Broom cupboards masquerading as bedrooms, window-boxes as balconies. Box-like homes with shoe-box-sized measurements piled high on top of each other, cramming millions into small urban spaces. Hailed as the essence of urban existence, apartment living goes hand-in-hand with modern city life.
Although long a way of life in the cities of continental Europe, apartments only really came to the fore in Manhattan in the early 1900s as property values soared. Like most modern trends, once New Yorkers embraced apartment living the phenomenon became fashionable and so it became the blueprint for modern city living.
The story of the apartment is chronicled and illustrated in apartment: Stylish Solutions for Apartment Living by Alan Powers (Ryland Peters and Small, £18.99 sterling). Apartments and shared townhouses were the norm for people at almost all levels of society for centuries, according to the author, and in England, living in "chamber", with service provided, was usual only for bachelors.
London acquired its first prestige block of "mansion flats", the Albert Hall Mansions designed by Richard Norman in 1881. Overlooking Kensington Gardens the design resembled Dutch canal-side town houses. Still a landmark on the London landscape, the chateau-style Whitehall Court was the second apartment block built and for many years there were no kitchen facilities in the apartments so residents ate in a dining room on the ground floor.
That was in 1884, and this was the same year that the first apartment block was developed in Manhattan. At the time, the building on the west side of Central Park was situated so far uptown that it acquired the nickname Dakota, in reference to the remote territory.
It was reinforced concrete construction after 1900 that made it possible not only to build taller than before, but also to change the shape of buildings. "After 1900, apartments began to develop architectural personalities of their own. Auguste Perret's block on Rue Franklin, Paris, broke the street line to give a more varied outlook to the flats," according to Powers.
Swiss architect Le Corbusier rose to fame during the inter-war period as the "prophet of this new spirit". Art Deco and modernism defined the style of the 1930s and London, Paris and New York began to embrace the concept.
After World War II, new building regulations meant that a lighter look - glass and steel - became possible and skyscrapers dominated American city skylines. According to Powers, Mies van der Rohe's Twin Towers in Chicago and the Seagram office building in New York are good examples of this era, while Le Corbusier's Unite d'Habitation at Marseille became the blueprint favoured for public housing all over the world.
A typical slab block, the tower block was conceived as a self-contained utopia of communal living in the city.
Like Sunday brunch and cafe lattes, Ireland really only latched on to the apartment concept with gusto in the 1990s but apart from a few applauded complexes in Temple Bar such as the Green Building and The Printworks, there are few architecturally noteworthy developments in Irish cities.
