The further western you go from the epicenter of this shitshow, the more amenities those things get
Weryj 3y ago
All these places with super high housing prices because of supply issues? Maybe we need more, not less. Why wait for high quality housing, when we need something to alleviate pressure now. At least give people the option to be function over form and save a buck. I mean, plain boiling water with Oats is a meal I eat a lot, but just because it's pretty tasteless, doesn't mean it's not an effective solution to hunger.
- malermeister 3y ago
  That is exactly the approach the Soviets took when they built these in the first place. They might get a bad rep these days, but commieblocks lifted out millions and millions of people from much worse circumstances.
  - 48864w6ui 3y ago
    Thanks to the internet it's relatively easy to see what the alternative housing stock was; I too would have chosen cheap & cheerful, especially in a country where heating systems matter (the stove was often the show off piece of a Russian peasant's house).
  - Muromec 3y ago
    You sadly miss the larger picture here. Why would soviets suddenly have a housing crisis that required shit-quality housing? Why don't we have commie-blocks district in Amsterdam? Worse circumstances were -- living in villages in their own houses, but that was against communist things. People had to live in public housing in a city and work in a factory, be mobile and be shuffled around whatever number of timezones and thousands of kilometers -- that was the whole point of ideology and was needed for industrialization too. Life in a village sucked by design too.
    - malermeister 3y ago
      Ummm. Because of WW2 and the Nazis waging a war of extermination on the Soviet population? Many cities were completely reduced to rubble, as were any villages that got in their way. Amsterdam still has their pretty Dutch Golden Age buildings because the war played out very differently there.
elzbardico 3y ago
Funny thing is that this style came from Eastern Europe. Early soviet architecture was heavily slanted towards classic themes, as per Stalin personal tastes. Only after Stalin died that brutalism and modernist themes became prevalent in the soviet system.
- elzbardico 3y ago
  Typo: I mean WESTERN Europe.
bbsz 3y ago
The title is misleading as the article primarily focuses on Bulgaria. In contrast, Poland began re-insulating old blocks en masse about 20 years ago, especially in all the larger cities. Moreover, the project isn't as "innovative" as it seems to be portrayed in the article. The quality of these buildings today depends on a variety of factors, such as the precise time they were built (during periods of a strong vs. weak socialist economy), the location (growing worker cities vs. peripheral cities), and their maintenance over the years. During socialist times and even up to today, these buildings were largely maintained by legal "cooperatives." The quality of management within these cooperatives can vary significantly. And management of those basically never changes through the decades. There is also a notable difference in the quality of an average "block" among different Central and Eastern European countries. Having traveled through most of this part of the continent and living in Poland, I've observed that many Balkan Soviet blocks were of significantly lower quality, likely due to smaller economies and greater scarcity of materials at the time, which affected their ability to meet building standards (all these blocks were state-built). For anyone interested in how these were made en masse in months, here's a link to an old Polish movie archive from 1976, which was pretty much the peak of building these in Poland, following a substantial loans from the western world. The video lacks subtitles, but you can still observe the manufacturing, quality control, delivery, and on-site assembly process. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYW5bnD-3Z8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYW5bnD-3Z8
- Muromec 3y ago
  Wait, your commieblocks had maintenance? How dare you be so filthy-rich westernmost-eastern-european!
  - bbsz 3y ago
    Well, the last one (hopefully) I was living in and moved from in 2015, was built in 1971 and it's "district cooperative" was mostly unchanged from that time (starting from technical employees, through administrative ones and ending on "executives") and basically was there to just rubber stamp any inspection. It's not like the building was collapsing of course. It had full 10-floors of tenants. But if going by the actual inspection book - it shouldn't. Gas leaks - check, Fire hazard in the basement - check, Fire hazard through faulty (aluminum) electrical installation - check, Elevator out of order or just simply being scary - check, Often plumbing problems (no hot water for a month? check!) and the list could go on and on. The last straw for me was when I installed a water filtration and filters basically turned black in a week and clogged. I just moved. One of the big advantages of those buildings is often the location. Beats living with no public space (parks, playgrounds, walking space etc) and public utilities (like schools, commies, built those with every new district erected) and on the outskirts of the city
leto_ii 3y ago
I started appreciating the design and build quality of commie blocks only after living in "the West" for a while. The prevalence of poor quality, cramped (and very expensive) housing in many of Europe's wealthiest cities is really disregarded, I think.
- Tenoke 3y ago
  Yes, I come from a commie block in Bulgaria and was rather taken aback when I moved to London as a fresh adult and the houses I lived in there had so many more issues, such worse insulation etc.

