BLOCKHOUSE

vvvvThe post-soviet landscape is often underscored by issues of language, as the building of vast concrete districts often came with a Russian workforce that stayed when the equipment had left. But there is the more abstract language of the built environment that is more often felt rather than talked about. It is a collection of spatial conditions that only people with a shared experience of those buildings know.
vvvvAs with everything that is planned rather than spontaneous or natural, the block-housing environment is imbued with the idea of intention. Informed, yet misguided ideas of what living should be like, modernist experiments with building density, orientation, materials, and so on, only demonstrate their true reality after years. The character of a place is determined by quirks and accidents, eventually revealed through stories.      
vvvvAt the back of stairwells in panel buildings of series 602 in Riga as well as many others, there is a second entrance with a short staircase and a canopy. Designed to allow egress to both the streetside and the backyard side of the building, they have nevertheless been in most cases closed, either to limit heat loss or better control access. In some cases, its small foyer is joined to the adjacent apartment to form a small business, such as a beauty salon or a hairdresser.
vvvvOtherwise, if it is in a favorable, quiet location, it is used as a hangout space for small groups of young people, hanging out after or during school hours. This has frequently

been an annoyance to nearby inhabitants, as its visitors can be loud and leave rubbish after themselves. Without knowing it, its designers had created a congregational space, a specific architectural typology, something that can be found in many contemporary schools’ and universities’ entrance halls, at once a small theatre and a place to rest, chat and have fun.      
vvvvLike the front garden in terraced housing and the courtyard in urban environments, the backyard and its second подъезд (podyesd, or ‘poģītis’ used in Latvia to mean ‘entrance’ or ‘stairs’) is an important interface of the block housing habitat. It is both symbolic of a type of building, as well as the urban environment within which it sits. But most importantly, places like this are a container of collective memories that span time as well as location. People bond over similar experiences they have had there across the city or even in different parts of the country. Unlike social housing architecture in western Europe, the panel houses of post-soviet countries have not seen reconstruction or at least a cultural rebirth quite yet. Not because of trauma, but a vague sense that forgetting, rather than remembering might be better. For a place to develop, however, a degree of care must be deployed, an idea of embracing the built reality as-is, seeing its quirks not as a burden, but as a collection of opportunities to connect.