Berlin’s Modernist Interwar Estates II: ‘Light, air and sun’

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1920s, 1930s

Last week’s post examined two of Berlin’s strikingly modernist interwar estates and the politics which created them.  We’ll examine two more this week, built just before Weimar Germany’s famously progressive politics succumbed to Nazism.

That politics was, of course, always fiercely contested and the cultural battle for the German soul is clearly seen in the so-called Dächerkrieg (or Roof War) which erupted in Berlin in 1928.

An early image of Großsiedlung Siemensstadt

The point at issue resided in an apparently arcane architectural debate between the relative merits of flat and pitched roofs.  The social democratic and trades union building cooperative GEHAG had constructed a modernist (and therefore flat-roofed) estate in the southwestern Berlin suburb of Zehlendorf.  The Gemeinnützige Aktiengesellschaft für Angestellten-Heimstätten (GAGFAH building society), representing the salaried, lower-middle classes, opened a combined architectural exhibition and more traditional, pitch-roofed housing estate adjacent to it.

The Roof War’s competing estates (with thanks to Atlas Obscura)

A battle royal ensued.  Modernist commentators berated the GAGFAH estate and argued that it – in its failure to build simple, functional homes – lacked public spirit and should be denied public funds.  Their opponents defended the estate as representing a specifically German style of architecture.

In other contexts, the question of roof forms might be seen as a simple and practical issue and certainly one susceptible to compromise. In interwar Germany, no such compromise was possible – ‘opinions as to what was the appropriate architectural style for the German home were essentially irreconcilable between progressives and conservatives’: the Roof War represented an existential struggle ‘of traditional versus modern, the bourgeoisie versus the proletariat, rural versus urban, the former regime versus the current republic’. (1)

Weiße Stadt: head-building at entrance to estate by Bruno Ahrends

The Weiße Stadt (White City) Estate with its flat roofs, cubical forms and white walls, built between 1929 and 1931, represented modernist architecture in stark form.  It was built by the Gemeinnützige Heimstättengesellschaft Primus mbH, a municipally-owned housing association, on a greenfield site in the northern suburb of Reinickendorf, funded by a municipal grant of 15m Reichsmarks as tax receipts from the housing interest tax dwindled.  That space allowed a more extensive design than that of the inner-city Carl Legien Estate but the emphasis – as the Great Depression hit – remained on economy.  Of its 1268 flats, four fifths comprised just 1½ to 2½ rooms. (2)

Weiße Stadt: bridge house by Otto Salvisberg

Designed by the Swiss architect Otto Rudolf Salvisberg and two Berlin architects Bruno Ahrends and Wilhelm Büning, it reflects the functional efficiency championed in the architectural style dubbed Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity).  It presents a striking appearance, seen most notably in the five-storey portal buildings marking the entrance to the estate and the impressive Brückenhaus (bridge house) erected across Aroser Allee.  The spare white appearance of the blocks is at once offset and highlighted by their brightly coloured guttering, window frames and entrance doorways.

Weiße Stadt: Schillering – blocks by Büning to the left and Ahrends to the right

The apartment buildings are characteristically long four-storey ribbon blocks, including one of 230m length beyond the bridge house facing a school and an open terrain of sports fields.  Greenery and open space, designed by landscape architect Ludwig Lesser, remained a key element of the overall design with communal garden courtyards with benches and playgrounds between the housing.

Weiße Stadt: Emmentaler Strasse community building by Ahrends

Heating and hot water were supplied by a central plant.  Twenty-four shops, dotted around the estate, a pharmacy, kindergarten and health centre provided the estate with the facilities and community identity for which its planners strove.

At the same time and across the city to the south-west, Großsiedlung Siemensstadt was emerging. This was the most diverse of the modernist estates.  While Hans Scharoun was responsible for the estate’s masterplan and some of its housing, he commissioned a number of other architects to design individual blocks: Walter Gropius, Hugo Häring, Otto Bartning, Fred Forbat and Paul Rudolf Henning.  Like Scharoun, most were members of Der Ring (the Ring), an architectural collective formed in 1926 committed to modernist principles hence the name occasionally given to the scheme, the Ringsiedlung.

