Walter Gropius House (Hansaviertel, Berlin)

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Gropius House in Berlin's Hansaviertel
International building exhibition: Contribution from the USA by Walter Gropius / The Architects Collaborative (TAC) and Wils Ebert

The Walter-Gropius-Haus is a nine-storey residential building with 66 condominiums at Händelallee 1-9 in Berlin's Hansaviertel at the Großer Tiergarten . It was designed by Walter Gropius / The Architects Collaborative - TAC ( Cambridge , Massachusetts , USA) in collaboration with Wils Ebert , Berlin, on the occasion of the first international building exhibition (" Interbau ") in 1957. It was placed under monument protection in 1980 .

General

The Walter-Gropius-Haus is one of the 35 objects realized at the International Building Exhibition ( Interbau ) in 1957 . The architects involved were exclusively representatives of the New Building direction, including Alvar Aalto , Egon Eiermann , Walter Gropius , Arne Jacobsen , Wassili Luckhardt , Oscar Niemeyer , Sep Ruf , Max Taut and Le Corbusier, among others. It is - next to the congress hall by Hugh Stubbins - the second contribution by a US architecture firm to Interbau 1957.

The characteristic feature of the Walter-Gropius-Haus is the concave curved structure, which is open to the south, with a three-dimensional, complexly structured facade and strikingly structured narrow sides. The apartments are accessed via four separate entrances with tower-like staircases and elevator shafts.

architecture

View from Handelallee, 2019

In addition to its characteristic concave curvature, the south facade of the building shows a richly differentiated structure. It develops a lively, decorative effect through the graphic arrangement of the protruding balconies, with white, sail-like arched parapets and colored, glass parapet elements. It stands in stark contrast to the formal and functional rigor of the housing projects that Walter Gropius carried out before the Second World War. The otherwise largely identical floor plans of the three-and-a-half-room apartments differ mainly in the position of the balconies, which are grouped together in groups of four and thus create a "checkerboard pattern" in alternation with the window and plastered areas. Another special feature is the design of the narrow sides: while row buildings usually have windowless narrow sides, Gropius has turned four apartments at each end of the building in an east and west direction. These eight “turned” apartments with their protruding loggias give the building a striking side view and also enliven the main view with their flanks made of high-quality scratch plaster. The soffits of the balconies were framed in a pale blue, the side projections separating the balconies are brick red, and the building overhang on the eastern narrow side is emphasized by an old rose colored soffit. The four entrance doors are bright red, yellow, blue and green. The north-facing view is characterized by the four tower-like stairwells and elevator shafts. The north side is less colorful than the main view from the south, but has subtly differentiated surfaces: The height of the four staircase towers is emphasized by vertical grooves on the smoothly plastered, white front side. They are partly inside and partly outside the structure and originally also contained rubbish chutes. The ground floor is clad all around with strong vertical grooved, matt brown ceramic tiles. In the interior of the stairwells, the side walls are covered with brick slips, the front sides are accentuated in bright yellow painted plaster. The vestibules of the four entrances are illuminated by glass blocks and individualized with different colored ceramic tiles. There is a storage room for bicycles on each side of the house entrances. In the recessed top floor there are two penthouse apartments with large roof terraces.

Since the house was designed as a concrete skeleton construction, the apartments have only a few load-bearing walls, so that kitchens open to the living space and / or living space that extends through both sides of the facade can be created. Some of the apartment doors are ceiling-high and have aluminum handles. Originally, all windows were to be designed as filigree steel frame constructions. Since steel frames would have blown the budget, Gropius turned to wooden windows, whose frames were painted steel-colored. In order to preserve the desired filigree effect, the wooden frames of the south-facing windows were slimmed down by combining sash windows with permanently installed panes. The house was not built with a basement. Storage rooms and laundry rooms are on the ground floor. The floor plans of the apartments are based on Gropius' contribution to the Siemensstadt housing estate from 1929/30. To the north are two bedrooms and a bathroom in between, to the south a living room and another bedroom with a kitchen in between.

history

The building in 1957
Another view from 1957

The organizers of Interbau did not announce an architecture competition for the construction of the buildings, but instead relied on the splendor of internationally renowned "superstars" who received an invitation to participate. The architects used an urban design by Gerhard Jobst and Willy Kreuer as a guide , which provided for an “informal” and “freely natural” arrangement of the buildings, as well as key words from Aachen professor Erich Kühn : “light - cheerful - homely - festive - colored - radiant - secure ”. Walter Gropius translated these central ideas literally into architecture and represented them in a convincing and visually attractive way. For this reason, and also in general because of the attraction of the name Gropius, the building was positioned as a crowd puller not far from the southwest main entrance of Interbau.

The original urban planning design of the entire Hansaviertel by Jobst and Keuer also goes back to an - albeit unintentional - inspiration from Walter Gropius: A publication of the site plan of the working-class city "Aluminum City" in New Kensington, Pennsylvania by Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer apparently shows one Disorganized scattered arrangement of the buildings. This plan was interpreted by Jobst and Keuer as an “abstract figure” and an expression of a “free composition”. Since topographical information was missing in the site plan of the “Aluminum City”, it was not clear to them that Gropius and Breuer did not arrange the buildings completely “freely”, but rather arranged them on hilly terrain along a valley cut.

The facades and external parts of the structure were comprehensively renovated in accordance with listed buildings in the years 2013–2015, and in 2019 the staircases were renovated in the original colors (light blue, gray, pink and dark red) under the supervision of the listed building.

