Wandering in a recently completed large housing estate in Berlin's district of Neukölln, writer Franz Hessel appreciatively wrote in 1929 that
its colours shine, gold, white and red and in between blue of framing and balconies. From one of the streets, we are entering into the round complex, along the open side of the quadrangle, on whose other three sides small houses enclose a large garden. . .We are entering the inner circle and finally see the centre, the pond, where the waterside joins the circle of housing in the shape of the horseshoe. In beautiful symmetry, the houses have a row of dorm windows, big and small windows and recessed balconies. On the side where the horseshoe becomes small, this lucky town has its own marketplace. . .We are entering a house. On the inside it is also colourful, but no superfluous ornament, everything decoration free yet decorated.Footnote 1
Hessel was describing one of the major Neues Bauen settlements in Berlin, the Horseshoe housing estate, a collaborative project by the architect Bruno Taut and head city planner Martin Wagner. As with many other settlements of the era, the Horseshoe estate was located on the outskirts of the city and was part of the co-operative effort among modernist architects, planners and politicians to address the housing crisis in Berlin.Footnote 2
Often, studies of Weimar housing reform trace the ways in which housing policies were largely shaped by broader political processes and point consequently to the larger socio-economic contexts in which housing operated.Footnote 3 Other researchers focus on the site of home as a place of state intervention. As Jennifer Jenkins has commented, observing the allegiances between social reformers and modern housing movement in Germany, ‘in a search for mass solutions to social issues, design began to be integrated into state social policy as a way of making domestic environments into pedagogical and transformative spaces, a linkage which found its clearest articulation in the public housing settlements of the Weimar Republic’.Footnote 4 As the transformation of domestic space and of housekeeping practices entered into the complex constellations of modern discourses about the welfare state, nationalism, hygiene and consumerism, homemaking practices became an object of scrutiny by proponents of the new ‘science’ of home management, by planners and architects interested in the prospects of modernization.Footnote 5
Drawing from studies of both of these groups of researchers, I address how various interventions (such as the financing and policy mechanisms of the welfare state and expert groups of modernist planners and architects) positioned housing as a sphere of state interest and contributed to modernist production of living space. Housing reformers’ project of social and spatial ordering signalled that the everyday living spaces and practices became professionalized; planners and architects could define what the everyday life would look like. This was not a top down imposition, however. Some regulations were more strictly defined while some recommendations, especially those about the interiors of domestic spaces, had a prescriptive character, taking the form of advice and encouragement, rather than mandates. How did these recommendations aim to reorganize everyday practices, when entering the sphere of the everyday life?
To address the juncture of home as ‘an affective concept’ (the way in which home space is experienced in various practices of homemaking) and housing as a realm of policy and economy in general, Jane M. Jacobs and Susan J. Smith introduce the notion of coproduction.Footnote 6 By their understanding, the concept of coproduction can help develop more complex reading of the relations among the ‘agents that make the modern interior’ by complicating simple distinctions between those who impose and intervene into the domestic sphere and those who live under such directives and regulations.Footnote 7 Inspired by this approach, I focus on the Horseshoe estate as a case-study to explore the ‘migration’ of architectural and planning visions into home spaces. My conceptions of the various discourses, representations and lived practices in the Horseshoe estate should not be taken to describe the Horseshoe estate as a settled site or object, but rather as a space in the process of being composed by the efforts of planners and architects, politicians and residents. Analyses of the Horseshoe estate endeavour therefore to capture the processuality of this site as a place being coproduced, not only by architects and planners, but also by political allegiances and formations, by financial mechanisms and bodies and by inhabitants.
How did plans and understandings of the architects and planners – Martin Wagner's visions of efficiency and rationalization of construction and designs, Bruno Taut's ideas about community and Leberecht Migge's designs for outdoor spaces – find their way into actual Siedlungen? To answer this, we will need to examine in more detail how these planning ideas became expressed in housing designs and policies of the Horseshoe estate. Tracing the drift of planning ideas into built spaces, I aim to emphasize how architectural and planning visions were incompletely translated into built spaces amidst struggles over designs and the appropriation of living space. Additionally, I consider financial policies and legal regulations as mechanisms of coproduction rather than as determining factors. As architects’ ideas and planning initiatives found their way into built spaces, the residents variously involved themselves in the appropriation and coproduction of space.
