XL Residential Infrastructures. Evolution of massive housing productions on the large scale

Massive residential sets have been a representative part of the architectural production developed in the 20th century. This has led to territorial approaches, understanding architecture and urban planning as an inseparable couple. The present research analyses the evolution of massive housing productions, focusing on their approaches on the large scale and paying special attention to those extra-long morphological tendencies and of territorial dimensions. For this, an analysis of theoretical and constructed cases that are considered of special relevance has been generated, providing an overview of Europe and the United States, from the early 19th century to 1924; the revealing approaches of the Soviet Union; the conceptual fundamentals in Europe between 1925-1945; Latin American experimentations; as well as the encouraging theoretical approaches of the postwar period. This review opens the way to a more specific contextualization on the examples of collective housing between 1945-1967 and 1968-1986 in the United Kingdom and Italy, generating a comparison between the strategies of the winners and losers of the Second World War and detecting the XL Residential Infrastructures carried out. This architectural type consists of residential buildings with a façade length greater than the standard, exceeding 300 meters; with communities of more than 1,000 residents; and with characteristics intrinsic to urbanity, such as streets in the sky, different travel speeds, meeting spaces, services and other uses.

Mainly developed between the decades of the 20s and 70s, these artifacts were introduced as the constructions of the future that exemplified the housing of the Modern Movement. Its evolution over time has gone through different stages, both of acceptance and rejection due to its misuse and deterioration, by users and experts. This has made them an object of study and recognition in a recent period, which has led to their consequent recovery and enhancement. These pieces are beginning to be considered as heritage assets in their respective urban contexts due to the large communities that they have generated and, from the discipline, have stopped being understood as dwelling machines, to be interpreted from a more human reading. These constructions are now supports for domestic environments that generate regular encounters between their neighbours.

For the detailed study of XL Residential Infrastructures, a British case and an Italian case from the first and second period of the second post-war have been selected. The Park Hill Building, Quartiere Forte Quezzi, Byker Wall, and Quartiere di Corviale will be analysed and redrawn, explaining the transformations suffered and their contemporary reality, as well as data and parameters that will be compared to obtain an understanding of these supports. In this sense, each of the selected examples shows a different intervention strategy, such as partial restoration, programmatic control, renewal of management, regularization of squatters, and restructuring of access areas. The research is completed with a Catalogue that compiles the most significant XL Residential Infrastructures built between 1919-2019, with a total of 85 cases, as well as three Contra-Catalogues of massive or longitudinal housing that show cases that might appear XLRI, but are not. Divided into Catalogue of massive residential sets; Catalogue of housing blocks for community generation; and Catalogue of extra-long residential blocks.