Großsiedlung Siemensstadt: ‘Der Panzerkreuzer’ by Hans Scharoun

For all this common allegiance, their designs – apart from the de rigeur modernist flat roofs – were diverse.  Scharoun designed the access to the estate with a grand head-building with retail outlets on the ground floor which became known as the Panzerkreuzer (armoured cruiser – it sounded less sinister before 1933) for its liberal borrowing of ship motifs: a ‘consciously anti-traditional, machine age aesthetic’ (3) Across the Jungfernheideweg he built a five-storey residential block with similarly deep-cut balconies and angles.

Großsiedlung Siemensstadt: Goebelstrasse – laundry building and apartments by Walter Gropius

Moving into the estate proper beyond the railway bridge, you reach two long blocks, in a palette of creamy white and grey, designed by Walter Gropius fronting Goebelstrasse: ‘sharply defined and crisp in their contours and dynamically elegant in the functional austerity of the rows of identical buildings’ (3) Gropius had founded the Bauhaus School some ten years earlier.  Here he applied its design ideals – ‘to create the purely organic building, boldly emanating its inner laws, free of untruths or ornamentation’ – to social housing.

Otto Bartning’s 388m-long block along Goebelstrasse marks the southern perimeter of the estate and acts as a buffer to the railway line just behind. It’s a similarly functionalist grey-rendered block, broken by patches of exposed brickwork and splashes of cerise framing.

Großsiedlung Siemensstadt: blocks on Goebelstrasse by Hugo Häring

Facing it along Goebelstrasse are nine blocks, aligned Zeilenbau-fashion on a north-south axis, designed by Hugo Häring, very different in outward form in which yellow-brown bricks, smooth beige plaster and dark brown main doors are used to complement the greenery of the open courtyards designed by Leberecht Migge.  Kidney-shaped balconies add an expressionist touch.  Six similarly disposed blocks to the north by Paul Henning echo Häring’s natural restrained shades.

Großsiedlung Siemensstadt: blocks by Forbat along Geißlerpfad

Along Geißlerpfad on the eastern fringe of the estate lie the two long blocks designed by Fred Forbat, white-walled but with cut-out and protruding balconies with yellow brick to add to their texture.

Each in their different way captured the modernist aesthetics and ideology of their time.  Gropius and Bartning, ‘in accord with the pragmatics of the factory assembly line or the aesthetics of the Tiller Girl’: (4)

created strongly rational and anonymous structures that used repetitive forms to generate a fixed number of forms in terms of size and occupancy…In contrast to this rigid adherence to the ideologies of mass production and mass entertainment, Scharoun and Haring produced housing blocks that, although fully committed to modernism, were also wilfully allusive and organic in their design.

This divergence of form represented, to one architectural theorist, ‘one of the most serious ruptures within the modernist movement’ but, as a simple place of residence, the estate forms a signified and attractive whole and represents an ambition to decently house the working class rarely matched in later years.

Großsiedlung Siemensstadt: apartment blocks by Scharoun on Goebelstrasse at the entrance of the estate

The average size of apartment in the Großsiedlung Siemensstadt was just 54 square metres, a reflection of contemporary austerity.  Later affluence would expect greater space and more mod cons but the estate and its counterparts across the metropolis provide an uncommon example of architectural ideology committed to social service and progressive politics.

Berlin’s five modernist interwar estates – I’ve covered perhaps the most celebrated, the Hufeisensiedlung (Horseshoe Estate) in Britz in an earlier post – were exceptional, providing only around 6700 of the 140,000 new social homes built between 1924 and 1932.  Most of the new-build was of more conventional form although it uniformly represented a huge advance on the ‘rental barracks’ which had been the lot of the Berlin working class before the war.

All were provided with significant, and often direct, support from the local and national state although, as noted, in a manner very different – though more common on the Continent – than that in the UK where central government grants and local government provision were the norm.  It’s another model, closer to the housing association model which has largely undertaken the provision of social housing in this country (such as it is) since 1979.

With the direct participation of social democratic politicians and trades unions it was a potent one, although not without its critics.  The increasingly powerful Communist Party welcomed the new homes and rationalist mass production which delivered them but argued – with some justice – that socialised housing remained too dependent on land and construction material prices dictated by a capitalist free market.

