The Minimum Dwelling

""Today's proletarian dwellings... despite their current revolting appearance of hovels, housing barracks or overnight shelters, will be reproduced in the future on a higher level."" Say what you will about his dubious faith in socialist housing schemes, celebrated Czech avant-garde artist and designer Karel Teige (1900-1951) elaborates some provocative and humane ideas for modern housing. His treatise The Minimum Dwelling (1932), translated into English for the first time by MIT architecture professor and Teige scholar Eric Dluhosch, surveys interwar European housing and argues, among other things, for the demise of the eat-in kitchen (the proletariat have no time to cook) and suggests the hotel, with its centralized services, as an ideal model for workers' dwellings. (June)