Government involvement in local municipal housing programmes
Weimar cities were granted the relative freedom to determine their own housing politics, since there was no national urban development policy. The national government therefore called on the cities to accomplish different tasks, such as providing welfare.Footnote 8 Municipalities thereby obtained considerable influence over the construction and provision of housing. The particular mechanisms by which an emerging Weimar welfare state aimed to shape municipal housing programmes included zoning regulations as well as via legal and financial initiatives (such as setting up welfare offices, supporting non-profit building societies, introducing new taxes and directing financing towards specific categories of housing). Many of these reforms were directed towards building low rise, suburban and often modernist by design housing estates. In Berlin, the rate of new housing construction was remarkable. According to Gustav Böss, who was elected mayor by the Social Democrats in 1921 and who was a supporter of Martin Wagner, the number of newly built flats rose from 10,050 in 1924 to 24,000 in 1928. In 1928, in Berlin 189,000 families were registered at the housing office. The municipality supplied 433 million Reichsmarks, of which 395 million were from taxes and 38 million from bond money. Writing in 1929, Böss proclaimed house-building in the city to be ‘one of the most important public responsibilities’.Footnote 9
Municipalities therefore obtained considerable influence over the construction and provision of housing. In 1918, one of the more important federal laws to be introduced placed the right to control the loans to co-operatives in the hands of regional municipal agencies.Footnote 10 Although municipal governments were similar in structure and function to those during the pre-war administration – consisting of a city parliament that also elected a Magistrat (administrative board) or a mayor – in Weimar a wider array of political interest groups obtained the opportunity to elect their representatives to city parliaments.Footnote 11 Most new construction was built by the co-operatives and various types of building organizations, financed by trade unions and banks, and politically allied with the Social Democrats. The state, although indirectly, began to carve out a segment of the market that could be regulated: ‘Weimar politic searched for the middle ground between capitalism and socialism: through partial government financing, a segment, remote from the market, should have developed, where affordable housing was provided in accordance with normative standards of humane living conditions. Co-operatives and municipal housing societies became such agents – what we now call public–private partnerships.’Footnote 12 Thus, municipal building societies, non–profit organizations created through federal measures, were given the legal powers to purchase and develop land for housing. As Manfredo Tafuri famously stated, ‘the attempt to control the housing market through a program of state loans to building companies and co-operatives is one of the corner-stones of the Weimar Sozialpolitik’.Footnote 13 Another way in which municipalities increased their role in housing construction was through control of the distribution of public funding: ‘municipal housing programs typically set targets for the number and type of apartments to be constructed with public financial assistance. Attaching conditions for the use of low-interest mortgages and other loans, municipal authorities steered public funds towards the construction of particular categories of housing such as small apartments or housing earmarked for those of modest means.’Footnote 14 The building society GEHAG (an acronym for Gemeinnützige Heimstätten-, Spar- und Bau-Aktiengesellschaft) was organized in 1924 under the directorship of Martin Wagner, out of a previous Allgemeine Deutsche Gewerkschaftsbund (‘Federation of Trade Unions’) and became responsible for over 70 per cent of the modernist housing built in Berlin.Footnote 15 Most of its financing came from the socialist trade unions and Wagner's socialized building trades movement. Although not intended by Wagner, a Social Democratic Party (SPD) member, to have a political orientation, GEHAG was nevertheless staffed primarily with left-leaning officials.Footnote 16 Using rationalized methods of construction, GEHAG's aim was to develop low rent standardized housing.
The social democratic vision of efficiency and rationalization of construction as a way to address and solve the housing crisis was very much shaped by Henry Ford's introduction of the assembly line as a method of efficient production. As Mary Nolan emphasizes, ‘one of the most striking characteristics of the new discourse on the home and consumption was its wholesale adoption of the language of production. . .Proponents of household rationalization saw the home as an integral part of the national economy, and precisely because of this, argued that rationalization was both desirable and possible.’Footnote 17
Bruno Taut and Martin Wagner: communal and efficient living
Bruno Taut, a consulting architect overseeing the housing programme at GEHAG, and Martin Wagner, the head of city planning in Berlin, both viewed suburban settlements as a preferential form of housing for low and middle income classes. Taut's writings at first sight might seem simply nostalgic for small town life and the form of collectivity that was threatened by the city, while Wagner's works can be folded in this discourse of ‘rationalizing’ space, as he argued for Siedlungen on the grounds of economy, efficiency and austerity.
