Housing as Heritage
The architecture of domestic housing provides the next generation with material proof of how their ancestors lived. Housing stock makes up the world’s largest proportion of built heritage, and important witnesses of past times have survived into our era. A large number of castles and palaces have become museums, but some everyday houses have also become admired monuments of architecture – their value is defined not by their comfort (or lack of it) but by their age and beauty and what they tell us about the past.
For the twentieth century domestic housing is represented first and foremost by apartment buildings. Massive growth in urban populations has made apartment buildings a major element of the city environment. Also, due to the connection between the modernist movement and social reform, it is natural that the search for new forms of efficient housing dominated twentieth century architecture. The houses and complexes that resulted became monuments of social history as well as landmarks in the development of architecture.
This was recognised in the recent nomination of six housing estates in Berlin to UNESCO’s World Heritage List. One of them, the Gartenstadt Falkenberg, was built before the First World War, and the others – Siedlung Schillerpark, Grossiedlung Britz, the Wohnstadt Carl Legien, Weisse Stadt and Grossiedlung Siemensstadt, during the Weimar Republic. The constitution of 1919 guaranteed citizens a right to adequate housing, but the real possibility for construction in this war-torn and debt-ridden country, did not come along until the mid 1920s. As in the Soviet Union, the interval between design and implementation was a period of theoretical interpretation and development.
Planner Martin Wagner developed a city-planning concept proposing the creation of simultaneously planned living zones on the outskirts of existing cities. Unlike the typologies of earlier garden cities, these housing estates were to consist of standardised apartment buildings with no connection to agriculture; spaces between the houses were planted with trees. This scheme was conducted in many of Germany’s large cities. Important modernist architects worked on designs for housing estates in Berlin, such as Bruno Taut, Walter Gropius, Hugo Häring, Otto Bartning, Hans Scharoun, Bruno Arends and others.
Despite the huge variation in the designs, the architects kept to the programme. Modest 3-5 storey houses (it was considered best not to go higher without a lift) with apartments consisting of a living room, two or three bedrooms and a small kitchen (in order to avoid it becoming an extra bedroom), set the standard for the first small scale and yet comfortable housing. For the first time in workers’ housing, central heating was installed as well as piped gas and hot water and a bathroom in every apartment, and balconies were obligatory.
The charm of the houses and apartments was largely determined by their colours, painted to harmonise with one another. The original painting scheme has been returned to the buildings in the course of restoration, carried out by the Berlin authorities before making the nomination to the World Heritage List. After restoration, the inhabitants of the houses returned, although some preferred to sell their apartments which were now much more valuable.
In order to meet the requirements of a World Heritage Site, these housing estates were nominated not specifically for their architectural merit but for the specifics of their typology1 and a direct connection with the most important philosophical and artistic ideas of the era.
A more famous building, the Unitè d’Habitation in Marseilles, is under consideration for inclusion in the World Heritage List as part of the general nomination for Le Corbusier’s oeuvre. This building was created as a pilot project for the relief of the post-war housing crisis. Here, planning schemes developed in the 1920s by Le Corbusier were applied on a new scale. The Marseilles Unitè d’Habitation (1946-1952) is built for 1,600 people, and is a 12 storey structure with a reinforced concrete frame into which the individual living cells are inserted, in the words of the architect, “like bottles in a wine rack.” Inside the house the apartments are organized along extended corridors, or “internal streets.”
Twenty three types of apartment are used in the building, to meet a variety of needs, from those of a person living alone to a large family. There is a double-height living room in almost all the apartments, and they all have deep balconies, a grid of which defines the appearance of the façade. In contrast to Narkomfin, which is considered to be the direct prototype for Unitè d’Habitation, the services are not housed in a separate block, but are placed on the middle storeys of the central building. There is a sculpture garden and swimming pool on the roof.
Today, the owners of apartments in Unitè d’Habitation in Marseilles and buildings based on it in Nantes, Briey, Firminy and Berlin, are proud that they live in a building created by a great architect. The public spaces of the building are accessible to visitors.
The process of including monuments of the twentieth century in the World Heritage List is just beginning and at the moment it contains only three modernist apartment buildings. These are the buildings of Antonio Gaudi in Barcelona: Casa Milà, Casa Battló and Palau Güell. These stunning Art Deco works of art show how a functioning apartment building can also be a tourist attraction. Tourists can buy a ticket that lets them into the vestibule, internal courtyard, on to the roof, and also into one of several of the apartments that have been made into museums. Here the original interiors have been restored and there is a small exhibition dedicated to the architect and the history of the building. At the same time, the boundaries of the public access zone are strictly delineated in order to ensure peace for the inhabitants of these very expensive apartments.
Russia’s housing stock, inherited from the Soviet authorities, is an immensely rich heritage. Experimental apartment blocks and settlements were built not only in Moscow and Leningrad but also in Sverdlovsk (Ekaterinburg), Samara and other cities of the USSR. Some of these are officially recognised cultural monuments – several of Moscow’s 1920s student villages and housing estates were nominated to become monuments (which affords them the same protection) at the same time as the Berlin authorities nominated their housing estates to the World Heritage List. Buildings like Narkomfin, Ivan Nikolaev’s student communal house (1929-1930), Boris Iofan’s Parliament building (1927-1931), Evgenii Levinson and Igor Fomin’s house on Karpovka in St Petersburg (1934-1936) are without peer and in the future will undoubtedly play a major role in the cultural image of the country and become key tourist attractions. It is important that projects for their restoration take this into account.
Anna Bronovitskaya, Ph.D., Associate Professor at Moscow Institute of Architecture