Wedau railway workers' settlement

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Street in the green angle
Typical semi-detached house (Rüsternstrasse 43/45)
Former society house built in 1928 as a hall

The Wedau railway workers' settlement is a factory settlement in Duisburg - Wedau . It was built as a garden city for the station and workshop staff of the Prussian railways from the beginning of the 20th century and has been a listed building since 1999.

location

The settlement is west of Wedau train station . It is bounded in the north by Wedauer Straße and in the west by Kalkweg. In the south lies the Masurensee, which was already a quarry pond when construction began. Between meadows and pastures on marshy ground (Wedau = pasture meadow), the railway settlement was the nucleus of today's Wedau district.

history

In 1911 the civil servants' housing association founded for this purpose acquired the building plots near the train station. In 1913, the greatly expanded marshalling yard , the repair and depot and the Wedau passenger station went into operation. The first phase of construction began six months beforehand, and by 1915 312 houses with 485 apartments had been built. The settlement was given a village character due to its central square (Wedauer Markt) and the infrastructure facilities (shops, post office, school). Street names such as Kehrwieder, Heimweg, Imgrün Winkel, An den Linden or Ulmenweg underline this. Caspar Maria Grod worked as an architect, and his designs were hardly deviated from in later expansion stages.

The first stage of expansion took place after the First World War. The focus here was particularly on finding affordable housing for large families and - in the spirit of the warrior home concept - for widows and orphans of soldiers. By 1925, 158 more buildings as well as a Catholic and a Protestant church were added. The theater hall was built in 1928. From 1925 the newly founded Bauverein Wedau eGmbH acted as developer and owner.

As a result of individual expansions from 1930, the stock grew to a total of 611 houses with 1,043 apartments.

layout

Similar to the Margarethenhöhe in Essen, the settlement follows the concept of the garden city : the creation of squares and courtyards, staggered arrangement of groups of houses and streets, many open spaces with trees, internal gardens with their own farm roads. The mostly two-storey houses are combined with single-storey connecting structures to form trains of two to 10 units. The roof surfaces and structures are very varied with saddle, hip, hip, and mansard roofs, various gables and dormers (including bat dormers), as well as slate and wood cladding, bay windows set individual accents. The houses stand on concrete cellar walls with alluvial stone masonry on top with light cement plaster, the base area is often clad with quarry stone. Each apartment has its own entrance, usually with an outside staircase. Many of the door leaves are still original. The gardens, then intended for self-sufficiency, can be reached via their own entrances or through the cellar. The apartments were equipped with a toilet, kitchen and partly scullery, built-in cupboards and partly pantries, washing kettles, bath stoves and - with the exception of the living room - lighting systems.

In addition to the structural conditions, other reform ideas were also implemented, including training facilities such as a library and reading room, a consumer association, the cooperative as a tenants' association and its own savings and loan fund. Other buildings that are noteworthy are: a single home (in the houses there were also additional rentable rooms under the roof), the inn "Unter den Eichen", a community house for clubs, a separate sewage treatment plant for the settlement, a horticultural business with small animal breeding (for the sale of Plants and animals to the residents) as well as an air and outdoor swimming pool. This was financed by donations and profits from the savings and loan fund. Doctors, a pharmacy and a social station rounded off the offer.

As one of the three garden city settlements in the Rhineland (the others are Margarethenhöhe in Essen and the Gronauerwald garden settlement in Bergisch Gladbach), the settlement was listed as a historical monument in 1999. It represents “an outstanding example of the implementation of garden city ideas on a cooperative and non-profit basis”. The city of Duisburg has issued a design statute to protect and maintain the monuments.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Statutes for the monument area "Wedau settlement" in Duisburg-South of 30 September 1999

Web links

Commons : Siedlung Wedau  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Coordinates: 51 ° 23 ′ 32.4 "  N , 6 ° 47 ′ 49.7"  E