WEISENHOF HOUSING ESTATE

During the birth of modernism, the Weisenhof Housing exhibition has loomed large as a historical marker. In 1927, between the wars, the German government mounted the Deutcher Werkbund exhibition. This exhibition was established so as to explore how the crafts and mass production could work together to achieve great results.

We have touched on this fusion of craft and mass production in our inclusion of the Bauhaus. As we have seen, their goal was to produce design students who were ready for the modern world vie their exploration of the hand crafts. Thus, the principals explored and established at the Deutcher Werkbund in fact were the same principals upon which the Bauhaus was founded.

Mies van der Rohe was selected by the city of Stuttgart to plan the housing estate. As you might expect the vast majority of the architects selected were German or at least German speaking. Mies is one of the heroes that we have been following sporadically in these pages. And his stint as director of this portion of the exhibition was one of his last posts before taking over the Bauhaus before it closed in the lead up to WW 2.

Each of the houses in the state were supposed to have been designed as prototypical workers housing. Here was architecture in it’s most heroic guise; meld industrialization with craft to lift up the common worker. But of course, each of these were designed by architects. And as we know, architects sometimes can not adhere to budgets. As it turns out, none of the houses could have been affordable by a typical early industrial worker.

Although we will look at some of the more famous examples in the estate, it was nice to learn that Hans Scharoun was one of the architects who designed a house. Scharoun, who we also will address later, has been a hero of mine since the beginning.  And his house would have been a very nice place to live, as it turns out.  There were second floor terraces, a well defined yard, and an organic curve shape introduced into the form.

So it was satisfying to fully understand his contribution to this exhibition via this drawing.