Type Projects as Tools: Housing Type Design in Communist Romania

Abstract

This paper investigates so-called type projects and the process of housing typification in Romania under the communist regime (1948–89). It studies designs for housing of particular types (‘type projects’), primarily apartment buildings, disseminated through catalogues, that were used as more than just models for construction. They were ‘tools’, the active interface between political goals and actual buildings, similar to the contexts of contemporary developments in Eastern and Western Europe. Politicians exerted governmental control to ensure an institutional control over the design and production of type projects. A type project, with plans, section, elevation and specifications, contributed to the organization of the socialist lifestyle within family dwellings, led to new urban forms and cityscapes, standardized construction, guided industrialization and sustained the prefabrication of housing, especially large-panel prefabrication. This paper examines how these types entirely determined housing production.