Krupp official houses

Krupp's Office of Officials, Goethestrasse 32–36

The Krupp officials' houses in Essen 's Südviertel district were part of the Friedrich Krupp AG housing program around 1910 . Some of the houses in Goethestrasse have been preserved, others were destroyed in the Second World War.

history

Krupp housing construction began by Alfred Krupp in the 1860s with the masters 'houses and the Westend workers' colony . Housing construction for ordinary workers continued at the beginning of the 1870s with the workers' colonies Nordhof , Schederhof , Kronenberg and Baumhof . Friedrich Alfred Krupp took up the program again in the 1890s with the Friedrichshof and Alfredshof settlements in his modern way. A special feature is the Altenhof, built from the turn of the century in 1900, for the elderly and disabled.

With the Krupp officials' houses, living space for so-called Krupp officials was added around 1910. This meant senior executives. In 1905 they founded a building association on a cooperative basis. The aim was to create inexpensive and practical living space in a simple but modern design. The Krupp company granted loans and made land and building materials available.

That was the basis for the creation of 27 apartments in 19 two- to three-storey residential buildings on Goethestrasse. They were built in an open row construction with a garden plot. From 1910 the architect Georg Metzendorf was responsible for the artistic and technical design, whereby the future residents were given a say for the first time. This resulted in light-flooded apartments with externally individual bay windows, plaster ornaments, terraces and verandas. In particular, the houses at house numbers 24 to 36 were built from 1911 to 1912 according to his designs. Exactly ten years later, Metzendorf had more Krupp officials' houses built at Walter-Hohmann-Strasse 17 and 20 to 28, only a few hundred meters away, all of which were destroyed in the Second World War.

Only the officials' houses at Goethestrasse 24 to 36 and 56 on the western side of the street have survived to this day, while all the others were destroyed by bombing raids in 1943.