Blumläger Feld settlement

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In the foreground with district heating pipes is the north end of the 220-meter-long eastern residential line, followed by the rest of the residential line, which was widened and raised in 2003

The settlement Blum warehouses field is a larger residential development of the new architecture in Celle in Lower Saxony . It was planned by the architect Otto Haesler and completed in 1931. The complex originally consisted of around 150 low-cost small apartments in steel frame construction , some of which have now been demolished, threatened with demolition or renovated.

description

The so-called lung block of the Blumläger Feld settlement
Apartment blocks with supported district heating pipes

The settlement has two construction phases that were created one after the other. The developer was the Städtische Wohnungsfürsorge-Gesellschaft , founded in 1930 . The first phase of construction with 95 apartments, begun in 1930, is located on a long and narrow plot of land that extends north-south. The first development consisted of two rows of living quarters that were 220 meters long and ran parallel. A transverse wing was erected between the northern ends of the building so that the building ensemble formed a U-shape open to the south. The 140 m² utility and recreational gardens of the residents of the settlement were located in the approximately 60-meter-wide inner courtyard formed in this way. The two long rows of living rooms were two-story and each had 11 stairwells and 44 apartments. The individual apartments were not described in terms of the number of rooms or the living space (34, 43 and 51 m²), but rather as two, four or six bed types because of the prevailing housing shortage. The apartments had a toilet but no bathroom. The only radiator was in the living room. The two-story transverse wing consisted of seven south-facing single-family row houses. They had a sun terrace on the ground floor and a balcony on the upper floor. The health department occupied them with families suffering from tuberculosis, so the tract was also called the lung block. The ensemble included a central building with a laundry room for communal use, a bathroom with bath and shower cubicles and a central boiler house with coke ovens and a coal bunker to provide district heating .

The second construction phase with three rows of apartments and individual houses with around 50 apartments began around 1930/31. The defects that occurred in the first construction phase due to leaky cellars were bypassed with high cellars. The construction phase was separated from the first construction phase to the north by a road.

Between the individual buildings of the settlement, supported district heating pipes ran at a height of six meters, which transported the heating heat to the residential buildings. The unconventional pipe laying should save costs.

history

The settlement was built at the time of the global economic crisis with three million unemployed in Germany and a considerable housing shortage. In 1930 the Brüning government initiated a housing program . The requirement was the creation of "the simplest of small apartments for families with children and for rents that ... take into account the most difficult circumstances". The program limited the living space to 32 to 45 m².

The architect Otto Haesler submitted the first plans for a settlement of tiny apartments to the city of Celle in 1927. In 1930 the magistrate decided to carry out its construction plans on a municipal property. Despite initial resistance to the New Building style and the new construction method with steel frameworks, Haesler's design was selected because he expected the lowest rents at 20 to 30 Reichsmarks .

today

Vacant apartment block in the second phase of construction of the estate, 2019
Facade opening for damage assessment on the steel frame, 2019

Today, the estate belongs to Städtische Wohnungsbau GmbH as the successor company to the builder society. At the end of the 1990s, the company was considering structural measures on the almost 70-year-old buildings. In 1998 it declared that a renovation was economically unreasonable , which led to the largest historical conservation dispute in Lower Saxony up to that point. In the years 2000 to 2003 the building stock was demolished and rebuilt. In the first construction phase, the 220 meter long eastern residential row was widened and raised by one floor to three floors. The western residential row was demolished and then rebuilt elsewhere.

The Otto Haesler Museum, founded in 2001, is located in the settlement's wash, bath and boiler house, which was built in 1931. In a neighboring apartment block of the settlement there are further museum rooms within apartments that have been preserved in their original form.

In 2015, the Städtische Wohnungsbau GmbH started to plan maintenance work for the second construction phase of the estate with five buildings. In 2017 it was found that the steel skeleton of the building showed considerable corrosion damage and the stability of the facades was no longer guaranteed. It was threatened with demolition. In 2018 all tenants had to vacate their apartments. The renovation costs are estimated at almost 15 million. In 2018, over 10 million federal funds were made available with which the old town school in Celle , built by Otto Haesler, is to be repaired.

Style and meaning

The original part of the southern end of the 220-meter-long eastern residential line, followed by the remainder of the residential line, which was widened and raised in 2003

The Blumläger Feld housing estate is considered to be one of the most consistent housing projects of the interwar period , in which the architect Otto Haesler used an earlier form of social housing . The construction of a steel frame construction with brickwork and insulation with straw mats was a technical innovation of the new building. Flat roofs, rectangular building blocks and smooth plastered surfaces express the programmatic aesthetics of the avant-garde. When it was being built, architecture critics criticized the apartments' small bedrooms, which the architect Bruno Taut described as “ prison cells ”.

The Lower Saxony State Office for the Preservation of Monuments attaches great importance to the estate as it shows how a “committed architect tried to cope with the existential needs of the weakest in an unusually difficult period in German history”. Therefore, there is a public interest in their preservation within the meaning of the Lower Saxony Monument Protection Act .

In 2019, the Lower Saxony Homeland Association expressed its concern for the preservation of the northern area of ​​the settlement in the red folder after the discovery of significant deficiencies. The Heimatbund asked the state of Lower Saxony to look for a sustainable solution to the rescue. The settlement is a characteristic ensemble of the social building culture of New Building.

See also

literature

  • Angela Schumacher: Otto Haesler and housing construction in the Weimar Republic. (=  Cultural studies series. Volume 1) Jonas-Verlag, Marburg 1982, p. 146–161.
  • Falk-Reimar singer: The Haesler settlement on the Blumläger field in Celle - threatened loss of a high-quality architectural monument in: Reports on the preservation of monuments in Lower Saxony 1/99, pp. 50–51.
  • Reiner Zittlau : Why go to the Haesler settlement on the Blumläger Feld in Celle again? in: Reports on the preservation of monuments in Lower Saxony 3/99, pp. 157–158.
  • Christina Krafczyk , Klaus Thiele: Otto Haesler in Celle: Blumläger Feld settlement - construction of small apartments from the 1930s as an optimization of economical steel construction. In: Society for the history of building technology (ed.): Everyday life and change. Practices of building and construction. Dresden 2017. pp. 157–172.
  • Simone Oelker: Blumläger Feld settlement - apartments for the subsistence level in: Otto Haesler. A career as an architect in the Weimar Republic. Munich, 2002, pp. 213-217
  • Cellesche Zeitung (ed.): Blumläger Feld renovation case in: 100 Years of Bauhaus , 2018, pp. 87–96.
  • Eckart Rüsch: The Blumläger Feld settlement in Celle from 1930–1931 In: Reports on the preservation of monuments in Lower Saxony , 1/2019, pp. 24–31.

Web links

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

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Joachim Göres: All tenants have to get out in Weser-Kurier on April 23, 2018
  2. ↑ Joachim Göres: All tenants have to get out in Süddeutsche from June 28, 2018
  3. ↑ Gunther Meinrenken: Millions for the Haesler legacy in Cellesche Zeitung from November 8, 2018
  4. ↑ See literature: Why go back to the Haesler settlement on the Blumläger field in Celle? , Pp. 157-158.
  5. ↑ Securing of the Blumläger Feld Nord settlement by the architect Otto Haesler in Celle 306/19 in Rote Mappe 2019 of the Lower Saxony Heimatbund , pp. 25-26 (pdf)

Coordinates: 52 ° 36 '41.7 "  N , 10 ° 5' 37.9"  E