Staaken garden city

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Department store on the market square

The garden city Staaken is a settlement in today's Berlin district of Spandau , which was built between 1914 and 1917 according to the design of the architect Paul Schmitthenner near the then village of Staaken. Because of the layout of the streets and squares, the intelligent handling of house types and variants, and not least because of its role model effect on the Berlin settlements of the 1920s, it is considered one of the most important urban planning achievements of the early 20th century. The garden city of Staaken was planned with 1,000 apartments and a number of public buildings for 5,000 residents. Unlike most other projects of this type and scale, it was almost completely completed within just four years of original planning.

planning

Site plan, 1917

The building owner of the garden city Staaken was the Reichsamt des Interior (Interior Ministry). With this project it wanted to reform housing construction for workers in Germany as an example. The residents were intended to be those employed by the state armaments factories in Spandau . The supply of housing has traditionally been very poor for these people. First of all, the Reich Office bought a 35-  hectare property four kilometers west of the state arms factories in Spandau. The ministry then set up a cooperative. Contrary to claims to the contrary, from the beginning it consisted largely of simple workers belonging to different professions. In addition, Paul Schmitthenner, who was only 29 years old, was appointed architect. When planning the Staaken garden city, he should pay particular attention to the limitation of construction costs. Therefore, the following measures were taken: all designs came under the responsibility of a single architect, the number of house types was limited to a few, the components were standardized and the services of the construction companies were performed in large units. In addition, the implementation of the entire project came into the hands of a uniform site management. In this way, the magazine Bauwelt assumed in 1915 , about a third of the usual construction costs could be saved.

Aerial photo, 1920

Between 1914 and 1917 a total of 793 residential units were completed. In addition, public buildings such as B. two department stores, two schools, an inn, a church, a rectory, a large hall, a syringe house and a bakery. Most of these buildings were realized under Schmitthenner's leadership. Only a few houses north of the green belt as well as the church, the inn and the bakery remained undeveloped; a church was built in 1922.

The structural development of the Staaken Garden City can be divided into three clearly distinguishable construction phases, which were accompanied by a gradual simplification of the design language. This process reflects the increasing impoverishment of the German Reich in the First World War . As a result of the mobilization , construction work came to a standstill in many places due to a lack of workers. But the building project Garden City Staaken was an exception in this context, because this settlement was intended to be inhabited by workers from the armaments industry. But at the end of 1916, the consequences of the war were also reflected in construction work on the garden city of Staaken. Paul Schmitthenner's planning work for this settlement ended in 1917 when he was called up . His work was completed by the (neutral) Swiss Otto Brechbühl.

Due to his success in housing development, Schmitthenner was awarded a professorship for building construction theory at the Technical University of Stuttgart in 1918 . At that time, his services also included settlement projects beyond the garden city of Staaken, such as the garden cities of Plaue near Brandenburg (1915–1917) and Forstfeld near Kassel (1915–1917).

House types and groups

Group of multi-family houses on Kirchplatz

Paul Schmitthenner took the landscape and urban planning requirements into account in his urban design for the garden city of Staaken and developed a clear, yet complex system of streets and squares. The main feature of the design is a kind of construction kit with which the individual houses from five house types were put together to form house groups. In addition to this system, there is a certain number of facade variants and a large number of standardized extension elements such as windows, doors, etc. In the outside area, this construction kit is supplemented by different open staircases , which, similar to the house types, are based on a combination of different stairs and stringers . In addition, the open space is structured by a multi-layered system of stables, walls and fences. With the different combinations of these elements, different architectural moods can be created. In addition, each house could be given an individual touch. The internal division of the house types, on the other hand, was based solely on pragmatic criteria. The public buildings were excluded from the kit and were highlighted by exposed masonry, a richer design of the individual forms and an individual design (market square, church square).

Multi-family house group Am Heideberg

The layout types 1–3 are relatively similar. They are four-family houses, each with a central corridor running from the street to the courtyard and an apartment on each side. The two larger house types 2 and 3 have an entrance loggia in the central axis. House type 4 is a single-family house and house type 5 is a two-family house. The latter type of house is used to close off groups of apartment buildings and is the only one with the entrance on the side. The facades of the houses based on the kit are plastered. The house groups can be slightly bent or have a jump. In the relationship of the house groups to one another, reflections and axes sometimes appear, but these are never strictly implemented. The modular kit described does not use corner types. Instead, the corners were surrounded by walls.

The floor plans and facades were harmoniously proportioned. In the case of the facade of the house types, the ratio of width to height is regularly graded. It was determined in each case by means of a diagonal. The facades themselves show a relatively simple design. On ornamental jewelry Schmitthenner has largely dispensed with.

In the first construction phase of 1914/1915, Paul Schmitthenner's construction kit based on these elements could be fully developed. This lies in the core of the settlement and extends from the market square over Delbrückstraße and from Langen Weg to the street Beim Pfarrhof. There the different quarters clearly differ in their formal language. One of these quarters is on the street between the gables and the name of the streets speaks for the architecture program.

