Settlement on the Fischtalgrund

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At the fish valley

The settlement on Fischtalgrund in the Berlin district of Zehlendorf was built in 1928 on the occasion of the ten-year existence of the non-profit corporation for salaried homes (GAGFAH).

The architects of the estate were Hans Gerlach, Ernst Grabbe, Wilhelm Jost , Fritz Keller, Alexander Klein , Arnold Knoblauch , Paul Mebes and Paul Emmerich , Hans Poelzig , Erich Richter, Emil Rüster , Fritz Schopohl , Paul Schmitthenner , Georg Steinmetz, Karl Weißhaupt and Gustav Wolf and Heinrich Tessenow as coordinator. In the period from September 1 to October 31, 1928, they presented this experimental settlement with 75 private homes and 40 apartments in multi-storey houses under the name “Building and Living Exhibition”.

Creation of the settlement

Am Fischtal 24
Memorial plaque for Ernst von Harnack ,
Am Fischtal 8

An elongated plot of land between Onkel Toms Hütte and Fischtalpark in Berlin-Zehlendorf was chosen for the settlement .

Heinrich Tessenow, who was also a member of the Reich Research Institute for Economic Efficiency in Building and Housing, was appointed as the coordinator of the settlement and exhibition. The organizer placed her company in a row with two important building exhibitions in Germany - with the Mathildenhöhe from 1901 and the Weißenhofsiedlung from 1927 - to make it clear at the same time that, unlike in Darmstadt and Stuttgart, “essentially aesthetic purposes” should not be pursued . The houses should also make the housing problem clear to interested laypeople, future builders and broad sections of the population.

With the participation of the Reichsforschungsgesellschaft, the architects were given a precise program with regard to the cost and size of the houses, whereby the official goal should be to keep the interest and rent burden of the residents within limits with smaller structures while at the same time meeting the "cultural needs of the middle class" to protect. Solutions for different needs should be worked out: single, group, row, single-family, apartment buildings and apartments for single people. For single-family houses, an upper limit was set for the built-up space, while the number of square meters was limited for apartment buildings.

A two-room apartment was considered sufficient for small families with few children, and a three-room apartment was provided for large employee families.

"The houses are not a race for never-before-seen artistic ideas, but want to make a contribution to the solution of an economic-technical problem - the satisfaction of medium-sized living needs."

- Bauwelt , 34, 1928

120 apartments in the form of single-family houses, semi-detached houses and small rental apartment buildings were built on the exhibition grounds, which are curved in a narrow strip along the Fischtalpark. Following the elongated shape of the property, the buildings stand in a row. The semi-detached houses by Gerlach, Mebes / Emmerich, Steinmetz and Schmitthenner as well as the single-family house by Poelzig are only located outside of this row formation in the southern and somewhat wider part of the complex between Riemeister and Onkel-Tom-Straße.

The 29 individually designed groups of houses stand in stark contrast to the serial construction of GEHAG . In the design, emphasis was placed on simplicity and the choice of traditional materials, and the houses were built using traditional methods. The facades are smoothly plastered, sometimes only slightly covered with mud. Folding shutters, trellises and pergolas characterize most of the facades of the regular symmetrical houses. Formally, only the single-family semi-detached house by Poelzig with the gables that are raised above the roof, with clinker bricks in the exposed masonry and emphatically asymmetrical gables are out of the ordinary.

Hugo Häring criticized: “We need clear, reasonable apartments. Houses that look like us city dwellers today and nobody else. Out of love for a preconceived house ideal ( Goethe's garden house ) , a lot is done at Schmitthenner's houses in the Fischtalgrund that is irrational. For the sake of the axes, the windows are not where the lighting in the living space or the furnishings require them. The rooms are not dimensioned as they should be in consideration of their use. "

The roof dispute

Information board
at Fischtal 1 in Zehlendorf

Critics saw in the GAGFAH settlement above all a reaction of the traditionally oriented architects to the Weißenhofsiedlung of the German Werkbund of 1927 in Stuttgart.

In addition, 17 architects were involved in both Stuttgart and Berlin. The management of GAGFAH itself vigorously denied any intention to counterbalance the Stuttgart exhibition or the neighboring GEHAG estate built under the direction of Bruno Taut. No regulations were made for the design. This contradicts a statement by Tessenow that GAGFAH made the pointed roofs a condition for him.

