The housing floor plan serves as the point of departure for examining the relationship between the broader conditions of its production and the spatial positions it establishes for different users. In the thesis, I approach the floor plan as a spatial intersection of actors that enables certain activities, relations, and modes of use, makes others more difficult, and leaves still others unanticipated. The relationships between these actors change over time, yet none of them determines the spatial organisation directly or independently. The floor plan temporarily stabilises these relationships within a system of spaces, surfaces, furnishings, thresholds, connections, and anticipated uses, thereby establishing different spatial conditions for activities and users.
The research focuses on housing architecture in Slovenia in the second half of the twentieth century and proceeds through several successive steps. It first reconstructs the changing conditions under which housing was produced by examining the development of the housing system, the architectural profession, the experience of inhabitants and forms of dwelling, as well as technology and production. Drawing on Stuart Elden and Beatriz Colomina, it then develops an analytical framework for a relational reading of the floor plan. On this basis, five housing examples from the late 1940s through the 1980s are analysed as comparative spatial cross-sections rather than as representative models of individual decades. The spatial analysis is subsequently read through three selected fields of conflicts of dwelling: conflict between genders, between generations, and between architect and inhabitant. In the final part of the thesis, the individual findings are brought together within the broader concept of the floor plan as a spatial intersection, and its value as a historical source is examined. The research combines architectural plans with legislation, professional and theoretical texts, data on housing policy and production, and sources on everyday life.
The comparison shows that the development of the housing floor plan cannot be adequately described solely through an increase in the number of rooms or their growing functional specialisation. More significant is the changing question of which relations between activities and users become regulable, and from whose spatial position they can be altered. The long-term shift can therefore be described as a transition from the differentiation of spaces to the differentiation of spatial positions. This development does not represent a linear increase in spatial freedom, since improvements in particular housing conditions can simultaneously introduce new constraints or new forms of spatial determination. Conflicts of dwelling are therefore understood as spatial expressions of broader contradictions, through which the simultaneous gains and limitations of housing modernisation become particularly legible.
The contribution of the thesis lies in a relational reading of the housing floor plan as a historical source, as it examines the relations established by spatial organisation. The floor plan thus becomes a means of investigating where and how broader historical relations acquire concrete spatial form through architectural translation, and what possibilities and constraints they establish for everyday dwelling.
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