Residential building type WBS-70 (part-1)

Description I present to you, panelized residential buildings of series WBS-70. Abbreviation WBS 70 is an abbreviation of the word Wohnungsbauserie 70 (housing construction series 70), where the number in the name means the year of project development. The decision to develop a new standard series of panelized apartment buildings was made at the 5th Construction Conference of the Central Committee of the SED and the Council of Ministers of the GDR, held in the late 1960s. The basis for this decision was a study conducted in 1969 on the optimization and rationalization of mass production of standard building elements in the field of panel construction, the authors of which were Wilfried Stallknecht and Achim Felz, who eventually developed the project Wohnungsbauserie 70. The residential buildings of this series are the most widespread in the GDR (East Germany) and account for more than 42% of all housing construction in the GDR! The design of the model buildings was developed in 1970 to replace the earlier model buildings of the P2 series created in 1961, which were not economical enough, as they contained a lot of structural blocks, among which were non-standardized and had differences in regional variants. WBS 70 was much more unified, contained fewer structural elements and was standardized for production in all GDR building factories. This ensured widespread distribution in all regions of the GDR. According to the government's plans, announced in 1970, every resident of the GDR was to live in their own apartment by 1990 and the WBS 70 project was intended to realize these plans, which ultimately failed. Despite the maximum unification of the building elements, the WBS 70 project was in fact a kind of constructor from which houses could be built, significantly changing both their appearance and number of storeys. No other GDR project gave city planners and regional factories such freedom as was provided by the WBS 70 design. Most of the houses of this project were