There was an architect, Le Corbusier. He was a socialist, so his projects of future cities involved a lot of public spaces where people spend their free and working time, while a person's home was just a small area for sleeping and eating breakfast. The Soviets took the idea of small personal homes, and dropped the "nice public areas" part.

It's cold in the winter because the walls are quite thin
You can hear your neighbours loudly speaking
I was lucky to have a normal-sized room in a later "Brezhnevka" house, but many of my classmates had rooms (if they had a separate room at all) where you had a bed, a cupboard+desk combo, and a chair in the middle, that you have to remove to get to the window. Japan-sized stuff.

Speaking of Le Corbusier, as his main (I know, that's subjective) achievement was a technical approach to ergonomics - all sizes in his projects were based on human sizes and proportions. Meaning that a height of a ceiling is a height of an average adult man raising his hands, + some space. It worked, and it's cost-effective, but you really like some extra space, and have more than 3 sq.m. toilet.

[–] sunzu@kbin.run 8 points 3 months ago (2 children)

All fair criticism and that's why I prefer to have 600k visiable homeless in the US with likely another 1 million living in their cars.

SInce you knew all of this would also know All of this is fixable with modern technique and extra investment.

You would also know that north American style construction with shiti wood frame for both houses and apts are a lot worse for noise . Furthermore they only gotten properly insulated for in the 1990s so all the stock prior to that is beyond inefficient.

Literally boomer 2mmilion mcmension and you still hear guy walking upstairs...

Like wtf y'all paying for

[–] toofpic@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Oh yes, I've heard of (but haven't experienced myself) a low quality of a "standard" us house, but personally I really value the amount of space over many things. When the covid started, we rented a shitty thin-walled summerhouse to get out of the 5M city and keep some freedom of movement. And it was so awesome I didn't care how much firewood we burned, or how I could hear the kids through 2 walls. Because I could step out of the door and still stay within "my territory", my place. And in most of small apartments, not just the soviet ones, you feel trapped in those 2 or 3 concrete boxes you call home.
And if you build a house for yourself, you have a chance to make use of all the modern technologies, and some things are not that much more expensive - I know because I did plan to do it, and I even have a giant excel file with calculations and choices made. Never happened because we moved to another country.

[–] sunzu@kbin.run -2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

There is value in space and you if got means it, it aint no thing.

We sure as fuck don't have a shortage of luxury inventory lol

But sound proofing us style construction is nearly impossible is my understanding due to structural studs running across floors passing sound. Concrete structures are not economical, not sure how true this is though.

[–] uis@lemm.ee 1 points 3 months ago

All of this is fixable with modern technique and extra investment.

Soviets fixed it with old techniques and no extra investment. By, you know, just building homes for people.

[–] ThunderclapSasquatch@startrek.website 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Oh god I already feel claustrophobic knowing everything in that tiny space would be made for people half a foot shorter than me, it'd be living in that fucking RV all over again

[–] toofpic@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

If you're tall, then yes, it won't be pleasurable as well. Especially sad because houses of earlier Stalin period were awesome. It doesn't make Stalin any better, and he wasn't solving the problem of overpopulation by building houses (sad joke), but the houses from tgat period are well built, have high ceilings, thick walls, sometimes nice things like second entrances and garbage chutes, etc. This was connected with the industrial and economical boom after the war (so, generally the same stuff that happened in the us, only in the us people got a bigger piece of pie).
I converted the heights for you:

Khruschevka ceiling: 2,5m, 8,2ft
Stalinka ceilings - 3-4m, 9,8-13.1ft

[–] uis@lemm.ee 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Especially sad because houses of earlier Stalin period were awesome

There is nothing to be sad because houses of earlier Stalin period were not for people, but for nomenclature.

[–] toofpic@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

There's a shitton of nice buildings, I'm not telling about Moscow towers only

[–] sunzu@kbin.run 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Each city had them but as guy above said, they were for the party members and you had to be decently well ranked to get a stalin style apartment. they were deff luxury.

[–] toofpic@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago

They were better, but what do youmean by "Stalin luxury"? Again, I not speaking of several unique buildings in Moscow, SPb, etc. I'm speaking of thousands buildings in many many cities, buildings of a period.
Let's take my family or people I know as an example:
the only person remotely "high ranked" was my grandfather, an engineer of a shipbuilding bureau. He and my father's family got a four-room apartment in one of those 1000s of buildings. Same as many other engineers, he wasn't super high ranked.
at the same time, my grandma's sister got a same-type apartment, before my grandma even knew my grandpa. Guess what profession she was? A nurse! Does that sound like Stalin-level? My classmate was one of four kids, so they got apartment in stalinka as a part of a social quota for families like that.
What do you say, is my family special? We don't have wikipedia pages, and we weren't anything special in financial terms.
Are you even from USSR/Russia, or you just read about it?