Taut's thoughts on the socially transformative role of architecture were most comprehensively presented in Dissolution of Cities (Auflösung der Städte), published in the same year as the creation of Greater Berlin took place (1920).Footnote 18 As the city boundary expanded, Berlin now included former agricultural land; such incorporation required a new spatial organization. Taut's argument in the book was directed against urban tenements: ‘Let them collapse, the vulgarities that were built! Stone houses create hearts of stone.’Footnote 19 Like other reformers who advocated decentralization and efficient building as a means for improving social conditions for the working classes, Taut envisioned decentralized, dispersed self-sufficient communes, with industry limited only to heavy manufacturing. His argument is an attempt to discover a form of settlement most appropriate to his vision of an anarchic classless society: ‘Taut's interest in decentralization is not merely founded on aesthetic and hygienic notions but is rooted in the belief that cities are by nature hieratic, that they are centers of political and economic power which draw the poor resulting in an extremely stratified class system. Decentralization becomes then a requisite for creation of classless society.’Footnote 20 Taut, addressing the threat to communal experience of place in the modern city, was fully aware that the communality of the rural life could not be sustained in the transfer to mass housing. Rather, his theorizations of Siedlung were attempts to formulate the idea of mass housing that would deliberately promote new forms of social organization.
As a notion, commonly translated from German as ‘settlement’, Siedlung denoted ‘community’ for Taut, as he clarified in his unpublished memoirs, ‘in the sense that the garden city movement used the term’,Footnote 21 where the building's function is to re-establish contact with nature through dispersion of collective settlements. We can look at the Horseshoe estate as an attempt to give architectural shape to the idea of community. As Taut reflected in 1931, the estate was built in a way ‘to correspond to various relations of community of residents’ (Bewohnerschaft), employing the architectural form of the horseshoe (Hufeisen), a symbol of community, to arrange the housing, around the pond of the same shape, as the visual centre of the settlement.Footnote 22 The shape of the Volkshaus (‘the people's house’), a large-scale structure suitable for a stateless society, by its social functions and spatial structure, resonated here: the visual centre of the settlement, the pond and trees, is a site for social gatherings and community festivals, which centralized communal functions of the settlement.Footnote 23
In the Horseshoe estate, many flats have a balcony and each house has a garden. Employing the discourse of the ‘organic city’, Taut wrote that ‘especially if the house is situated in the open space there should be no sharp distinctions between inside and outside; the body of the house arises from its inner functions, not in the least, it is also determined by the relations with building conditions of the place, with its location in relation to the sun, garden, landscape and also neighbourhood (vicinity)’.Footnote 24 The dwelling was to be understood not simply as a ‘grouping and arrangement of rooms, but as an organism with its inner functions and outside vibrancies’.Footnote 25
Behind the concepts of the ‘outdoor space’ (Aussenwohnraum) or bright colours is the idea of productive space, of space that is not simply inert, or neutral, to be simply filled with objects. Rather, through the organization of the ‘outdoor space’, as, for example, parks, architecture was to be understood not as built structures in space, but as a production of collective spaces: ‘The task of architecture is the creation of the beautiful use. . .Architecture becomes a creator of new social forms.’Footnote 26 How the ‘outdoor space’ is situated in relation to sun, wind, ‘is not only of hygienic meaning, but also influences greatly the feelings of comfort (coziness), tranquility, calm, harmonious peace’.Footnote 27 The colours of which Taut was enamoured point to and call forth the visual organization and order, and different colouring of groups of houses can emphasize elements in the natural surroundings. Taut wrote: ‘we do not want to build anymore any colourless houses. . .Colour is not expensive compared to decoration with cornices and plastics, but colour is vitality. . .in the place of dirty gray houses let's see endlessly blue, red, yellow, green, black, white houses in unbound bright toning.’Footnote 28