That cleavage in the left was one factor which eased Hitler’s rise to power in 1933.  After 1933, left-wing ideals and activism, in whichever form, were damned and dangerous. Scharoun remained in Germany under the Nazi regime in a form of internal exile.  He would return to prominence in the 1950s to design his most famous building, Berlin’s Philharmonic Hall.  Bartning too remained in Germany, retreating to the safer terrain of church architecture for the duration of the Nazi dictatorship. Häring attempted to convince the new regime that the new architecture was German rather than international (6). Forbat moved first to Hungary and then Sweden where he died in 1948.  Gropius fled to Britain (where he designed Impington College) and ended his life and career in the US.

Of the chief protagonists of Berlin’s Neue Bauen (New Building movement), Taut, who died in 1938, fled first to Japan and then to Turkey. Martin Wagner too spent time in exile in Turkey, where he briefly resumed collaboration with Taut, and devised a new city plan for Ankara. He took a position with the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1938 and died, an American citizen, in 1957.  All this represented a tragic loss of talent and social purpose to the German nation; many millions of others paid a far heavier price.

The aim of Berlin’s modernist estates had been to bring ‘light, air and sun’ to its citizens.  What followed was among the darkest periods of human history.  In 2008, the five estates were granted UNESCO Heritage status – a fitting tribute to the energy and ideals which inspired them.  They are now a properly celebrated aspect of a prouder German history and well worth a visit.

You’ll find some additional images of the two modernist estates featured here on my Tumblr page.

Sources

(1) Mark Hobbs, Visual Representations of Working-Class Berlin, 1924–1930.  University of Glasgow Department of History of Art PhD thesis 2010 and this well-illustrated article on the Atlas Obscura website.

(2) Ian Boyd White and David Frisby (eds), Metropolis Berlin (2012)

(3) Ronald Wiedenhoeft, Berlin’s Housing Revolution. German Reform in the 1920s (1971)

(4) Jörg Haspel and Annemarie Jaeggi (eds), Housing Estates in the Berlin Modern Style (2007)

(5) Boyd White and Frisby (eds), Metropolis Berlin

(6) Eric Paul Mumford, The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928-1960 (2002)

You’ll find more detail online including this comprehensive record of the five estates:  Housing Estates in the Berlin Modern Style: Nomination for Inscription on the UNESCO World Heritage List.  The architects’ images and the two colour images of Großsiedlung Siemensstadt are taken from this source.

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Berlin’s Modernist Interwar Estates I: ‘Every German their own healthy home’

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1920s

This post is a little different, inspired by a trip to Berlin last December and in celebration of our common European home.  I’ve written about perhaps Berlin’s most famous modernist estate, the Hufeisensiedlung (the Horseshoe Estate) in an earlier post.

Weimar Germany, the democratic state founded in 1919, emerged from the horror of world war and the collapse of the reactionary and authoritarian regime which had largely triggered it.  It promised, for a troubled and tragically brief period, an humane alternative to the brutality which both preceded and succeeded it and its social democratic stronghold Berlin – Red Berlin – pioneered some of the most progressive working-class housing of its time.  This post and the next examine four of Berlin’s most significant modernist estates and allow us to study both a model and form of social housing provision radically different from that which existed in Britain.

An early image of Siedlung Schillerpark

The constitution of the new state was promulgated in the town of Weimar, 175 miles to the south-east of Berlin, in August 1919 when the capital, in the throes of revolutionary upheaval, was considered too dangerous for the newly elected National Assembly.  This was a democratic constitution, proclaimed plausibly – with its protection of democratic norms and minority rights – as the most democratic in the world.  (That it succumbed to Nazi tyranny within fourteen years might be taken as a lesson to another contemporary proudly constitutionalist state.)

The constitution was especially radical in its guarantee of social rights, most notably in Article 155 which promised ‘Every German their own healthy home’ – an attack on the speculative building and private profit which had dominated housing provision and blighted working-class lives hitherto. Henceforth, the Article continued, ‘the allocation and use of land’ was to ‘be controlled by the state in a way which prevents its misuse’.  The Reichssiedlungsgesetz (State Settlement Law), passed at the same time provided the detail of this ideal, giving the federal states powers of compulsory purchase and requiring them to set up non-profit-making building societies which would finance the new housing programme.

