Designing for apartment access

Although social conflicts in corridor housing have long been acknowledged, few useful alternatives have been developed. The corridor remains a standard of apartment design. As a catalyst to the development of new alternatives, this thesis examines the corridor in detail, and determines some basic principles for the design of more socially coherent access space in apartment housing. The first section of the thesis isolates twelve major problems of corridor living. It then discusses their effect on the social and spatial qualities of the apartment environment. And in response to these problems, it derives principles for the redesign of this environment through an examination of other forms of housing in which access from the street to the front door is more direct and more coherent. In the second section, these principles are applied to the analysis and redesign of one of the few existing alternatives to the internal corridor in apartment housing: the outside access gallery. In this analysis, a group of the more important gallery access projects is examined to determine how well they each fulfill the twelve principles isolated in the first section. Where these principles remain unfulfilled, alternatives are proposed and illustrated. Together, these principles sketch out a larger design project which attempts to fulfill all of the proposed principles.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Architecture.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

1980

Author dc:creator

• Graham, John David Trevor

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Shun Kanda.

• Architecture.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/66716

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/66716