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‘The dissolution of cities’: the Horseshoe settlement in Weimar Berlin
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 August 2017
Abstract:
By considering the material processes by which the Horseshoe housing estate in Berlin came into being as aesthetic vision, constructed environment and inhabited living space, this article focuses on the complex manner by which the ideas of planners and architects ‘migrate’ into actual built forms. I evaluate the roles played by emergent technologies and new building methods as well as the managerial directives of state and civic bureaucracies, assessing how co-operative and competing aesthetic visions and the life practices of inhabitants are involved in the coproduction of Weimar public housing.
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References
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19 Taut, Auflösung der Städte, plate 1, as cited and translated in Haag Bletter, ‘Bruno Taut’, 218.
20 Haag Bletter, ‘Bruno Taut’, 229.
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29 Using Taut's early theoretical works, which customarily are assigned by art critics (at least in the 1980s) to expressionist visionary utopias and fantasies, along with his later housing estates projects that are usually described in the language of functionalism, Haag Bletter has argued that the continuities between expressionism and Neues Bauen are found not so much on ‘a stylistic, formal level’, but in ‘underlying social convictions’. See Haag Bletter, Bruno Taut, 117.
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34 Wagner, ‘Rationalisierter Wohnungsbau’ (1924), in Hilpert, Hufeisensiedlung, 161.
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46 ‘Kleinstwohnungsgrundrisse’, EINFA Nachrichtenblatt, 1/4 (1930), 4.
47 Hilpert, Hufeisensiedlung, 88. By incorporating discussions in architectural history, analysis of funding mechanisms and interviews about everyday life in the Horseshoe estate, Hilpert's study enlists the stories of community building in the Horseshoe estate with the aim of delineating distinct narratives of communal life in various periods of the estate's history. Explicitly, the project places the settlement into narratives of resistance to Nazism. The oral narratives themselves, producing a ‘representational space’, complexly mix perceptions of satisfaction of living there in the late 1920s with nostalgia. Keeping in mind that the interviews collected in the book provide a highly selective account, I use them to further clarify relations among tenants’ home decorating practices, financing mechanisms, various degrees of influence, mandates, coercion by the politicians, planners, architects and the management of the estates.
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69 The park area was administered by the district of Neukölln and GEHAG did not have influence in relation to the design. See J. Tomisch and A. Jaeggi, ‘Grossiedlung Britz, Dokumentation und Rekonstruktiomdes Originalzustandes’, unpublished report for GEHAG (Berlin, 1991), cited in Haney, When Modern Was Green, 184.
70 ‘Erweiterung des Grossiedlung Britz’, EINFA Nachrichtenblatt, 1/4 (1930), 4–5.