36 points by ranit 3y ago

probably_jesus 3y ago

[flagged]

waffleiron 3y ago
Home-ownership rates are really high in most (ex-)communist countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_home_ownership_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_home_owne...
kurthr 3y ago
I think it's more a question of authoritarianism rather than "Communism". If the state (or a corp) can take away anything you have without reason, then it's really hard to plan for the future. In some places all land is considered state land and you can only lease it, in other places the politics are so fluid your property could be handed out to an oligarch in good with the regime. Both of them have major discontinuities that disrupt decision making.
revert_to_test 3y ago
Anecdotal data from Poland : mostly, yes, they are owned by people living in them, or by people renting them (people having small amount of apartments that they are renting). Mind you - in post-communist countries, in cities houses are not as popular as apartments, as we do not have USA-style suburbs. There is issue on the housing (apartment?) market, but it has nothing to do with communism, mostly with capitalism - big funds are buying apartments en masse (mostly new ones) and a lot of people started buying previously cheap apartments and renting them, causing prices to skyrocket in the last years.
Broken_Hippo 3y ago
Just to clarify: Folks buy them in the US as well, much like you are likely to be able to rent an entire house with a yard. You'd miss this if you, say, lived in small-to-medium sized housing in the US simply because there isn't a lack of land in cities surrounded by farmland. But if you go to Indianapolis and especially Chicago, you can own an apartment. Of course, they might not call it an apartment, row house, or whatever - it might be called a condo instead.
rambojohnson 3y ago
where in the US and its late-stage capitalist collapse is communism alive?

wsgeorge 3y ago

Just from a visual perspective, it's amazing what a colour palette can do

Tade0 3y ago

> But as the blocks age and become inadequate in terms of energy efficiency, there's the question of what to do with them – demolish or retrofit? Huh? Once you fit in new windows and insulation in the form of a thick layer of styrofoam, commie blocks are already very efficient. I grew up in one and we would maintain 22-24°C during the winter because the combination of insulation and district heating allowed for that at a low price.

Muromec 3y ago
The price of district heating may not reflect the actual efficiency of insulation zo. Classic commie-block walls are 30-40 cm of bare (reinforced) concrete. The windows as they were put there are double glass in a wooden frame, which you have to glue over with a paper in winter. Sure, replacing windows and slappign styrofoam on a facade helps, but beating that doesn't seem to be hard when building now.

Tenoke 3y ago

Ive grown up in a block like that in Bulgaria, and currently live in a similar but worse and smaller block in Berlin. They are great and pretty cost-efficent. I'm glad there's a movement to renovate them.

Rinzler89 3y ago
>Ive grown up in a block like that in Bulgaria, and currently live in a similar but worse and smaller block in Berlin Isn't it ironic when you move to a country that's 10x richer, but the real estate is somehow worse lol?

rambojohnson 3y ago

I actually find brutalist architecture charming, and not sure why the BBC opted to use such overloaded language such as "~ apartment blocks that DOMINATE Eastern Europe" lol relax.

hackerlight 3y ago
I dislike that the conversation around apartment tends to be centred around form instead of function. Does it have better insulation, ventilation and sound proofing? That's all that matters. Form gets so much attention because the public conversation around housing is dominated by older and more wealthy NIMBYs who don't have to live in apartments, so their only consideration is how they look as they drive past them on their way to work.
- synecdoche 3y ago
  I do not agree. Beauty is a necessary prerequisite for a healthy and prosperous life and by extension society. Rich or poor.
  - Joker_vD 3y ago
    Which is, no doubt, is the reason why brutalism was invented in post-WW2 Great Britain. The Soviets kept building in "socialist classicism" style around that time; those apartment blocks from the article were Khrushev's invention, after the guy condemned the "architectural excesses" and disbanded the Soviet Academy of Architecture.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - hackerlight 3y ago
    You can't appreciate beauty if your room has no sunlight, the highway noises wake you up, the trapped VOCs from cooking give you respiratory illness and the lack of insulation inflates your power bill eating into what little of your paycheck you have left for groceries. It's Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Beauty as an ideal should only be aspired to once the basics have been solved, which is adequate and liveable housing provision. I view anyone who inverts this order with deep suspicion, and even cynicism. The needs they're catering to certainly aren't those of the people that have to live in these places. Especially in a modern context where an appeal to form is often weaponized by anti-housing activists, and where form is typically more than adequate but function and availability is not.

dvh 3y ago

I bought mine in 2011 for $37k (single room apartment with kitchen and bathroom/shower, interior freshly renovated). Exterior renovated in 2020 (free, mix of utilities and eurofonds). In the 2022 winter I didn't turn on radiator once during the winter and temperature remained above 22°C. When I search similar apartments now they cost $90k. Tax/trash/utilities are $150/month. Everything is walking distance away.