Greater Berlin, 1920 (c) Maximilian Dörrbecker and made available through Wikimedia Commons

Greater Berlin itself was a product, in 1920, of the new regime – an agglomeration of eight towns, 59 rural communities and 27 rural estates with the political clout and financial power to implement the reforming ambitions of its social democratic majority.  With a population of 3.86m, it was the third largest city in world.

That population had risen fourfold since 1871 and most of its working class were housed in the so-called Mietskaserne (rental barracks) which ringed the centre.  These were generally five-storey blocks built around a series of enclosed courtyards – privately (and expensively) rented, grossly overcrowded, with tiny individual apartments and shared facilities.

Berlin ‘Mietskaserne‘ in the 1920s (c) Aaron Cripps

In the aftermath of war, it was estimated the city needed 100,000 new homes.  By 1923, however, only around 9000 subsidised homes had been built in Berlin. Two things were critical to the social housebuilding boom which followed. The Hauszinssteuer (housing interest tax) of 1924 was a tax levied on housing wealth created during the hyperinflation of 1922 and 1923; it provided revenues of around 750m Reichsmarks into the late twenties.  The Dawes Plan, agreed with the United States in the same year, was intended primarily to help Germany pay the punitive reparations levied after the First World War but it brought access to international loans and helped fund mortgages on housing projects.

The architect-planner Martin Wagner was the crucial figure in the Neues Bauen (New Building – a term encompassing lifestyle as well as bricks and mortar) programme which followed.  In 1924, he organised three of Germany’s largest trade union groups to form the Deutsche Wohnungsfürsorgegesellschaft für Beamte, Angestellte und Arbeiter (mercifully we can call it DEWOG) which undertook the overall coordination of the country’s socialised housebuilding industry. One month later, he helped found the Gemeinnützige Heimstätten-, Spar- und Bau-Aktiengesellschaft (or GEHAG) – a housing cooperative which built much of Berlin’s housing in the succeeding years.

‘In Berlin the essential partner for new house-building initiatives was  the trade-union movement’ (2) and Martin Wagner himself, a committed social democrat, served as the city’s municipal building director from 1926 to 1933 until forced out by the Nazis. The dominant architectural figure was the Jewish socialist Bruno Taut.  With the personnel, politics and finance in place, it’s time to look at the buildings.

Some of the earliest blocks of Siedlung Schillerpark along Bristolstrasse

The first modernist estate was Siedlung Schillerpark erected in the Wedding district north of the city centre for the Berlin Savings and Building Association and built by the construction workers’ guild, the Bauhütte Berlin.  It features 330 homes, predominantly built to Taut’s designs in three phases between 1924 and 1930, with landscaping by Walter Rossow.

The earliest blocks are located along Dubliner and Oxford Strasse, three and four-storey blocks, red-brick with bands of white plastering, enclosing carefully planned courtyards intended to fulfil Taut’s principle of ‘outdoor living space’.  Alternating balconies and loggias, facing the sun, were used to create striking facades. There is a strong influence here of the Amsterdam School which Taut had studied in the early twenties. (3)

‘Outdoor living space’, Siedlung Schillerpark

The actual apartments were of more traditional form and some of the earliest – where three homes accessed a single landing – were single-aspect, lacking cross-ventilation.  The flats varied in size too, from 1½ to 4½ rooms (the main figure refers to living rooms separate from kitchen and bathroom; the fraction represents a small box-room) and, though designed intentionally for different income groups, all enjoyed the same standard of fitting.  Low attics contained laundry and drying rooms. A separate bathhouse and new kindergarten were provided in 1930.

One of the estate’s doorways

It was intended to pioneer a new and civilised form of urban living at density both in its quality of accommodation and design aesthetic.  Clearly modernist in form, Taut included some personal signatures – a rich use of colours, textures and surface patterns – and some idiosyncratic expressionist elements seen, for example, in the reinforced concrete tapered pillars.

To one commentator, it was all a: (4)

bold statement of new site planning ideas and building forms, a forcefulness of expression, drawing attention to itself as something revolutionary. The preference for flat roofs, straight lines, and right angles is symptomatic of the will to express the social spirit of a new age.

