Towards a New Kind of Living: The Werkbund Housing Estate Breslau 1929

Rating:
Summary: Rediscovering another Werkbund gem
Review: Beginning with the Cologne exposition of 1914, the German Werkbund and its sister organizations in Central Europe undertook a program for disseminating the new 'radical' theories of architecture. This was particularly true when it came to disseminating ideas of how to design housing, an area that became an important mission for these Werkbunden, which proceeded to sponsor housing exhibitions in various cities prior to the Second World War. The best know of these was the Weissenhof Siedlung in Stuttgart, built in conjunction with the Werkbund exposition of 1927. With its master plan by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who also designed a seminal apartment building, the complex includes structures by Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Bruno Taut, Max Taut, Hans Scharoun, Adolf Rading, Mart Stam, J.J.P. Oud, Victor Bourgeois, Peter Behrens, and others.  The Breslau Werkbund exhibition, "Wohnung und Werkraum" or WUWA-- the subject of this fine volume--did not share its Stuttgart sibling's list of contributing architects from the firmament of Avant Garde architects, rather it relied on practitioners from what was then Upper Silesia--Schliesen--and included professors at the Breslau Academy of Applied Arts--itself one of the institutions that benefited from Hermann Muthesius' appointment in 1904 as privy councilor to the Prussian Board of Trade and superintendent of schools of applied arts for all of Prussia.  The focus of the 1929 Breslau Werkbund exhibition was the interrelationship of dwelling and workplace. The exhibition, on a site adjacent to the trade fairgrounds--a condition not unlike that at Stuttgart--permitted for concurrent exhibitions and other cultural activities to take place in conjunction with the housing exhibition. Buildings by Scharoun and Rading, as well as Hans Poelzig and others less-well known outside German academic circles but nonetheless significantly contributing to the theoretical explorations underpinning the WUWA. The projects range from the single family houses by Heinrich Lauterbach, Moritz Hadda, Ludwig Moshamer, or Emil Lange, row houses by Gustav Wolf or by Ludwig Moshamer, Heinrich Lauterbach, Moritz Hadda, Paul Häusler, and Theo Effenberger, to Paul Heim & Albert Kempter's apartment block with open hallway access and a kindergarten, to a wonderful collective residence by Rading, to Scharoun's magnificent building for singles that today is a guest house. The buildings are presented in period and contemporary photographs, plans, and detailed description. Also found are chapters placing the WUWA in the context of other Werkbund efforts, and other experiments in housing of the period. The book ends with photographs of models built by students at the University of Stuttgart for a recent exhibition, and brief biographies of the architects involved in the WUWA. As with the publication on the Bohemian Werkbund's 1932 exhibition in Prague on the Baba hillside overlooking the city center, this volume provides much-needed documentation in English (both exhibitions had been discussed in earlier publications, including a 1983 study analyzing housing from the 1920s then and in the 1980s by Liselotte Ungers, a publication unfortunately not accessible to the monolingual U.S. public).