This resulted in the so-called “Zehlendorfer roof controversy”, which filled the pages of architecture magazines. It flared up in Zehlendorf, where the Onkel-Tom-Siedlung and the Fischtalgrund settlement stood in a very small space for two different aesthetic (perhaps also political) directions in architecture. The personal resentment of the architects involved in the Fischtalgrund as well as competition for building contracts certainly played a role.

The roof-top dispute subsequently expanded into a fundamental debate, because the two common directions of architecture could be discussed here as an example. On the one hand, the advocates of New Building and on the other hand the traditionalists.

Classification in the architecture of the 1920s

After the uncertainty caused by war and revolution, one direction sought refuge in a return to a traditional and proven design language, such as that used in B. embodied Goethe's garden house in Weimar . The other direction sought a new aesthetic in line with the state of science and technology, although both directions began at a common point: the rejection of the city model of the 19th century and life in the tenement houses.

Both building exhibitions (and in most aspects also Bruno Taut's Onkel Toms Hütte settlement ) are a series of solitary single houses that contain apartments of different sizes and shapes. Both are settlements at a relative distance from the city center and without economic autonomy. They are dormitory cities that circle around the economic centers of the old city like satellites. Ebenezer Howard's design of an ideal city (garden city) is included in the formal design of the settlements. The content of an autonomous third city, which combines the best of city and country, in which land is shared and democracy could flourish through local communities, has not been adopted.

Both fronts - Stuttgart and Berlin - claimed the task of researching and exhibiting a building that was adequate for the time and the housing shortage. On the other hand, there is the built reality: apartments with more than 100 m², wing in the living area and girls' room on the first floor.

Rather, these two building exhibitions represent a discussion of architectural tendencies that relate to form and design, but not the urban planning problems and uncertainties that the housing shortage and the associated construction of 140,000 residential units in a city brought with it and what changes these brought for them City as such.

The Karlsruhe building exhibition in Dammerstock was a next and, at first, last attempt to address urban planning .

From the National Socialist “ seizure of power ” in 1933, the achievements of the New Objectivity were continued in a sober industrial architecture, the classic modernism of the architects of the “RING” was rejected as “ cultural Bolshevism ” and the traditional construction of the Stuttgart school of the “BLOCK” prescribed for everyday architecture . Most of the “RING” architects had to emigrate during the Third Reich ( Palestine and USA ).

literature

  • Johannes Cramer, Nils Gutschow: Building exhibitions. An architectural history of the 20th century . Stuttgart / Berlin / Cologne / Mainz 1984.
  • 750 years of architecture and urban development in Berlin. International Building Exhibition Berlin 1987 in the context of the building history of Berlin . Edited by Josef Paul Kleihues. Stuttgart 1987.
  • Maria Berning, Michael Braum, Engelbert Lütke Daldrup , Klaus-Dieter Schulz: Berlin residential quarters. A guide to 60 settlements in East and West . Berlin 2003, ISBN 978-3-496-01260-3 .
  • Norbert Huse: Four Berlin Settlements of the Weimar Republic. Britz. Uncle Tom's Cabin. Siemensstadt. White city . Berlin 1987.
  • Norbert Huse: New Building 1918–1933. Modern architecture in the Weimar Republic . Munich 1975
  • Gustav Lampmann: The Gagfah settlement in the Fischtalgrund . In: Zentralblatt der Bauverwaltung , Vol. 48 (1928), No. 47, pp. 753–759, urn : nbn: de: kobv: 109-opus-59688 (with 21 illustrations)
  • W. Lotz: The Gagfah settlement . In: Die Form , Vol. 3, 1928, pp. 289–298 ( digitized version ).
  • Wolfgang Voigt, Hartmut Frank (eds.): Paul Schmitthenner 1884–1972 . Berlin 2003
  • Berlin and its buildings . Part 4: Housing Volume A: The requirements. The development of residential areas . Berlin / Munich / Düsseldorf 1970.
  • The Gagfah settlement Fischtalgrund . Berlin 1928; Bauwelt No. 34/1928; Journal for the entire construction industry. Organ of the Reichs-Hochbau-Normung.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Association of modern architects, such as Mies von der Rohe, Bruno Taut, Mendelsohn: Buildings with flat roofs, taking into account the "5 points of modern architecture" by Le Corbusier.
  2. ^ Including Schmitthenner, Bonatz: saddle roofs, rather conservative architecture

Coordinates: 52 ° 26 ′ 50 ″  N , 13 ° 15 ′ 30 ″  E