Most new public housing of the time was not of such consciously modernist design but new building regulations, drawn up municipal building councillor Walter Koeppen, introduced strict zoning rules separating housing and industry and banning the use of side and rear blocks in future developments.  New blocks had to be arranged either around the plot perimeter (Randbebauung) or as open-ended terraces (Zeilenbau).  The Mietskaserne had been consigned to history. (5)

A desperate housing shortage remained, however; by 1926 it was estimated 174,000 homes were required to accommodate Berlin’s growing population.  One consequence was rising rents; between 1925 and 1929, they almost doubled – for a two-bedroom flat, from 23.10 Reichsmarks to 43.75.  Planners and architects looked to secure affordable rents by standardising schemes and reducing space standards; at worst, a so-called Existenzminimum (‘minimum existence’) home, condemned by Wagner, contained just 1½ rooms and 40 square metres of floor space.

Carl Legien Estate head-building

The Carl Legien Estate (named after the German trades unionist and social democrat who had died in 1920), built for GEHAG between 1928 and 1930 in the densely-settled working-class district of Prenzlauer Berg, reflected such economising measures.  Eighty per cent of its 1149 flats were of 1½ to 2 rooms but it was an attempt by Taut (in collaboration with Franz Hillinger) to provide high-density housing in a consciously modernist and progressive form: in the words of Kurt Junghanns (Taut’s biographer): (6)

to defeat the tenement building system on its own terrain and to prove that the new principles can also be used to build in a better way in an urban context.

The estate comprised a series of four- to five-storey blocks along existing street lines but there the resemblance to the earlier tenement housing which surrounded it ended.  Two innovations stand out.

Carl Legien Estate courtyard

Firstly, Taut maximised the light and air of the new development by creating three large U-shaped open courts along its main artery Erich-Weinert-Strasse. Living rooms and balconies were placed on the inside of the blocks, facing the courts, to emphasise their communal, semi-public nature.

Carl Legien Estate side street

Secondly, Taut – who had famously urged that colour (he called it ‘this wonderful gift from God’) should have ‘absolutely the same rights as form’ – painted the exterior facades a sunny yellow which made the narrow side streets appear wider. Interior loggias were painted yellow too for emphasis and rear walls across the interior courtyards in pairs of red brown, blue or dark green.

Carl Legien Estate shops and facilities

Shops and two communal laundries were provided in the blocks’ impressive head-buildings and a central plant delivered heating and hot water to each of the tenements.  For all the necessary economies, the estate raised working-class living standards to a new level and it became ‘a very desirable residence’.

Ironically, the condition of blocks deteriorated sharply under the post-war socialist regime (Prenzlauer Berg found itself in East Berlin) and by 2005, within a united Germany, the estate suffered a 40 per cent vacancy rate.  A major refurbishment that year by a private real estate company has restored their former popularity but with the added irony supplied by a resurgent capitalism that it now caters for a ‘more affluent and wealthy clientele…Prenzlauer Berg, which used to be the epitome of poverty and overpopulation, has now become one of the most gentrified enclaves in Germany’.  (7)

It seems that each generation must fight anew the battle to secure good quality and affordable accommodation for its least well-off.  That struggle continued in innovative ways in Weimar Germany in the later 1920s and we’ll look at two more of Berlin’s modernist estates in next week’s post.

You’ll find some additional images of the two modernist estates featured here on my Tumblr page. 

Sources

(1) For more on these, see ‘Mietskasernes: Working Class Berlin, 1871-1922’

(2) Ian Boyd White and David Frisby (eds), Metropolis Berlin (University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2012)

(3) Housing Estates in the Berlin Modern Style: Nomination for Inscription on the Unesco World Heritage List

(4) Ronald Wiedenhoeft, Berlin’s Housing Revolution. German Reform in the 1920s (1971)

(5) Mark Hobbs, Visual Representations of Working-Class Berlin, 1924–1930.  University of Glasgow Department of History of Art PhD thesis 2010

(6) Quoted in Jörg Haspel and Annemarie Jaeggi (eds), Housing Estates in the Berlin Modern Style (Deutscher Kunstverlag, Munchen Berlin, 2007)

(7) Ulduz Maschaykh, The Changing Image of Affordable Housing: Design, Gentrification and Community in Canada and Europe (Routledge, 2016)