Paul Schmitthenner also dealt with the furnishing of the apartments in the garden city of Staaken. A model apartment was set up as a model for future residents. The principles of Paul Schmitthenner for the design of the interior were: Simplicity and clarity of the form, high combinability, functional, solid, inexpensive and well proportionable household appliance based on the model of the Dresden workshops . His principle was: “Everything should only be decent and truthful. Do not make more than you are. It also has a bad and indecent effect on people. ”Accordingly, the architect appealed to his audience:“ Just look at Schiller's apartments and Goethe's garden house in Weimar ! There you have the greatest simplicity and the highest culture. "

Old and contemporary models

Groups of single-family houses at the Kleine Platz

For Paul Schmitthenner, designing with building types was based on the study of housing construction in the Baroque and Classicism periods . Such an approach can be found in all progressive architects of that time. In the garden city of Staaken, the use of plaster and brick was obviously based on the local building tradition: plaster for residential construction and brick for municipal and sacred buildings. The architecture of the garden city Staaken contains references to the nearby Potsdam , in particular to the Dutch Quarter (1732–1742). In general, the multi-family houses show a bourgeois classicistic expression and the single-family houses a regionalistic, rural to proletarian expression. The urban design was obviously influenced considerably by Camillo Sitte .

Paul Schmitthenner was able to fall back on exemplary contemporary solutions in his design for the garden city of Staaken in November 1913. The English examples, which were initially more progressive, were known to German architects primarily through the lectures and publications of Hermann Muthesius . German models were: the garden town of Hellerau in 1909 by Richard Riemerschmid , the Gmindersdorf settlement in 1903 by Theodor Fischer , the Margarethenhöhe settlement in 1909 by Georg Metzendorf . Schmitthenner himself worked on the planning of the garden city of Hellerau.

evaluation

Church from 1922, in the background the rectory (1927),
architect: Curt Steinberg

Due to the high level of government support for construction activity during the war and the fact that the experience gained was fixed in norms and laws, the Staaken Garden City became a general role model in publicly funded social housing, especially in the first half of the 1920s.

The contemporaries still understood the type of reference to old models. In 1917 Fritz Stahl saw the "certain mobility and warmth [...] achieved [...] that the old naturally developed settlements in the country have, but not through the artificial means of imitating their effects, but only through the artistic processing of the." Necessity of derived forms. ”It was only Julius Posener in 1979 who came to the verdict :“ The illusion of the medieval small town was completely successful ”. In addition, he spoke in this context of "tiny dollhouse houses".

Straße Beim Pfarrhof, renewal of the facades with a considerable loss of original quality, shortly before the protection was granted in 1986

Julius Posener's claim can be explained by his pioneering role in researching the reform architecture of the twentieth century. More recent research on this epoch, on the person of the architect Paul Schmitthenner and, last but not least, on the Staaken garden city clearly shows the contemporary avant-garde character of this settlement.

The construction of an explicit proximity between the building forms of the garden city Staaken and National Socialist architecture - as most recently with Brendgens and König - must be referred to the field of projection at the latest since 1968 with Barbara Miller Lane's research on the architecture of National Socialism in connection with its crude and inconsistent theory become.

In summary, it can be said that Paul Schmitthenner's unreserved identification with the building task when designing the Staaken garden city led to the exemplary fulfillment of the residents' physical and emotional needs. The Garden City of Staaken is one of the most progressive in comparison with other contemporary settlements. With their overwhelming influence on the design of the well-known Berlin Modernist housing developments from the 1920s, their importance can hardly be overestimated. Because of this importance, the garden city of Staaken was placed under monument protection in 1986 . This refers to the area identified in the development plan from 1917 including the additional buildings there that were built in the northern settlement area in the 1920s according to plans by Carl Derleder, as well as for the rectory and the church by the architect Curt Steinberg, which is considerably smaller than the original design, likewise the green areas of the garden architect Ludwig Lesser.

The garden city of Staaken in the film

literature

  • Karl Kiem: The garden city of Staaken; Types, groups, variants . Berlin 1997. ISBN 3-7861-1885-X .
  • Wolfgang Voigt, Hartmut Frank (Eds.): Paul Schmitthenner, 1884–1972 . Tübingen u. Berlin 2003. ISBN 3-8030-0633-3 .

Web links

Commons : Gartenstadt Staaken  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Kristiana Hartmann: German garden city movement; Cultural policy and social reform . Munich 1977. p. 43.
  2. ^ Paul Schmitthenner: The German people's apartment . In: Daimler Werkszeitung , vol. 1, issue 15/18, 1920. pp. 60–63.
  3. ^ Fritz Stahl: The garden city of Staaken . Berlin o. JS 10-11.
  4. ^ Julius Posener: Berlin on the way to a new architecture; the age of Wilhelm II. Munich 1979. p. 280.
  5. ^ Arne Ehmann: Residential architecture of Central European traditionalism around 1910 in selected examples; Considerations on the aesthetics, typology and building history of traditionalist building . Hamburg 2006 (dissertation, URN , URL ).
  6. Wolfgang Voigt, Hartmut Frank (Ed.): Paul Schmitthenner, 1884–1972 . Tübingen u. Berlin 2003.
  7. ^ Karl Kiem: The garden city of Staaken; Types, groups, variants . Berlin 1997.
  8. Guiddo Brendgens, Norbert König: Berlin Architecture; Architecture guide . Berlin 2003. p. 493.
  9. ^ Barbara Miller Lane: Architecture and Politics in Germany 1918–1945 . Cambridge (Mass.) 1968.

Coordinates: 52 ° 32 ′ 27 ″  N , 13 ° 8 ′ 49 ″  E