Masters' Houses (Krupp)

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The Masters' Houses in Essen were the first residential buildings by the Krupp company for their employees. Built in 1861 and 1862, they represent the beginning of Krupp housing construction .

The beginning of Krupp housing

At the beginning of the sixties of the 19th century, the industrialist Alfred Krupp felt compelled to create adequate living space for his employees, because a housing shortage was looming in Essen, caused by the immigration of workers for the rapidly expanding mining and the rapidly expanding steel industry Krupp company, which expanded on the site of the Krupp belt . This Krupp cast steel factory clearly exceeded the size of the actual city of Essen at this time. Until then, Krupp had rented apartments in the city of Essen, but in 1861 he set up an in-house construction office under the direction of Ferdinand Barchewitz , which the government master builder Gustav Kraemer took over on February 15, 1863 .

The first buildings were the so-called Masters' Houses from the years 1861/1862, which were initially built for executive employees. At that time there was no thought of simple workers. The generous arrangement of the masters 'houses, with the garden belonging to the house and a separate residential unit for each individual house, could no longer be maintained later, so that just one year later the much simpler and more compact workers' colony Westend was built around 300 meters to the west. The reason was the increasing housing shortage and the lack of space close to the factory, because the workers should be able to reach their workplaces by a short distance. If one had nevertheless switched to large areas more distant, the groundwater level, which has fallen sharply due to mining, would also have caused problems. The nearby workers' colonies, on the other hand, were connected to a plant's own drinking water pipeline, and also to a plant-owned gas pipeline, which also ensured outdoor lighting.

The workers' colonies Nordhof , Baumhof and Schederhof followed the Westend colony until 1873 . In these four colonies more than 2,300 apartments were built. With the Kronenberg workers' colony , which was established by 1874 , a further 1,400 were added. After 1874, the Krupp company came to the brink of bankruptcy due to a severe recession, so that Krupp housing construction was discontinued. After Alfred Krupp's death in 1887, his son Friedrich Alfred Krupp and the head of the Krupp construction office, Robert Schmohl , took up residential construction again, which began with the Alfredshof and Altenhof settlements in 1891 and took on completely new dimensions in a new form.

The Masters' Houses

In 1861 and 1862, two rows of terraced houses were built on Hügelstrasse, west of the Essen city ​​center and south of the factory. One row of the Masters' Houses provided six apartments in six individual houses, the other row provided four apartments in four individual houses. A single house had a footprint of around 6.8 by 8.5 meters. Each apartment could be entered from the outside through a separate entrance. The individual houses each had a garden and an outside toilet that was connected to a stable building.

The outer walls of the Masters' Houses were solidly bricked, the inner walls made of stone framework. The approximately 100 m² apartments extended over the ground floor and the loft, with the kitchen, living room and bedroom on the ground floor and an internal staircase leading to further rooms under the roof covered with pans. The houses were partially basement with a vault.

Current condition

Today nothing is visible of the former masters' houses. The street with the name Hügelstrasse , which no longer exists there , roughly followed the course of today's Hans-Böckler-Strasse ( B224 ) in the section between Frohnhauserstrasse and Schwanenkampstrasse. After the Second World War , for example, an industrial park was built on the site of the former masters' houses, on which a Siemens site was located until 2008 . In July 2011, the new company headquarters of the Society for Nuclear Service was moved into.

literature

  • Daniel Stemmrich: The settlement as a program . Ed .: Johann Georg Olms Verlag. 1981, ISBN 978-3-487-07064-3 .
  • Boris Kretzinger: Company housing construction before 1914 . Ed .: GRIN Verlag. 2007, ISBN 978-3-640-14178-4 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Structural description of the apartments. (pdf) In: Welfare institutions of the cast steel factory von Fried. Krupp zu Essen an der Ruhr, 2nd edition. University of Cologne, 1891, accessed on February 22, 2013 (German, 850kB).

Coordinates: 51 ° 27 ′ 15 ″  N , 6 ° 59 ′ 58 ″  E