Apartments

The apartment (as housing type) is a set of rooms, including a kitchen, designed as a complete dwelling for occupation by a single household within a larger structure or complex, typically with other similar units. As an architectural type and way of living, the idea dates to ancient Rome. The roots of the apartment as known today, however, lie in the towns of early modern Europe. With the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the great metropolis in the 19th century, the apartment emerged as fundamental component of the urban built environment, mostly, to begin, for the upper middle classes and then, with the introduction of philanthropic and public housing, for workers, often in complexes with innovative courtyard designs emphasizing hygiene, nuclear-family domesticity, and, though community facilities, non-commercial forms of recreation. In the first half of the 20th century both the luxury and the social apartment began to appear beyond western Europe and the United States, including in the USSR, Latin America, and Japan, and under colonial regimes in Asia and Africa. In the second half of the 20th century, the apartment continued to spread. In Europe, the state disincentivized private development and house building, channeling production into apartments, typically grouped in suburban estates. In much of the Global South apartments came to predominate in formal housing (as opposed to informal, often self-built, housing in slums). In rich countries where the state did not discourage private housing, by contrast, including the United States, apartments were reserved mostly for low-income households or, in the private sector, younger and older adults without children at home. In the era of global economic liberalization, the apartment became yet more ubiquitous. In the rapidly urbanizing Global South, the majority of formal housing came to be in apartments. In the Global North, the dispersal of industry allowed city centers to transform into boutique neighborhoods for growing numbers of white-collar workers. All over, acceptance of the apartment led to a proliferation of high-rise forms. This article is largely organized chronologically and geographically, with emphasis on housing cultures, social housing in the Global North, and private housing in the United States. Entries mostly focus on the apartment as a type or as a larger phenomenon. Detailed design studies, surveys of particular architects whose oeuvre includes apartments, and broader place histories that engage the apartment have mostly been excluded.