Apartment House

Apartment house

A building containing a number of individual residential dwelling units.

Illustrated Dictionary of Architecture Copyright © 2012, 2002, 1998 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved

apartment

1. A room or suite of rooms designed to be lived in, containing at least one bathroom; is separated from, and is usually one of, many similar units within a multiple dwelling.

2. A building containing at least three such dwelling units; an apartment house. Also see efficiency apartment, garden apartment, apartment hotel.

McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Architecture and Construction. Copyright © 2003 by McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Apartment House

 

a type of architectural structure; a multiple-unit building in which apartments are rented.

The apartment house originated in Europe in the 1830’s and 1840’s. At the turn of the 20th century the apartment house usually occupied the perimeter of the landlord’s lot; only a small inner court remained open. The main characteristic of the building is its honeycomb-like spatial structure; apartments of uniform layout are grouped around the stairwells or corridors and, in gallery houses, along galleries. In the 19th and early 20th century only the street side of the apartment house had an architectural facade, which usually had a decorative character and had no architectural connection to the structure of the building itself. In the 20th century the apartment house became one of the main types of housing for city dwellers in many of the developed capitalist countries.

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.