P/A Technics

Lov# COSI, High Design

It was famous in its youth, ridiculed and nearly destroyed

in its adolescence, abused in its middle years, only to
be revived in its old age. It is the Weissenhofsiedlung:
an experimental development of low-cost worker housing built in 1927 in the Weissenhof section of Stuttgart,
West Germany. Construcled in less than five months for
a scant budget of 35DM/cubic meter, the houses and
apartment buildings were designed by some ofthat era's
leading Modern architecls: Le Corbusjer, Mies van der
Rohe, Walter Gropius, Peter Behrens, J.J.P. Oud, Hans
Scharoun, Ludwig Hilberseimer, and others.
Fame come quickly to the projecl. In 1928, the
founders of the International Congress of Modern Architeclure (ClAM), many of whom had designed houses at
Weissenhof, pointed to the development as an example
of functionalist urban designo And in 1932, Henry-Russell
Hitchcock and Philip Johnson saw, in the houses' stucco
walls and flat roofs, evidence of an International Style.
But Weissenhofsiedlung's
reknown also made it o
target of rising right-wing factions in Germany. Shortly
after its completion, for example, the develpment was
branded by the conservative press as "a suburb of
Jerusalem." In 1938, the Nazis had the buildings
evacuated with the intention of tearing them down to
make way for a headquarters for the Nazi General
Command. Although World War 11 forced the scrapping
of those plans, the fate of the development was nearly
sealed when the Germans placed flack guns along the
eastern edge of the site overlooking Stuttgart. Allied
bombardment of those positions in 1943 leveled 10 of
the original 21 struclures.
The post-war years brought their own form of abuse
to the remaining houses and apartments. Gable roofs
were added, open plans enclosed, and windows altered.
Years of deferred maintenance also began to take their
toll in cracked stucco, corroded steel frames, and crumbled retaining walls. It wasn't until April of 1981 that a
government-sponsored restoration was begun, the final
phase of which was completed in 1987.
It is ironic that the Weissenhofsiedlung has been resto red in a period of eclipse for the International Style
and functionalist urban designo Yet, in another sense,
the restoration is timely, for we may be more receptive
now to the spatial and technological innovations that
were largely ignored by Hitchcock and Johnson.
e orchi ec1s 01 Weissenhof took
e en opa red
uare foo
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ble walls or freestanding partitions to open up the house

interiors, making small spaces appear larger and, in the
case of Le Corbusier, finding ways for living areas to
double as sleeping spaces. Others, such as J.J.P. Oud
and Peter Behrens, created more conventional plans,
but worked them out so that, in the case of Behrens,
every apartment had cross-ventilation and access to a
private terrace, or in the case of Oud, every square foot
of space was efficiently used.
Ways of reducing the cost af construction also were
explored by most of the architecls. Victor Bourgeois,
Ludwig Hilberseimer, Richard Docker, and Josef Frank,
for example, used innovative construclion systems developed by engineer Albert Feifel. The most unconventional of these, called the "Feifel-zickzack"
system, involved nailing boards in a zigzag pattern and using
them as permanent formwork for poured concrete floors
and as the wall struclure. Other Feifel inventions included oversized L-shaped bricks that reduced heat
transfer through the joints and reduced the labor required to build a masonry wall, and oversized bricks
with horizontal cells that prevented the thermal cycling
possible in vertical brick cavities.
Interested in prefabrication,
Walter Gropius developed (for a house destroyed during the war) a steelframed construction system that featured interlocking
cork-board insulation and asbestos panels fastened to
blocking on both the interior ond exterior walls. Gropius
and others refined this system in later houses.
The ongoing operating costs of the housing also was
a concern of several architecls. Hans Scharoun, for
example, reduced heating costs with "therrnosplotten."
insulating panels consisting of a wood box frame set
belween the joists and filled with many layers of heavy
paper separated by wood blocking.
Many of the spatial and technical innovations at Weissenhof beca me widely adopted. The idea of built-in storage cabinets in Le Corbusier's double house, gypsum
board walls in Josef Frank's house, and poured gypsum
subfloors in Mies's apartment building are 011 techniques
still in use today. The most impressive feature about Ihe
development, however, was the willingness of so man '
leading architecls to explore and of the City of Stuttga
to support such innovation. The restoration of Weissenhofsiedlung is not just a window o an era when e
housing problem challenged sc~
, _ best minds o
grea1est architectural
o
laceo d .
FisAer

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PETER BEHRENS
HANS SCHAROUN
JOSEF FRANK
MAXTAUT
MAXTAUT _
RICHARD OOCKER
RICHARD DOCKER
HANS POELZIG
LUDWIG HILBERSEIMER
WALTERGROPIUS
WALTERGROPIUS
LE CORBUSIER
LE CORBUSIER
ADOLF SCHNECK
ADOLF SCHNECK
VICTOR BOURGEOIS
J.J.P OUD
BRUNO TAUT
MIES VAN DER ROHE
ADOLF RADING
MARTSTAM