In his 1924 article, tellingly entitled ‘How the community spirit embodies itself in the building’, Taut argues that the practical aim of creating healthy and liveable dwellings is dependent upon social practices of community.Footnote 29 Siedlung Falkenberg is for Taut an example of the ‘community spirit’ (Genossenschaftsgeist), because the space is arranged in a way to invite social interactions. Community spirit is realized in yearly festivals, which engage the Falkenberg tenants who organize them (children and women, Taut notices) as well as guests from Berlin. Such celebrations take place in the courtyard, which for Taut is a ‘building form’ of this ‘lively spirit’.Footnote 30 By employing expressionist rhetoric to describe how Siedlungen embody and express ‘communal spirit’, Taut walked the line between aestheticism and a commitment to social ideas, and carves out a utopian vision of space distinct from the discourse of rationalization so prevalent in Wagner's and others’ writings. Taut was not opposed at all to rationalized methods in building construction; he developed ideas about the rationalization of women's labour in the kitchen and widely celebrated them in Bauen: Der Neue Wohnbau and Die Neue Wohnung; die Frau als Schöpferin. But what emerged in his writings on Siedlungen is that shape, arrangements of indoor and outdoor spaces, colours of the exteriors and interiors all actively produce new everyday spaces and new social relations. Taut's understanding of the Siedlung rested on a view of the interdependency of space and social relations. In Auflösung der Städte, using and inhabiting buildings constituted practices of social transformation.
Taut's partner in the design of the Horseshoe estate, Martin Wagner, widely promoted the new rationalized methods of building construction; Taut called him for this reason ‘just an engineer’.Footnote 31 In his numerous writings, Wagner presented his urban vision, wherein the construction of the new housing would be sped up by rationalized building methods. Rationalized (mechanized) production in building, as well as the shrinking of the bureaucratic apparatus of planning (fewer people to deal with issues more effectively), was, for Wagner, the way to attack the housing problem.Footnote 32
Therefore, for Wagner the Horseshoe estate presented itself as an experimental building site, where his preferred methods of rationalization could be applied: ‘The reduction of costs of Ford's autos is not reached by the creation of some particular cheap model, but only through the most possible effective fabrication process.’Footnote 33 GEHAG was founded to test out the ‘possibilities of cost reduction of housing construction’, and the first 500 apartments of the Horseshoe estate were envisioned by Wagner as a testing ground for rationalization. In ‘Rationalisierter Wohnungsbau’ (1924), Wagner noted the similarity between housing construction and Ford's model of the assembly line in an automobile factory and to the automobile industry as a whole. Just as an automobile model would not be put into serial production before the pros and cons of the price reduction were tested, wrote Wagner, so in the construction of housing, cost and expense assessments must be made and tested.Footnote 34 In ‘Wohnungsbau im Grossbetrieb’ (1924) Wagner compared the building industry to the auto industry: just as the auto industry is a ‘montage’, a mechanized assembly of standardized parts, so does the building production involve the fabrication and assembly of standardized units, relying on specialized calculable labour.Footnote 35 Wagner connected this role to the socialized building societies and their trusts as the only agents ‘to provide means by which a construction site of 500 or 100 flats can generate practical economic evidence of cheaper building through the use of new technical devices’.Footnote 36 In ‘Gross-Siedlungen’ (1926), Wagner described the advantages of serial building (Serienbau) in terms of economic cost-efficiency as measured most of all by a concentration of labour and utilities on one site. Only a large-scale settlement, Gross-siedlung, argued Wagner, allowed for the ‘concentration of building on fewer large-scale building sites’, as well as the use of centralized utilities of gas, canalization, water, electricity and transportation.Footnote 37 In sum, it was more efficient to build in one place than in several. Using the Horseshoe estate as an example of ‘serial building’, Wagner calculated the costs of the ‘average’ dwelling of 63 square metres of living space by naming categories involved: net building costs, land value, administrative costs and so on. Not only could the building process itself be rationalized, but rationalization would extend into the administration of the building activity (what Wagner calls ‘Regiekosten’, using the cinematic metaphor of ‘directing’), which he further divided into categories of the technical, the economic and the artistic construction management.Footnote 38
The Horseshoe estate: Siedlung as a ‘cultural model’
