Uncle Tom’s Modernism, Berlin’s roof wars and a Tale of Three Estates.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times: Berlin between the wars. Jostling together in the city’s south west corner on the cusp of a lake-filed woodland, three housing estates dramatise one part of that contradictory cultural story.
The daring, innovative impulse of the age is embodied by Onkle-Toms-Hütte (1926–31). Built for a trade-union funded housing agency, it provided generous living space to 15,000 low income residents in a boldly modernist aesthetic. Multicoloured walls, doors and window frames stave off monotony. A tightly-packed, gently curved street plan brings neighbours together in a human scale. The canopy of original pine trees integrated into the scheme provide a sense of natural exploration. Many call it a masterpiece.
But to every force there is an opposite (if not necessarily equal) reaction. A rival, conservative housing agency built their traditionalist response right next door — the Fischtalgrund settlement (1928). A perfectly serviceable if unremarkable estate of 100 units, it self-consciously adhered to earlier design conventions and so apartment blocks echo houses. The two estates share a street at their centre, meaning the two aesthetics literally face off against each other. The interwar Berlin press figured this made good copy, and dubbed the public opening the city’s first “roof war” — flat against pitched.
But the retreat to ‘tradition’ can go much further. When the Nazis decided to build an ideal village for SS families they also chose a plot next to Onkle-Toms-Hütte. The Waldsiedlung (1939) is an idealised Germanic past run rampant: cute gabled windows, rustic painted shutters, wooden trellises and strictly earthy colours only. Whereas with the modernists there’s more of a balance between human, nature and artifice, here it feels like the houses seep into the forest camouflage as much as possible. Is it just my prejudice that makes me think they look like barracks?
Of course, today the same suburban, middle class families seem to live in all three estates. Does architecture actually matter, then? Well, it was in the denser, more playful Onkle-Toms-Hütte that I saw households cross-pollinating, bumping into each other and talking from their garden tables. The large empty stretches of the Waldsiedlung are better suited for parking cars.
Onkle-Toms-Hütte
Fischtalgrund
Waldsiedlung
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- 4 architects contributed to Onkle-Toms-Hutte, but the best bits were designed by Bruno Taut, a now famous architect responsible for several other German modernist jewels.
- Yes, that is Onkle-Toms-Hütte as in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the famous 19th century US anti-slavery novel. The story goes that long before the estate a nearby Gaststätte (inn-pub-resturant) landlord — Thomas — erected huts in his beer garden, which reminded people of the book title. The name stuck to the entire neighbourhood. Sadly the pub’s long gone, but an equestrian club on a similar spot has inherited/hijacked the name.
- It’s not really a surprise so much building went on here in the 1920s-30s. At the time, the local Berlin district of Zehlendorf had the most land and the fewest inhabitants of any in the newly industrialised, burgeoning city.
- Onkle-Toms-Hütte is still owned by the original housing agency but it’s now a subsidiary of DeutscheWohnen. If you follow Berlin politics, that’s the mass landlord which is being targeted by activists for expropriation in a recent referendum.
- One of the Onkle-Toms-Hütte architects, Hugo Häring said of the Fischtalgrund: “We need clear, reasonable apartments. Houses that look like us big city dwellers today and nobody else. Out of love for a preconceived house ideal, a lot is done at Schmitthenner’s houses in the Fischtalgrund that is irrational. For the sake of the axes, the windows are not where the lighting in the living space or the furnishings require them. The rooms are not dimensioned as they should be in consideration of their use”.
