Tower block

Once they were seen as one of the greatest triumphs of the postwar Welfare State and of the social functionalism of Modern architecture. More recently, high flats and other dense Modern housing patterns have become the target of widespread, violent condemnation. The authors of Tower Block have decisively broken from this polarised rhetoric, believing that it has itself fuelled the 'high-rise problem'. Instead, they have undertaken a cautious but comprehensive historical analysis of the buildings in the hope that this may help foster a generally more balanced attitude towards them. Two fundamental questions are addressed in these pages. Firstly: why were tower blocks held to provide good dwellings - better than any previous form of dense urban housing? Here, the authors explore the beliefs of designers and theorists in technical matters such as density, layout, construction and services, as well as in the less easily defined, yet equally urgent, search for 'community' in new housing. And they show that, alongside all this, there ran a belief that it was possible, in at least some of these solutions, to achieve an absolute architectural quality. The second question takes a different