The Walter-Gropius-Haus was family-owned when it was built. In the late 1980s, it was split into condominiums.

Green spaces

The green areas of the entire Hansaviertel were designed as a coherent whole as part of the Interbau and executed by ten internationally renowned garden and landscape architects. The boundaries between the adjacent Großer Tiergarten and the new residential area should be deliberately blurred. The urban planning target clearly states: “In a few years, the new Hansaviertel will have completely grown into the Tiergarten”. Lenné already wanted to expand the zoo at this point. The green spaces around the Walter-Gropius-Haus (Section I) originally laid out for Interbau were created by the garden architects Herrmann Mattern (Kassel) and René Pechère (Brussels). Between the Walter-Gropius-Haus and the Pierre Vago building, they provided for a playground, a rose circle and a fountain, none of which are any longer there today. The three oaks now standing in front of the south facade and the linden tree to the west were not part of the green space concept of Interbau, but were later planted on a private initiative without consultation with the green space office. They cover large parts of the main view from the south and south-west. The whole building can therefore only be seen in winter today.

criticism

The Walter-Gropius-Haus was completed in time for the opening of Interbau on July 6, 1957 and, as planned, proved to be a crowd puller. Contemporary press photos show long queues of visitors in front of the entrances that led to model apartments. Nevertheless, Gropius did not meet all the expectations of the professional world: on the one hand, because the curved structure with its colorful, richly differentiated facade and cheerful decorative effect seemed to contradict the strictly functional "white architecture" of the Bauhaus master, on the other hand the "recycling" was disappointing “The apartment floor plans that have been tried and tested since the Bauhaus era. The buildings by Aalto, Vago, Le Corbusier and especially van den Broek / Bakema , with maisonette apartments and partly complex split-level floor plans, were much more likely to meet the high expectations placed on Interbau '57 as an “experimental field for modern, standardized social housing”. A resident survey by Grete Meyer-Ehlers in 1958/59, on the other hand, cited satisfied residents of the Gropius house who explicitly praised the “tried and tested floor plan”.

Others

The Gropius House graced the front page of the catalog for the Open Monument Day 2016 in Berlin and was presented at the opening event on September 10, 2016.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ute Nerger, Gabi Doll-Bonekämper, Klaus Lingenauber: The Hansaviertel - Concepts - Meaning - Problems . Ed .: District Office Tiergarten of Berlin, Dept. of Building and Housing, Nature Conservation and Green Space Office. Berlin 1995.
  2. ↑ Bürgererverein Hansaviertel eV (Ed.): Hansaviertel Berlin compact - architecture guide to the substructure 1957 . Berlin 2016.
  3. ↑ Ralph Eue, Florian Wüst, absolut MEDIEN (eds.): The modern city - 6 film essays on the new urbanity of the 1950 / 60s: documents on the subject of modern residential and urban development . absolut MEDIEN, 2015, ISBN 978-3-8488-4033-5 .
  4. ↑ Sandra Wagner-Conzelmann: The Hansaviertel in Berlin and the potential of modernity . Ed .: Sandra Wagner-Conzelmann on behalf of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin. Berlin 2017.
  5. ↑ Lidia Tirri: living laboratory Hansaviertel - Stories from the City of Tomorrow . Amberpress, Berlin 2007, ISBN 3-9809655-6-2 , p. 69 ff .
  6. ^ Gabi Dolff-Bonekämper, Franziska Schmidt: The Hansaviertel: international post-war modernity in Berlin . Ed .: HUSS-MEDIEN GmbH. Verlag Bauwesen, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-345-00639-1 , p. 16 ff., 155 ff .
  7. ^ Nerdinger, Winfried: Walter Gropius. The architect Walter Gropius - drawings, plans and photos from the Busch-Reisinger Museum of Harvard University, Art Museums . Ed .: Bauhaus Archive. Berlin 1985, p. 274 f .
  8. ^ Hans Bernhard Reichow : Organic city architecture. From the big city to the urban landscape . tape 1 . Westermann, Braunschweig 1948, p. 49, fig. 55 .
  9. ↑ Platena + Jagusch Architects: Project description general renovation of the Gropius House. (PDF) Retrieved October 18, 2016 .
  10. ↑ Architecture Day 2016 - program. (No longer available online.) Berlin Chamber of Architects, June 2016, archived from the original on October 18, 2016 ; Retrieved October 18, 2016 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.ak-berlin.de
  11. ↑ Land register of the Brandenburg Gate District , Volume 58: Tiergarten plot of land, corridor 10, parcel 129/5, building and open space at Händelallee 1/9 . Ed .: District Court Berlin-Tiergarten.
  12. ^ Frank Manuel Peter: The Berlin Hansaviertel and Interbau 1957 . Sutton Verlag, Erfurt 2007, ISBN 978-3-86680-151-6 .
  13. ^ Stefanie Schulz, Carl-Georg Schulz: The Hansaviertel - Icon of Modernism . 3. Edition. Verlagshaus BRAUN, 2015, ISBN 978-3-938780-13-8 , pp. 30th f .
  14. ↑ Rita Jacobs and Christoph Bock: Blessing or Curse? Concrete repair in monument protection . In: Monument RENOVATION . Faible Verlagsprojekte, Allensbach, S. 74, 75 .
  15. ↑ Dr. Christine Wolf (coordination): "Preserving monuments together - Open Monument Day 2016 in Berlin" . Ed .: Senate Department for Urban Development and the Environment, Landesdenkmalamt Berlin. S. Cover picture .