Apartment

• 1. Introduction

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  The apartment, in its many forms, is where most of humanity now sleeps, eats, and calls home. What most people think of as a modern convenience actually stretches back to the Puebloan peoples of the American Southwest, who were building multi-room dwellings of more than 900 rooms as far back as the 10th century. The ancient Roman insulae rose ten or more stories in the imperial capital, some with more than 200 stairs climbing through the urban fabric. The questions worth asking are not simply when apartments began, but why they look so different depending on where you stand, and how they came to carry such a heavy load of class, aspiration, and meaning.

• 2. A World of Different Names

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  In North America the standard word is apartment, while in the United Kingdom, India, and South Africa it is flat. Australians and New Zealanders traditionally said flat, and have gradually added unit and apartment to everyday use. The naming differences are not merely linguistic: in parts of Malaysia, the word flat signals a specific kind of housing, typically a walk-up block of around five stories with no lift and no facilities, while apartment is the broader and more aspirational term. In Japanese English loanwords, the distinction cuts another way. The term apaato refers to lower-income housing, while manshon is used for high-end apartments. Both terms describe what English speakers would simply call an apartment. The British mansion block, a word with Victorian and Edwardian echoes, carries its own prestige freight, denoting buildings with ornate facades and high-ceilinged flats. Scottish English adds one more layer: tenement carries no negative meaning north of the border, referring plainly to any block of flats sharing a central staircase, particularly those built before 1919. The staircase itself is informally called a close, after the old word for an alleyway.

• 3. Ancient Towers

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  In the Classic Period city of Teotihuacan, apartments were the standard housing for a population of over 200,000. What makes Teotihuacan remarkable is the relative evenness of wealth shown across its apartment compounds, a distribution unusual by any standard. The ancient Roman insulae served the lower and middle classes, with tabernae occupying the ground floors. Emperors beginning with Augustus, who ruled from 30 BC to 14 AD, tried to set height limits of 20 to 25 meters for multi-story buildings, but those limits held with only partial success. Surviving Oxyrhynchus Papyri record that seven-story buildings existed even in provincial towns, such as in 3rd century Hermopolis in Roman Egypt. Medieval Fustat, the old Cairo, went further. In the 10th century, the geographer Al-Muqaddasi described multi-story residential buildings there as resembling minarets, each housing more than 200 people. A century later, Nasir Khusraw described buildings rising to fourteen stories, with roof gardens irrigated by ox-drawn water wheels. In the Yemeni city of Shibam, roughly 500 tower houses built of mud brick rose 5 to 11 stories in the 16th century, some exceeding 100 feet in height, earning Shibam the nickname Manhattan of the desert.

• 4. Who Owns the Walls

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  Owning an apartment is not a single, simple arrangement anywhere in the world. In the United States and Canada, apartment dwellers may be renters, condominium owners, or shareholders in a cooperative. In a cooperative, tenants do not own their individual units; instead they own a proportional number of shares in the corporation that holds the whole building. Co-ops are common in cities such as New York. In England and Wales, some flat owners hold a lease while also owning shares in the company that owns the freehold of the entire building, an arrangement known as a share of freehold. That freeholder retains the right to collect annual ground rents and, subject to planning restrictions, to develop or sell the property. Scotland takes a different approach: long leasehold of residential property was previously unusual there and is now impossible. In Australia, many apartments are owned through strata title, and buildings are typically managed by a body corporate, with owners paying a monthly fee for the upkeep of common spaces. Australian law also enforces a minimum floor-to-ceiling height of 2.4 meters, a requirement that distinguishes apartment buildings from office buildings.