The Horseshoe estate, from its design to regulations governing occupation and recommendations about the everyday life, has both functioned and represented a product of the SPD-supported vision for housing.Footnote 39 Lauded by socialist housing reformers because of its public financing, modern amenities and tenant structure, which comprised blue and white collar workers, descriptions of its exemplary status celebrated the Horseshoe's ‘modern’ and rational construction methods. However, the extent of the industrialization of the building processes of modernist housing settlements was often exaggerated. Further, although pre-fabricated building panels were introduced, manual work, especially for assembly, continued to be used in construction. As Ludovica Scarpa has argued, ‘although construction of the Horseshoe estate was not rationalized, in the sense of using machines instead of manual labour, it made the impression that it was, largely promoted as such by Martin Wagner’. For Scarpa, ‘rationalization’ became implemented more as a ‘cultural model’ than as an industrial mechanism: ‘through the sameness of flats and facades, the sameness of the residents was to be emphasized’.Footnote 40 Taut envisioned Siedlung as an expression of collectivity, a new social order: ‘As the melody of the whole, the roofs pitched at the same angle and the use of colour achieve endmost harmony. These are the unmistakable signs of truly collective building, building which captures the sense of collectivity and which is the most beautiful expression of a supra-personal perception.’Footnote 41 My analysis of their relationship hopes to avoid reducing these to simply contradictory viewpoints (technocrat vs. visionary), but rather to highlight via their clashing and collaborations how the materialities of the modern urban home were coproduced.
Ideas about effective housing and the concept of ‘living as a community’ (Gemeinschaftsleben) were messily translated and incompletely articulated in the built form and in the everyday spatial practices in the Horseshoe estate. The story of what rationalization ‘meant’ in the Horseshoe estate is complicated by the fact that the project was built in different stages. While modernist city planners and architects promoted new methods of building and architecture, they met with resistance from local politicians and, as a result, many housing projects employed ‘traditional’ designs and methods of construction. Taut's conception was never realized completely. The eastern part of the Horseshoe estate was extended in 1925–27 by DEGEWO, a conservative housing society. Günter de Bruyn, a writer and librarian, who lived in that part in the 1930s and 1940s, described it in his autobiography as follows: ‘Contrary to Bruno Taut's Siedlung with its cubic forms and rich colours, ours perpetuated so called “Heimatstil”: gable roofs, bays, window shutters and balconies with pointed arches. Single family row houses formed partly curved streets and created the feeling of a small town.’Footnote 42 As Taut wrote in his unpublished memoirs, when Wagner and he were building a part of the Horseshoe estate in 1925–26, the Berlin city office headed by Böss wanted to ‘coerce’ them into making big changes, ‘because the opposite part built by a different building society and architect, with its romantic sentimentalities, pointed gables, gazebos and steep roofs, although more expensive, was more beautiful’.Footnote 43 It took the interference of the former Berlin head of city planning Ludwig Hoffmann to push the project through. As Taut wrote, Hoffmann
accompanied Böss to Britz and as a consequence, the city office approved the project. . .A little under three years afterwards, Mr. Böss, during our visit to our settlement [Britz], explained to me that he is satisfied not only with practical consistency, but also by the beauty, in other words: ‘you had me converted’. . .The main part of my work was then built upon ‘conversion’.Footnote 44
In 1927, out of 1,027 apartments, 472 were single family row houses with three and a half or four and a half rooms, 555 were one and a half to four and a half bedroom flats in apartment blocks of two to three storeys.Footnote 45 For a further extension of the Siedlung in 1930, Taut proposed several floor plans for a type of a ‘smallest dwelling’ (‘Kleinstwohnung’), as the economic situation worsened. As the tenants were envisioned primarily as ‘small’ (nuclear) families, the separate rooms were organized around the distinct functions of ‘living, eating and sleeping’. For example, a two bedroom apartment of 45 square metres consisted of a bedroom, living room and kitchen. A variation of the two bedroom apartment and of a one bedroom apartment of only 36 square metres contained a combined kitchen and dining room and bedroom and living room.Footnote 46 The walls in the apartments were painted as instructed by Taut, in intense colours of yellow, blue and ochre, and many tenants preferred to paint over these colours or, later, put wallpaper over them. As one of the residents recollected, ‘After we moved in, Taut himself visited different apartments and explained how the flats’ interiors should be set up. I remember how he was against hanging pictures because they ruined the effect of the walls.’Footnote 47
