"It is a completely new breed of human." This is how Lyonel Feininger, the first Bauhaus master, enthusiastically described his new students in a letter to his wife Julia in May 1919. He was naturally including himself in this assessment. The concept of a "new breed of human" sounds promising - futuristic and utopian. This was the year when the Bauhaus was founded in Weimar as a revolutionary school of architecture, art, and design, with Feininger as master and teacher. From this aesthetic revolt was supposed to emerge not just new architecture, but a new society: the "new human."
These new humans would live in new houses in a new world. Just a year earlier, in 1918, at the end of World War I amid morass and blood, Germany's recent past had declared bankruptcy. The future took over. The enthusiasm for everything that wasn't old (war and misery) but new, or at least appeared so (futurism and utopia), is completely understandable.
To understand what this renewed vision of humanity should look like, one need only visit the duplex house by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, built in 1927 in Stuttgart's Weissenhof Estate in the Bauhaus spirit and as a beacon of modernism. Even in the entrance area, it becomes clear that the new human was meant to be a polite human. The narrow entrance to this house of reason, this space-saving wonder where millimeters matter more than meters, can turn into a scene worthy of comedy.
This is exactly what happened during a reporter's visit to the site on a gently sloped hill in Stuttgart, where a UNESCO World Heritage site has been located for nine years. In the entrance, which now houses the cash register and coat check of the Weissenhof Museum, visitors repeatedly find themselves saying: "Excuse me... may I just... pardon me... this should work... after you... gladly... thank you... excuse me." It is, admittedly, rather tight for a museum. While not incorrectly described as a duplex half, this structure is nevertheless avant-gardistically modern in a way that defies typical typology. "Duplex" always sounds somewhat half-hearted, but this duplex possesses triple the energy for being new and different, stemming from the ideological world of Bauhaus and modernism as well as from Le Corbusier's universe.
What's astonishing is that this duplex house, nearly a century old, represents perhaps the most current answer to current Housing Minister Klara Geywitz's turbo hopes. Geywitz serves as Germany's Federal Minister for Housing, Urban Development and Construction. Particularly in housing, she faces an enormous problem: hundreds of thousands of missing housing units. She urgently seeks solutions for faster, cheaper, and more efficient construction for tomorrow. However, it's possible that much of what is being sought today was already found long ago - about a hundred years ago in the Weissenhof Estate.
**What Do "Metropolitan Residents" Want? Still: Housing**
"The Apartment" was the title of a complex, multi-site exhibition conceived by the German Werkbund in the 1920s. The central, walkable part of the exhibition - a kind of model settlement under the artistic direction of Mies van der Rohe - was realized in the form of 21 houses with a total of 63 apartments on Stuttgart's Killesberg. Seventeen architects participated, including Peter Behrens, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Pieter Oud, Hans Scharoun, and Max Taut - all protagonists of the New Building movement. They had maximum creative freedom. The apartments were designed for "modern metropolitan residents." At that time, there was a housing shortage.
The reasons sound familiar: strong population growth, urbanization triggered by industrialization reaching its peak in the early 20th century and the accompanying migration to cities, sluggish housing construction (Berlin alone lacked around 100,000 apartments in 1925), ever-higher construction prices, and outdated infrastructure. Does this remind you of anything? Exactly: it's like today, just without war ruins. Construction prices are higher than ever. Construction times are longer than ever. Internal migration continues unabated. The result: a housing shortage like that of a hundred years ago.
Just days ago, the Pestel Institute reported a deficit of 1.2 million apartments for West Germany alone. The housing shortage, which no longer affects just metropolitan areas but also medium-sized and even small cities, and no longer just the needy but almost all social classes, is now seen as partly responsible for Germany's years-long economic malaise. "The paralysis of housing markets naturally also leads to paralysis of labor markets because people can no longer move to accept jobs in other regions," says Pestel chief economist Matthias Günther.
The report continues: "Solving the housing question is a prerequisite for economic development." One must think of these spheres together: housing, the labor market, and the economic situation. Housing is therefore not only individually but also societally of existential importance. No wonder that hopes now rest on the "building turbo." Building turbo, double-impact, digitalization offensive, Germany-pace: When politics rhetorically accelerates to mask its decades-long state of dormancy, mistrust is generally warranted. Announced in May, the Law for Accelerating Housing Construction was passed in October and confirmed by the Federal Council just days ago. The turbo is engaged. One must hope it works. That's not certain.
**Learning from a Past That Was Once the Future**
The architects for Stuttgart's model settlement were free in their design ideas (as long as they could be considered avant-garde), but they were committed to solving the pressing needs of their time: housing shortage, expensive construction prices, sluggish construction times - and people wanted to live differently. More practically, efficiently, economically, and also brighter and healthier. The new human longed for new forms of living. Essentially exactly like today. And everything had to happen quickly. Exactly like today.
So why not finally learn from housing that already exists as idea and design? Everything demanded today from contemporary housing construction - flexible interior spaces for different needs and diverse lifestyles, efficient room sizes, systems that can be thought of serially, rational construction organization, the most modern building materials and construction methods - all this was experimentally tested back then.
Le Corbusier realized his concept of modern living through free floor plan design, made possible by open construction with reinforced concrete posts and non-load-bearing, therefore changeable walls. "Transformable" living is served by multifunctional spatial zones that replace defined room uses. Lighting and ventilation are optimized. Movable partition walls and furnishings enable flexible use of interior spaces and thus space- and cost-saving floor plans. The house was erected in record time.
The flat roof becomes an accessible roof garden. The ground-floor garden is for everyone. The furniture is affordable, smart, and changeable. Hallway, parlor, and bedroom: that was yesterday. What's new is living in limited space with a limited budget in houses that are efficiently built and used. Essentially, living in the Weissenhof Estate is exactly that construction and housing turbo being sold today as the latest innovation. So to speak, the next-to-latest innovation. But it's better to learn late from what once was than never. A hundred years after housing modernism, it's probably time to finally become modern in Germany.