• 5. Types Across the Building

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  Garret apartments occupy the attic floors of buildings, often converted from domestic servants' quarters. Their sloping walls restrict usable space, and without a lift the staircase climb adds to the inconvenience. Yet because they sit at the top of the building, they tend to offer the best views and are quieter for the absence of upstairs neighbours. At the opposite end of the building, basement units carry different trade-offs. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a garden flat in British English as a basement or ground-floor flat with access to a garden or lawn, though it notes the reference to a garden may sometimes be illusory. The term can serve simply as a euphemism for a basement. In Chicago, a garden apartment refers specifically to a basement apartment. Loft apartments developed in the United States during the middle of the 20th century, initially describing living spaces created within former industrial buildings, typically from the 19th century. Artists and musicians seeking accommodation in large cities, particularly New York, favored these large spaces, which were often connected to unused buildings in decaying urban areas occupied illegally by squatters. As old industrial stock grew scarce, developers began constructing new buildings in the same aesthetic. The communal apartment in Russia, known as a kommunalka, takes yet another form: a room within a shared arrangement, typically a cluster of around five room-apartments on a floor of a pre-Revolutionary mansion, with a common kitchen and bathroom.

• 6. London and the Mansion Flat

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  Albert Mansions, constructed between 1867 and 1870 on Victoria Street, was one of the earliest blocks of flats in England. Philip Flower built it and James Knowles designed it. The building was structured as 19 separate houses, each served by a staircase with one flat per floor. Among its tenants were Sir Arthur Sullivan and Lord Alfred Tennyson. By the 2011 census, 52 percent of all homes in London were flats. The idea of flat-living was slow to catch on among British middle classes. Well into the late 19th century, those who lived in flats were assumed to be lower class or transient. Anyone who could afford to do so occupied an entire house. As urban growth and rising costs made traditional London townhouses harder to maintain, attitudes shifted. For bachelors and unmarried women in particular, renting a mansion flat became an attractive alternative. Albert Hall Mansions, designed by Richard Norman Shaw in 1876, was planned as a series of separate projects, with each block built only after the previous one was fully occupied. The approach reduced the risk of a new housing type and proved successful.

• 7. Glasgow's Long Reckoning

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  Scotland's highest concentration of tenement dwellings is in Glasgow, and the city's relationship with that housing stock has been troubled and instructive. Urban renewal projects in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s cleared the oldest tenements, which housed large extended families in cramped conditions, and replaced them with high-rise blocks. Within a couple of decades, those tower blocks became notorious for crime and poverty. Billy Connolly once described the housing schemes built on the city's outskirts as deserts with windows, places with no amenities such as shops or public houses. In 1970, a team from Strathclyde University found that the old tenements had been structurally sound and could have been renovated with modern plumbing. The Corporation acted on this finding for the first time in 1973 at Old Swan Corner in Pollokshaws. Government funding for stone cleaning later revealed a honey-coloured sandstone behind facades long presumed to be grey. Many of Glasgow's worst tenements were ultimately refurbished into desirable accommodation in the 1970s and 1980s. On the 7th of March 2003, the Glasgow Housing Association took ownership of the city's public housing stock and began a 96 million pound clearance and demolition programme aimed at many of the high-rise flats that replaced the tenements decades earlier.

• 8. America's Tenement to Tower

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  In 1839, the first New York City tenement was built. Jacob Riis documented the conditions in the tenement districts in his book How the Other Half Lives, including the story of a blind landlord named Daniel Murphy who ran a colony of blind beggars out of a place called Blind Man's Alley. Murphy told Riis he had made a fortune of four hundred thousand dollars from his properties and appeared before the Board of Health in person to resist improvements, arguing his tenants were not fit for better housing. Campaigners including Upton Sinclair and Jacob Riis pushed for reform, and the New York State Tenement House Act was passed in 1901. In 1949, President Harry S. Truman signed the Housing Act of 1949 to address slum conditions and rebuild housing for the poor. The luxury end of the market was represented early by the Dakota, completed in 1884, one of the first upscale apartment buildings in New York City. In the 1950s and 1960s, Chicago produced groundbreaking architectural designs including the 860-880 Lake Shore Drive Apartments completed in 1951, Marina City in 1964, and Lake Point Tower in 1968. A 2009 revision to the International Building Code gave rise to the one-plus-five building type in many American cities: four wood-framed floors above a concrete podium, popular with developers for combining high density with relatively lower construction costs.