Some people, however, left the original colours in place. Another tenant emphasized the connection between ‘modernist’ taste and political investments:
We, in the younger circles, have gone to Taut's lectures in the School of Applied Arts and have debated whether collective houses should be built, so that both husband and wife could have careers, with collective kitchens, so that one does not cook every evening their own little meal. Us women, we believed in this ideal. We have thought how men could get involved in the housework. Colourful rooms, no, many did not like them, they have later covered them in wallpaper. The others found them rather neat. . .In 1928, I had my flat painted and decorated in Taut's way. Yellow ceiling, orange walls. The painters thought we were nuts. It was customary then, to have brown floors, but I painted mine in light grey. These suggestions I took partly from Taut's lectures, some of this I have seen in Magdeburg. In those times, I was in the organization of young socialists, we were crazy about the Bauhaus then.Footnote 48
The increasing bureaucratization of housing construction, distribution and management allowed housing societies to claim that participation from tenants was largely unnecessary. GEHAG and EINFA, the building societies responsible for housing construction and management for the trade unions, did not encourage tenants’ participation, justifying their position on the basis of their not-for-profit status: ‘The administration argued that “every tenant was protected by the founder of the GEHAG and the EINFA”, and as these companies were not private companies any participation by the tenants was considered unnecessary.’Footnote 49 From the interviews collected in Hilpert's book, we see that the tenants’ council (Mieterrat) did exist briefly in the late 1920s and became a place for voicing alternative views of the estates’ regulations. Unsurprisingly, the initiative came from the more radical tenants of the estates. One of the tenants describing the role of the anarchist poet Erich Mühsam recollected that ‘in the tenant council, he always fought for us to be able to hang laundry out in the garden’.Footnote 50 In spite of the communist party calling for tenants to participate in the administration of the estate, unlike in the settlements in Vienna, tenants’ initiatives often took the form of the depoliticized ‘neighbours’ help’ organizations.Footnote 51
The goal of GEHAG, which was created in 1924, was to involve the ‘creation of healthy dwellings for appropriate prices for less-well-off social classes, especially for families and single people affiliated with co-operatives’.Footnote 52 The questionnaire that potential renters filled out asked whether they would be able to pay fees for the building society and whether they belonged to the listed manual or white collar workers’ trade unions. As Adelheid von Saldern clarifies, the housing office had the authority to assign a so-called ‘right to lease’ or ‘dwelling authorization’ (‘Wohnungsberechtigung’). The candidates had also to fit certain criteria such as citizenship, residency in the city, age, marital status (such criteria varied from city to city and could even change within a year). This way, the building societies had a pool of potential renters. Von Saldern importantly observes that such ‘authorizations’ were used by building societies to their own advantage: they could choose members of the organization which had some equity in property development firms (such was the case with trade union members in GEHAG Siedlungen) and this resulted in ‘relative political and cultural homogeneity of the tenant structure’.Footnote 53 Along with securing trade union members’ tenants, another way to ensure this kind of tenancy was the rent: ‘the rent, 63 marks for two and a half bedroom apartment in 1927, was too expensive for workers, that's why many bankers, insurance people, teachers and artists lived here’.Footnote 54 For that reason, the Horseshoe estate was widely criticized for its rents, which only the middle classes were able to afford. In Slatan Dudow's film, Zeitprobleme: Wie der Arbeiter wohnt, the sequence of the Horseshoe estate is thematically secured in the ‘middle’ position between shots of impoverished Berlin Mietskaserne and views of affluent suburban villas. For the film critic Thomas Elsaesser, this juxtaposition implied that the architecture of Neues Bauen appealed to ‘snobs and intellectuals’ and showed little genuine interest in housing for the working classes.Footnote 55