Tade0 3y ago
> In the 2022 winter I didn't turn on radiator once during the winter and temperature remained above 22°C. Most likely the grandmas living around you had their radiators at maximum. I have a relative who also doesn't turn on their radiator because otherwise it would be simply suffocating in there.
- Muromec 3y ago
  Oh that's not how commie blocks and heating work. You can't turn the radiators on and off in a classic commieblocks. There is no valve, there is no anything -- your only regulator is a window. The local government picks a day in a calendar once in 5 years when the turning on and off happens. People who talks about efficiency, insulation and all that have no idea.
  - Tade0 3y ago
    It's true that the municipal heating services turn the heat on but there are definitely dials you can turn - I lived in four different commie blocks and in every one the radiators had dials. Nowadays they even have wireless sensors to bill you for the heat you actually used and of course enforce the requirement to have them on most of the time so as to not become a heat sink. They've proven particularly useful when due to a mistake in reading the apartment plan the workers installed the radiator meant for the living room in my room.
    - Muromec 3y ago
      This sounds like a difference between ussr proper and the more broader “eastern block”, as I haven’t seen a single dial on those things in a whole country. The fact you even meter those per-apartment makes me believe even more. The further western you go from the epicenter of this shitshow, the more amenities those things get

Weryj 3y ago

All these places with super high housing prices because of supply issues? Maybe we need more, not less. Why wait for high quality housing, when we need something to alleviate pressure now. At least give people the option to be function over form and save a buck. I mean, plain boiling water with Oats is a meal I eat a lot, but just because it's pretty tasteless, doesn't mean it's not an effective solution to hunger.

malermeister 3y ago
That is exactly the approach the Soviets took when they built these in the first place. They might get a bad rep these days, but commieblocks lifted out millions and millions of people from much worse circumstances.
- 48864w6ui 3y ago
  Thanks to the internet it's relatively easy to see what the alternative housing stock was; I too would have chosen cheap & cheerful, especially in a country where heating systems matter (the stove was often the show off piece of a Russian peasant's house).
- Muromec 3y ago
  You sadly miss the larger picture here. Why would soviets suddenly have a housing crisis that required shit-quality housing? Why don't we have commie-blocks district in Amsterdam? Worse circumstances were -- living in villages in their own houses, but that was against communist things. People had to live in public housing in a city and work in a factory, be mobile and be shuffled around whatever number of timezones and thousands of kilometers -- that was the whole point of ideology and was needed for industrialization too. Life in a village sucked by design too.
  - malermeister 3y ago
    Ummm. Because of WW2 and the Nazis waging a war of extermination on the Soviet population? Many cities were completely reduced to rubble, as were any villages that got in their way. Amsterdam still has their pretty Dutch Golden Age buildings because the war played out very differently there.

elzbardico 3y ago

Funny thing is that this style came from Eastern Europe. Early soviet architecture was heavily slanted towards classic themes, as per Stalin personal tastes. Only after Stalin died that brutalism and modernist themes became prevalent in the soviet system.

elzbardico 3y ago
Typo: I mean WESTERN Europe.

bbsz 3y ago

The title is misleading as the article primarily focuses on Bulgaria. In contrast, Poland began re-insulating old blocks en masse about 20 years ago, especially in all the larger cities. Moreover, the project isn't as "innovative" as it seems to be portrayed in the article. The quality of these buildings today depends on a variety of factors, such as the precise time they were built (during periods of a strong vs. weak socialist economy), the location (growing worker cities vs. peripheral cities), and their maintenance over the years. During socialist times and even up to today, these buildings were largely maintained by legal "cooperatives." The quality of management within these cooperatives can vary significantly. And management of those basically never changes through the decades. There is also a notable difference in the quality of an average "block" among different Central and Eastern European countries. Having traveled through most of this part of the continent and living in Poland, I've observed that many Balkan Soviet blocks were of significantly lower quality, likely due to smaller economies and greater scarcity of materials at the time, which affected their ability to meet building standards (all these blocks were state-built). For anyone interested in how these were made en masse in months, here's a link to an old Polish movie archive from 1976, which was pretty much the peak of building these in Poland, following a substantial loans from the western world. The video lacks subtitles, but you can still observe the manufacturing, quality control, delivery, and on-site assembly process. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYW5bnD-3Z8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYW5bnD-3Z8

Muromec 3y ago
Wait, your commieblocks had maintenance? How dare you be so filthy-rich westernmost-eastern-european!
- bbsz 3y ago
  Well, the last one (hopefully) I was living in and moved from in 2015, was built in 1971 and it's "district cooperative" was mostly unchanged from that time (starting from technical employees, through administrative ones and ending on "executives") and basically was there to just rubber stamp any inspection. It's not like the building was collapsing of course. It had full 10-floors of tenants. But if going by the actual inspection book - it shouldn't. Gas leaks - check, Fire hazard in the basement - check, Fire hazard through faulty (aluminum) electrical installation - check, Elevator out of order or just simply being scary - check, Often plumbing problems (no hot water for a month? check!) and the list could go on and on. The last straw for me was when I installed a water filtration and filters basically turned black in a week and clogged. I just moved. One of the big advantages of those buildings is often the location. Beats living with no public space (parks, playgrounds, walking space etc) and public utilities (like schools, commies, built those with every new district erected) and on the outskirts of the city

leto_ii 3y ago

I started appreciating the design and build quality of commie blocks only after living in "the West" for a while. The prevalence of poor quality, cramped (and very expensive) housing in many of Europe's wealthiest cities is really disregarded, I think.

Tenoke 3y ago
Yes, I come from a commie block in Bulgaria and was rather taken aback when I moved to London as a fresh adult and the houses I lived in there had so many more issues, such worse insulation etc.