Being Single in a Perfect Society:
Paper for online symposium
Housing For Single People, March 2025,
(KU Leuven/UGhent/Politenico di Milano).
Housing For Single People, March 2025,
(KU Leuven/UGhent/Politenico di Milano).
“Single people do seem to have friends!”—wrote a Norwegian journalist, noting four chairs arranged around the dining table in a freshly furnished showcase apartment in a new housing block for single people, inaugurated in Oslo in April 1967. After a decade of operations, den Ensliges Forening—the Norwegian Singles’ Association—celebrated the opening of its most significant project to date in Oslo. The new 10-story housing block in Dynekilgata consisted of 160 new two-room apartments, each with a large balcony running along the facade. Each apartment featured a living room, a full-size kitchen and a bedroom. For many inhabitants, this was the first time they slept on a real bed rather than a sofa. The house was built by the Singles’ Association, which advocated for the interests of single people, spanning many fields, ranging from fighting the social stigma to taxation, health insurance, social benefits and not least—housing. In a welfare state based on calculations of a perfect statistical average—two adults and two children—single housing was entirely overlooked. The Norwegian Housing Bank, which administered all housing loans and set centralised spatial standards per person and income bracket, made it impossible for single people to obtain a loan.
This contribution is then particularly interested in the complex behind-the-scenes negotiations of the Norwegian Singles’ Association with the bureaucratic actors of the Norwegian housing market. Based on original newspaper sources, this paper traces the architectural and spatial evolution of a single-people house typology in Norway, a country which once catered to statistically average four-people families but one which today tops the world’s charts of the “single epidemic.” Expanding on the research on mixed-generation dwellings, which emerged with the changing Nordic architectural discourse in the 1970s, this paper aims to provide new insights for more diverse housing today.