~
SITE PLAN

Mies van der Rohe's original site plan for the Weissenhofsiedlung followed
the S-shaped curve of the
site's eastern edge with a
series of low buildings and
terraces. But for reasons of
cost and flexibility, the final
site plan was more conventional (Ieft), with apartment
blocks and rowhouses
along the higher, western
side of the site and separate villasalong the eastern
edge. Ten ofthe original 21
structures (shaded on the
site plan) were destroyed
during or just after World
War 11.Photographs of the
development taken soon
after its completion (belaw)
show the consistent vocabulary of the buildings.

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Progressive Architecturr 10-'

SECOND

FLOOR

PLAN
lIVING/DINING
KITCHEN
COURT
LAUNDRY
BEDROOM
DAYINGAOOM

S
Ro ho ses

Like JJ.P. Oud, Outch erchite<t Mart Stam

capitalized on the repetitive nature of rowhouses
to reduce costs. But unlike
Oud's more conventional
plans, Stam's employed
sliding walls to open up the
small interiors of the
rowhouses as much as possible. A triple-paneled wall
on the first floor (middle
left) slides into a pocket to
open the relatively large
entrance hall to the combined living and dining
room; spatial definltion is
otherwise maintained by a
change in wall color. A
pass-through opening between the kitchen and dining room visually connects
those two spaces. On the
second floor, a sliding wall
also allows the Dathroom
to open out to the hall (bottom right). Even in the
playrooms adiacent to the
back gardens, the steel
stairs (bottom left) have
minimal rails and no risers
to allow as much natural
light as possible to penetrate into the basements.
Construction of the
rowhouses was fairly conventional, using a steel
skeleton with concrete
block infil!. However, their
exterior color-light blue
fa~ades, deep blue entrance surrounds and
soHits, yellow side and rear
walls-is anything but conventional (above left), and
dispels the idea that International Style buildings
were always white.

Progressiue Architecture 10:88

10,

SECONO

FLOOR

KITCHEN
LlVING/DINING
BEDROOM
TERRACE

PLAN

Single-fami1y heuse
Hans Scharounls singJefamily residence is more a
villa than it is worker heusing, although it too used
some innovative consfruction methods. Formally,
such elements as the expressed, quarter-circle
stair on the entrance
fa~ade (top left) and the
brightly colored, planar
composition of the living
room (middle left) look
ohead to Scharoun's later,
more sculptural work. It is
in the plans (bottom right)
and the garden side of the
house (middle right) that
the house's underlying
order is revealed: Two
blocks, each with a curved
end, abut a central circulation path (plans, bottom
right). The-house has a
steel frame structure with
large pumice blocks used
as the substrate for the
exterior stucco (bottom
left) and interior gypsum
board. Under the roof, affixed to the steel frame, are
wood-fromed insulating
panels that contain layers
of a heavy paper creating
dead air spaces.

':mIMA'

SECOND

FLOOR

PLAN

LIVING
DINING
KITCHEN

WC
BEDROOM
TERRACE
FIRST

FLOOR

PLAN

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Progressive Architecture 10:88

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lIVING/DINING
KITCHEN
BEDROOM

FLOOR

PLAN

SECO NO FLOOR

PLAN

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Le Corbusier
Single-family house
This house (above left) was
the first built version of the
Citrohan houses that Le
Corbusier had developed
at least five years earller
as a solution to the housing
problem. As in those earlier
schemes, this house has a
two-story living area, roof
garden, pilotis, and cascading stairs. Although the
house, with Its reinforcedconcrete frame and
pumice-block walls, did
come in considerably over
budget, the design did address the issue of space
allocation in low-cost housing. Corb believed that the
living areas, in which
people spend most of their
time, should be large and
airy, and that sleeping
rooms and-other service
spaces, in which people
spend relatively little time,
should be smaller than required by building codes.
The plans (middle left) refled that idea, with their
overly large living/dining
space on the second floor
and the small bedrooms on
the top floor.

ROOFGARDEN

FIRST

FLOOR

PLAN

THIRO

FLOOR

PLAN

FOURTH

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FLOOR

PLAN

------'------11'

2m6m

Adolf Schneck
Single-family house
Schneck designed two
houses for the Weissenhofsiedlung, one of which 15
shown here (bottom). Construded of hollow pumlce
block bearing walls and
reinforced concrete decks,
the house has plywood
panels on some interior
walls.

BEDROOM
SECONO

FIRST

FLOOR

FLOOR

BEDROOM

PLAN

PLAN

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20'l6m

Progresstue Architecture 10:88

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1 ENTRY
2 lAUNDRY
3 LMNGIDINING/SlEEPING
4

Q;EN

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