While mechanisms were in place to secure the occupation of the Horseshoe estate by members of relatively similar social classes, among the prominent residents were artists and writers, including Heinrich Vogeler and Erich Mühsam. As one of the tenants recollected, ‘The artists came to live in the settlement to be together and have a piece of the culture of living.’ Another respondent said, ‘The artists come here because of their political activities.’Footnote 56 Such mixing led to conflicts: often, the tenants’ imaginative ways of furnishing their home spaces clashed with the plans of neighbours. In her memoirs about Heinrich Vogeler, his then-partner Sofia Marchlewska describes the political bases of some such conflicts. As soon as the couple moved into the Siedlung, according to Marchlewska, their ‘petit-bourgeois’ neighbours started bothering them, disturbed by the fact that they were communists: ‘Bruno Taut, the talented builder has everything planned: spotlessly clean houses surrounded by gardens, newly planted trees along street edges. . . – a pure paradise. The only thing [he] has not factored in was the attitude of German “squares”.’Footnote 57 The petit-bourgeois sentiments that Marchlewska lamented became a target for critique by the communists as well as by conservative proponents of household rationalization. Upon her visit to the Horseshoe estate, Erna Meyer, an advocate for household rationalization and the author of the best-selling book Der Neue Haushalt (1926), complained how difficult it was for ‘all who work on the housing problem’ to ‘instill in tenants that they in this new housing finally need to get rid of all that nonsense of their non-hygienic and useless habits’. For example, Meyer was scandalized to observe in the Horseshoe estate the ‘collection of stuff’ that tenants accumulated, and bemoaned ‘windows which are impossible to open because of three or four curtains’.Footnote 58
The garden became another place of conflict: according to Marchlewska, the appearance of their lawn outraged their neighbours, because, instead of planting flowerbeds, they left the ground bare for their little son to play in. Certainly, the recreational use of the garden contravened not only the petit-bourgeois sensibilities of their fellow-tenants, but, as we shall see, also the intentions of the landscape architect for the Horseshoe estate, Leberecht Migge, who designed small allotment gardens for the row houses and ground floors of the central apartment buildings in the Horseshoe estate.Footnote 59 In the mid-1920s through the early 1930s, Migge's idea of an ‘inner colonization’ of the areas of Greater Berlin as key to a ‘new urbanized form of life’Footnote 60 made the design of outdoor spaces central to the social transformation that Siedlungen were envisioned to foster. For Migge, the garden was envisioned as a productive whole and implicated in the creation of ‘humane dwellings’; garden plots, sustained by and sustaining humans, were organized with a concern for the complete utilization of the space.Footnote 61 ‘The Green Manifesto’, originally published in 1919, established the garden as the core of Migge's vision of national social and economic reform. Against the ‘old idea, the city’ of the nineteenth century, of ‘trade, factories and finance’ and of the ‘production of power and civilization of force’, he proclaimed in this manifesto the new social vision of urban space as a series of decentralized settlements, proposing a ‘general idea of the twentieth century: Land. . .Create City-land!’ Migge's was not a call to ruralize the city by returning to an older agricultural form of settlement; his manifesto rather argues for a new urban form wherein German cities might ‘embrace their own land’ through the creation of settlements with gardens.Footnote 62 This insistence on politicizing active cultivation of land distinguished Migge from many of his colleagues among the modern garden architects, who designed garden arrangements according to ‘natural associations, such as on beaches or prairies’.Footnote 63
By contrast, Migge proposed a strategy for the radical reorganization of urban space, which he referred to as ‘inner colonization’, or the agricultural cultivation of the land within the city boundaries. The ‘inner colonization’ rhetoric which, in Migge's writing, denoted social reform, by re-settling of urban tenement populations to the outskirts, nevertheless presupposed a view of the land as yet untouched by development, as a vacant space. Just like modernist architects’ recommendations for the ways in which to inhabit the new spaces clashed with established practices of homemaking, construction of the new developments often involved the removal of existing settlements. Often, the outlying spaces were already inhabited by the poor living in makeshift homes. As Mark Hobbs has demonstrated, the programme of redevelopment for Neues Bauen housing often relied on ‘garden clearance’ – that is, on the displacement of garden colonies of poor residents to make space for new developments.Footnote 64 The Horseshoe estate gardens were planned with these largely subsistence gardens in mind, as they included fruit trees and vegetables where tenants could grow food to support themselves, by consuming and selling surplus produce. The planned gardens of the row houses on Parchimer Allee, for example, included fruit