Loft apartment
A loft , short for loft apartment in German , is a storage or industrial room that has been converted into an apartment. The word comes from English and simply means attic or storage . In the US, loft was transferred to warehouses and industrial buildings. A special feature is the usually pronounced room height compared to conventional apartments.
history
From the 1940s onwards, empty halls of this type were redesigned for residential purposes in New York City and London , although the structure of the hall was hardly changed. An apartment therefore often comprised the entire area of one floor , on which furniture was simply placed. This resulted in open apartments with huge areas and high ceilings. Andy Warhol is now incorrectly counted among the pioneers of loft users, even though he did not set up his factory in a New York loft until the 1960s. Lofts quickly became the coveted apartments for freelancers and artists, who were able to integrate living and working space and thus often live cheaply.
Today's use of lofts
Today, loft apartments are no longer improvised apartments, but are created through extensive renovation and modernization of old industrial halls and thus often become very expensive apartments on the real estate market . The original idea of creating cheap living space by converting old industrial buildings has turned into its opposite and has become part of the phenomenon of gentrification . In some cases, openly designed new apartments are also offered as loft apartments; However, these offers have nothing to do with classic lofts, here mostly only the open character or certain design elements (e.g. exposed concrete, unplastered masonry, openly laid pipes, etc.) give the name.
Loft development in Germany
The German loft movement started in the 1980s in the Frankfurt area and the Ruhr area. In the late 1990s, Leipzig asserted itself as the “German capital of the loft” even before Berlin . Old industrial halls from the Wilhelminian era and the Bauhaus era are available here to a particularly large extent . They are increasingly used by Leipzig's lively art scene. It was mainly freelancers and artists who were interested in this type of apartment.
Loft development in Switzerland
In Switzerland, the conversion of factory buildings to lofts was discovered only occasionally in the mid-1980s. A real boom began in Zurich and Winterthur in the mid-1990s . Today, the demand for lofts, especially in urban areas, is leading to a price development that makes lavish properties almost exclusively available to high-income residents.
See also
- Carloft .
literature
- Markus Ehrat: Lofts - living in the old spinning mill. ISBN 3-907496-28-0 . (Showcase project in Windisch, Switzerland)
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ The history of lofts in Germany Metalworxx.de, April 19, 2020