Influence
Khrushchyovka housing blocks can also be found in Cuba, not only Eastern Europe, due to the spread of communism overseas, Cuba had links to the Soviet Union. In 1963, Cuba was struck by Hurricane Flora, that impacted the country immensely, the news was shared with Nikita Khrushchev and as a “gesture of solidarity” (Alonso and Palmarola, 2014, Khrushchev donated a factory to Cuba to produce Soviet type prefabricated housing blocks. This plan was not carefully inspected as the housing type was not designed for climates such as Cuba, it had been designed to protect from heavy snow loads rather than wind loads that had been the key problem to Cuba. It raised discussions, research to be done to better equip this design for Cuba, Pedro Ignacio Alonso and Hugo Palmarola two researchers and designers published “Panel” to show the journey of the prefabricated concrete panel through Cuba in the 1960’s and Chile in the1970s. This was the first time for the block type to be physically adapted to another country. Cultural historian of Eastern Europe, David Crowley proposed a term to divide and differentiate the social modern architecture from Western modernism in to ‘Socmodernism 1 and 2’ he categorised Socmodernism 1 “in this sphere architects were expected to behave as technocrats; they were required not to produce buildings but types, with the result that housing design was removed from the sphere of art to engineering” (Crowley 2009). Crowley’s analogy helps explain the reasoning behind the lack of design that was put towards these blocks,
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