trees (apple, pear and sour cherry), vegetables and fruit (currants, strawberries, espalier fruit) and flower gardens (perennial and summer flowers). The ‘ideal of the modern housing’, for Migge, combined private gardens with common use areas, such as communal subsistence gardens, areas for carpet beating, for trash disposal, for leisure and for children's play.Footnote 65 Private gardens, in Migge's plans, were to be included only if there was enough space. In accordance with Migge's ‘productive’ idea of space, his garden was supposed to embody self-sufficiency for city dwellers. Similar to the gardens that Migge designed for Taut's private residence in Dahlewitz, south of Berlin, which included both ornamental flowers as well as vegetables and fruit trees and bushes, the Horseshoe estate ‘small gardens’ could be thought of as extensions of indoor living space into the outdoors. As Taut writes, ‘With the garden and its unassuming plants close to the house, the house, in a way, spreads itself into the periphery.’Footnote 66
It is not clear whether Migge's visions were in any way enforced by GEHAG. To what extent were the gardens used according to such plans? It was not until after World War II that the gardens were used in a self-sustaining way; until then, the experiment depended largely on the initiative of the tenants: as photographs from the period show, some of the gardens had vegetables while others looked largely decorative. The most often reproduced image of the settlement, an open area with a pond in the centre of the horseshoe shaped apartment block, shows clearly that the layout was not built according to Migge's initial design for shared uses. Migge's plan for the lawn surrounding the horseshoe shaped pond was very much in sync with Bruno Taut's ideas of ‘city crown’. Taut's ‘city crown’ (‘Stadtkrone’) was envisioned as a common area which would include access to water from the tenants’ gardens, with the pond functioning as a wading pool for children.Footnote 67 The public space around the horseshoe shaped pond ended up not being designed by Migge, as he bitterly complained. Because planning of this iconic part of the green areas was under the jurisdiction of the district of Neukölln, the design that was followed instead included merely ‘the compromised originals’ resulting in ‘green overorganization’. At the same time, some small gardens remained ‘unadvised’, which resulted in a ‘green underorganization’ of over-planted and overly decorated crammed gardens.Footnote 68 Instead, the lawn became a ‘park land’ in a more conventional sense, where the common uses were discouraged and residents prevented from walking across the grass. In this case, the design of the pond as a merely decorative feature not intended for public use stemmed from the fact that GEHAG had no power over the design of the public spaces,Footnote 69 and therefore did not have enough influence to ‘push’ Migge's social design of the pond as a shared space, integrated with residents’ gardens. The garden at the centre of the exemplary modernist settlement, as the critique by Migge implies, was constructed according to the nineteenth-century idea of gardens as beautiful reproductions of nature.
Similarly, the 1930 EINFA newsletter made it clear that the concerns of the housing co-operative were not so much about utilitarian spatial practices (of growing vegetables per se) as about the representational aspect of these spaces, that is, on decoration and ornamentation: ‘Here individualist zest for action (Tatendrang) must in the interests of other residents step back a little, because it will certainly not be in the interest of the individual, to destroy a thoroughly thought–out architecture with inconsistent floral ornaments or installation of balcony trellises.’Footnote 70 Migge's anarchic and communal visions were modified in the Horseshoe estate, resulting, rather paradoxically, in individualist and bourgeois Kleingarten, built for leisure purposes rather than as self-sustaining sites of production, just as different conceptions of Siedlung advanced by Wagner as application and manifestation of the rationalized building technologies and by Taut as an expression of the communal way of life have not been fully realized in the housing estate. The Horseshoe estate is not merely representative of the visions of Wagner, Migge and Taut, nor can it be reduced to a concrete manifestation of political ideologies. While trying to avoid reductive or overly schematic readings, I have, in part, used it as a lens through which to assess and elucidate the complex relations between various social discourses, the visions of the architects, the logic of building practices and the habits and lives of estate tenants. In the process of collaboration among architects, planners and residents, the Horseshoe estate became a site of clashing class positions and tastes, of visions of community and of rationalization of construction, and of directives over home decorating.
