Italian Garden Settlement

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Italian Garden Settlement in Celle

The Italian Garden settlement is a small housing estate in Celle in Lower Saxony . It was planned by the architect Otto Haesler and completed in 1925. The complex, which is now a listed building, was the first colored housing estate of the New Building during the Weimar Republic . With her high-contrast facade painting, Haesler emphasized the importance of color in architecture .

description

The settlement was built southeast of the old town of Celle on the elongated property of the former Italian Garden . The former garden plot, separated by the Magnusgraben of the former city ​​fortifications of Celle , was to the east of the French Garden . Both gardens were created as royal gardens in the 17th century.

A four-family house with a red facade

The 10 residential buildings of the estate with a total of 44 apartments are located on Wehlstrasse and Italian Garden. It opens up the settlement and was created when the houses were built. Access from the west from Wehlstrasse is between two transverse six-family houses with hipped roofs , which, as gateways, mark the entrance to the settlement. With their entrances they are oriented towards Wehlstrasse and have upper -class, representative six-room apartments with 145 m² of living space.

In the Italian Garden street there are eight four-family houses with flat roofs , which are arranged in two rows of four opposite one another. Each house has a front garden and a back kitchen garden . The houses consist of a gray, three-story, rectangular middle section with an entrance area and two colored two-story side sections. The two side parts appear as cubes pushed into the middle block. Two floors of the middle section serve as living space and one floor as a drying floor. There is also a basement.

The window design in the side cubes with windows moved to the house edge emphasizes the plasticity of the building. The architect Otto Haesler had entrusted the painter Karl Völker with the blue and red color design of the facades, which enhances the architectural effect . At that point in time, there were no municipal specifications for the color of house paints in Celle.

In the houses set off in red there are four-room apartments with a living space of 85 m² and in the buildings set out in blue, there are five-room apartments with a floor space of 130 m². Each apartment originally had a small room for a maid. The apartments have a small semicircular balcony on the rear facade. Each residential unit had a 250 m² garden area at the house for self-sufficiency. Due to the generously designed apartments, the construction costs were high and the rents were correspondingly high. The first tenants belonged to the upper middle class and included administrative officials, merchants and teachers.

  • building

  • The two six-family houses with hipped roof as the entrance to the Italian Garden street

  • View between the six-family houses into the settlement

  • Block of flats

  • The middle part of a block of flats with the house entrance

history

The developer of the settlement was the Volkshilfe cooperative under the official name Volkshilfegesellschaft mbH , which, as a non-profit building association, borrowed money from the citizens of Celle as working capital. Founded People's Aid in 1923 by Celler merchant and later Reichstag Wilhelm Jaeger ( DNVP ). Jäger's intentions were to fight the “housing shortage with its harmful phenomena” through “bourgeois self-help”. In 1924 Volkshilfe acquired the former Italian garden from the city of Celle. Construction began in the same year and was completed at the end of 1925. In the vernacular of Celle , the settlement was initially called New Jerusalem or Morocco , which was probably due to the flat roofs that were unusual in the half-timbered town of Celle.

The buildings of the settlement are largely unchanged in their structural condition. At times they had lost their original color. In 2006 the houses were energetically renovated, whereby the original color scheme was restored. They are still part of the housing cooperative Volkshilfe eg Celle , which cooperates with Südheide eG in managing the estate .

Style and meaning

Implied corner windows on the house edge as a stylistic element of the New Building

The two six-family houses at the entrance to the estate can be attributed to the triangular modern style that emerged in the 1920s . It was a middle ground for architects who did not want to orientate themselves either on the Heimatschutz style or on the new building. The design of the eight four-family houses is based on models from contemporary Dutch architecture, especially the De Stijl group . However, Haesler did not adopt their design features, but rather individual formal elements such as color, flat roof and corner windows, with the cubes coming from the Netherlands.

The architectural style of the settlement hardly led to criticism at the time of its creation, apart from a few voices in Celle. They found that the flat roofs of the "Morocco Quarter" did not fit into the pointed gable Celle. Strong criticism was leveled at the Volkshilfe building cooperative because of the high rental costs. Although the aim of the cooperative was to create apartments for the less well-off, luxury apartments were subsidized.

The settlement construction with the Georgsgarten and Blumläger Feld settlements was the first of a total of three settlement projects carried out by Otto Haesler in Celle. It brought him international recognition and he became a leading representative of the New Building. The colourfulness of the estate also met with approval from specialist circles. In 1926 experts carried out an excursion to the settlement as part of the symposium “Promoting Color in the Cityscape” in Hanover.

literature

  • Angela Schumacher: Otto Haesler and housing construction in the Weimar Republic. (=  Kulturwissenschaftliche Reihe. Volume 1) Jonas-Verlag, Marburg, 1982, pp. 36–54.
  • Simone Oelker: Italian Garden Settlement - New Jerusalem and the Celler Volkshilfegesellschaft in: Otto Haesler. A career as an architect in the Weimar Republic. Munich, 2002, pp. 50-59
  • Cellesche Zeitung (ed.): Breakthrough with the Italian Garden Settlement in: 100 Years of Bauhaus , 2018, pp. 42–48.

Web links

Commons : Italian Garden Settlement  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Monument and color - The "Italian Garden" settlement at the German Paint Institute
  2. ↑ See literature: Italian Garden Settlement - New Jerusalem and the Celler Volkshilfegesellschaft , p. 50
  3. ^ "New building for everyone!" At Deutschlandfunk Kultur on August 24, 2005
  4. ↑ See literature: Otto Haesler and housing construction in the Weimar Republic. , Pp. 51, 52

Coordinates: 52 ° 37 '14.8 "  N , 10 ° 5' 17.4"  E