Georgsgarten settlement

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Three- story row buildings of the settlement

The Georgsgarten settlement is a larger housing estate in Celle in Lower Saxony . It was planned by the architect Otto Haesler and completed in 1927. The plant in the open row construction belongs to the new building and a major influence on the housing of the Modern . Today the settlement is a listed building .

description

The settlement is located on the southern edge of the old town of Celle on the arterial road to Braunschweig . It was built in the former garden of the St. Georg Hospital in the Blumlage, which gave it the name Georgsgarten.

The stairwells protruding from the structure

The residential buildings of the settlement consist of six three-storey row buildings 80 meters long and 10 meters deep in north-south orientation, which are covered with flat roofs. The buildings were constructed using a steel frame construction with an outer wall made of double-shell limestone. The entire complex has 168 apartments with a size of 50 to 70 m². The five stairwells each of the living rows protrude from the building to the west. The color scheme made by the painter Karl Völker reinforced the effect of the emerging architectural elements. Between the row buildings there is a 30-meter-wide courtyard with lawns that were previously leased to a shepherd. The blocks face the street at the gable, which was new at the time. The apartment blocks are separated from the street by a row of four single-storey block buildings that originally housed commercial and communal facilities, such as a heating, washing and bathing house as well as a cafe, a library, a hairdressing salon and shops. A transverse building is set up as a kindergarten on an outer block of flats. Orientation lighting using light boxes showing the number of the respective line was progressive for the time. The settlement was shielded from the two passing streets by flat blocks, walls and gates. Inside the settlement, it is accessed through residential paths and a garden path.

Right from the start, the housing units in the settlement had running water and a toilet, but no bathroom; a bathhouse was available for this. There was central heating. The architect Otto Haesler entrusted the painter Karl Völker with the color design of the buildings . By replacing the windows originally painted yellow with white plastic windows, the original color effect has now been lost. Haesler brought in the landscape architect Leberecht Migge to design 59 kitchen gardens for the tenants south of the blocks .

  • photos

  • The flat blocks that shield the settlement from the street

  • The kindergarten attached to a row building

  • Entrance to the inner courtyard of a block of flats with light boxes

  • Light box as orientation lighting

history

The developer of the settlement was the Volkshilfe cooperative with the official name Volkshilfegesellschaft mbH , which the non-profit building association borrowed from the citizens of Celle as working capital. The non-profit building association was founded in 1923 by the Celle businessman and later member of the Reichstag, Wilhelm Jaeger ( DNVP ). Jäger's intentions were to fight the “housing shortage with its harmful phenomena” through “bourgeois self-help”. In 1925 Volkshilfe announced a building program and planned the construction of 200 relatively inexpensive apartments in terraced houses. Construction began in the same year and was completed at the end of 1926. The rents were higher than expected because of the unfavorable financing of the construction project. One third of the first tenants belonged to the public service or administration, to independent merchants or craftsmen and to the lower middle class. Some concepts of building-building Volkshilfe did not work. The shops in the communal area were loss-making and the lavishly designed allotments could only be leased to a small extent due to the high rents.

Style and meaning

Wall lettering to the architect, behind it a row building of the settlement

The settlement became widely known through publications in architectural circles. There were individual voices of criticism of the architectural style in Celle, according to which the flat roofs were alien or that they were stone boxes. Shapes and colors of the settlement, especially in the markedly vertical stairwells, were based on models from contemporary Dutch architecture, especially the De Stijl group . The influence of the Bauhaus can be seen on a stairwell due to the large glass surfaces with free corners.

With the Georgsgarten estate, Otto Haesler implemented an open, linear construction for the first time and achieved maximum use of space with standardized floor plans. The result was affordable social housing with a high level of comfort, and architecture critics saw this as a “model settlement” that had a decisive influence on modern housing. For Haesler, the settlement meant the breakthrough on a national level, as it led to follow-up orders such as the Dammerstock settlement in Karlsruhe, the Rothenberg settlement in Kassel and the Friedrich-Ebert-Ring settlement in Rathenow .

today

During the first renovation in 1984, the living spaces were renewed and the windows replaced. The apartments now have bathrooms. Around the year 2000, cracks appeared on the outer facade in connection with mold formation on the inner walls. A thermal insulation planned by the client, which would have changed the appearance of the listed building complex, was not implemented after various investigations. The cause of the crack formation turned out to be groundwater movements in the subsoil and the mold was based on the ventilation behavior of the tenants.

See also

literature

  • Völter: Georgsgarten settlement . In: Die Baugilde , Vol. 9, No. 19, October 10, 1927, pp. 1149–1152.
  • Angela Schumacher: Otto Haesler and housing construction in the Weimar Republic. (=  Kulturwissenschaftliche Reihe. Volume 1) Jonas-Verlag, Marburg 1982, pp. 54–70.
  • Simone Oelker: The Georgsgarten settlement - incunable of the line structure in: Otto Haesler. A career as an architect in the Weimar Republic. Munich, 2002, pp. 69-86
  • Reiner Zittlau : The Georgsgarten settlement in Celle in: Reports on the preservation of monuments in Lower Saxony , 4/2004, p. 137.

Web links

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

Coordinates: 52 ° 36 ′ 56.1 ″  N , 10 ° 5 ′ 32.5 ″  E