Wednesday 21 September 2016

Hansaviertel: Das Glück vom Wohnen und Bleiben

The nature of Berlin's history has meant that it has more than once been at the forefront of architectural innovation. During the 1920s - after Berlin had absorbed seven towns as well as 59 rural communities that had previously surrounded the old city - the city's population exploded. From 1870 until 1920 the population doubled every 25 years leaving roughly 3.8 million people in Berlin by the 1920s. Now incredible as that sounds (considering the contemporary population of Germany's capital is around 3.7 million) the city was fast running out of places to house these people. Enter modernist architecture and the new role of government as contractor of living quarters. 

Bruno Taut - Hufeisenseidlung Britz, Berlin (1925-1930). 

Berlin during the Weimar years became world famous for the creative ways that it dealt with the population explosion of recent decades. Government funded projects steamed ahead in creating affordable, modern and well equipped houses that brought people out of the slums that millions in the industrialised world had gotten used to living in. The Hufeisensiedlung (Horseshoe Estate) designed by Bruno Taut and built between 1925 and 1933 in south Neukölln is a clear indication of this movement towards modernist values in Berlin's architecture. 

However, it really took the Second World War and the reduction to rubble of many parts of the city as well as in the rest of Europe that drove modernism up on the agenda of international governments. In Berlin, huge amounts of housing stock had been destroyed, which lead to a desperate need for new, large scale, affordable housing to be built and built fast. In West Berlin, the ideas coming out of modernist architecture yet again reared their head and offered solutions. 

Oscar Niemeyer, Rio de Janeiro. Building 19 Hansaviertel.
Which brings me to the Hansaviertel. Located in the centre of Berlin on the north western edge of the Tiergarten between the Siegessäule and Moabit, the Hansaviertel is a group of 38 separate buildings built between 1957 and 1961. The viertel (quarter) is made up of 33 residential blocks, two churches, one small shopping centre, a theatre and a library. The buildings were designed with contributions of 48 architects as part of the Interbau Project. Their aim: to create a thriving living space in the city centre of ruined Berlin. 

Amongst the 48 were two of the world's giants of modernism during the 1940s and 1950s - Oscar Niemeyer and Alvar Aalto. Niemeyer had shot to fame from his native Brazil for being asked to create the government a brand new capital city, Brasília, from scratch in a previously arid part of the country. Niemeyer designed the buildings for the city, and left the city-planning up to his long time friend and colleague Lucio Costa, who conceived it around modernist utilitarianism. 

Oscar Niemyer, Building 19 Hansaviertel. "the building is lifted onto stilts providing open walkways below that navigates residents towards electric lifts that take people up to their apartments"
Niemeyer's Brasília designs also give a window into his socialist political values that no doubt impacted his work. For instance, the city was constructed to have no noble areas, meaning that common labourers would live alongside ministers and the wealthy. Apartments were to be owned by the government and rented to employees. Many of the apartment blocks were designed to float above the ground to allow space beneath for free movement, the presence of nature and to remind people that they were being lifted out of poverty. We can see these ideologies reflected in Niemeyer's offering to the Hansaviertel, which was conceived at the same time as Brasília: the building is lifted onto stilts providing open walkways below that navigates residents towards electric lifts that take people up to their apartments; behind the building there is a skywalk, which provides spectacular views across the rest of the Hansaviertel and down towards the Siegessäule.


J.H. van der Broek + J.B. Bakema, Rotterdam. Building 9, Hansaviertel. 


The designs of these mainly residential buildings - though through contemporary eyes looking rather brutalist and a bit too functional - were meant to produce large, spacious apartments with plenty of windows and balconies for residents to access the outside world, as well as be surrounded by nature. The idea was to conjoin art, nature and living facilities to create small pockets of functional, sanitary living amongst a broader context of nature. The buildings themselves are simplistic and functional to a tea with out the pomp and circumstance of late 1800s stucco, which echoed a bygone era of empire and inequality.

Egon Eiermann, Karlsruhe, Germany. Building 18 Hansaviertel.

Frank Jaenecke + Sten Samuelson, Malmö. Building 20 Hansaviertel.
One of the most poignant experiences one has on a trip to the Hansaviertel is the deafening sound of birdsong. I visited at a time of high summer and was treated to a wealth of birds, bees, rabbits and squirrels (the red ones that we Brits aren't used to seeing). They were confident and seemed to own this part of the world away from the roar of the city that unknown to them engulfs them on all sides. Nature permeates every corner of the Hansaviertel, which is most notable when you look at a picture taken from above where you can see that the buildings rather then the trees look like the exception.

Franz Schuster, Wein. Building 17 Hansaviertel. "Nature permeates every corner of the Hansaviertel"

There is also a large quantity of art dotted around the residential housing, sculptures and ornamental mosaics plastered onto walls. Female bodies - contorted, distorted and reduced to simple curvature as if to imply that we are all part of the nature that surrounds us - are placed strategically into entrance ways or along paths leading up to crossroads. They are placed there purposefully to add a modern artistic contrast to the historical Siegessäule that watchfully gazes over the houses, or the Gründerzeit buildings and statues dotted around the outskirts of the Tiergarten. The people living in these spaces are not only surrounded by nature but also confronted with modern art. All this is meant to synthesise together to create as in the title: Das Glück vom Wohnen und Bleiben - the happiness of living and staying.

Liegende, 1956 Bronze. Henry Moore. In front of the Akademie der Künste.
When we look back today with knowledge of the somewhat clumsier attempts of the 1960s, 70s & 80s to try and create affordable housing for an increasing population, these efforts seem noble, seem good and seem as though they come from a time when grand ideas about the way that people should live tended to come from top down rather than bottom up. The idea that a way of life could be sculpted by the architecture and positioning of buildings, narrated by the presence of art works and boosted by the surrounding of nature seems slightly naive today. If we take Brasilia as an example, the city was over taken many times by many different kinds of leadership who often didn't stay true to the ideals of Niemeyer and the socialistic vision for a classless city. 

The Hansaviertel too feels slightly abandoned, lived in only by those who moved there in the 1950s, the 60s and 70s. This workers utopia has long since gone out of fashion. People today demand convenience, restaurants, bars, clubs, a supermarket on every corner and a community that somehow reflects the way people have chosen to live. In Berlin today, Altbau (old style, Gründerzeit buildings) are much more sort after than the latter-day creations of post war modernism that came out a need for housing and desperation for a better future. 

A small shopping centre lies quiet at the centre of the Hansaviertel.

U Bahn Hansaplatz (U9). Quiet spaces, pregnant with memory and longing.
Perhaps though, we can take some lessons from the idealism of the Hansaviertel. For instance, a need for closeness to nature that no doubt improves people's mental state. Open spaces and the proximity of art that help people to see the bigger picture and allow more freedom of thought. But I think the days of using architecture as method of social engineering for good or for ill are long since passed, as much for ideologies' sake as for the return of mass private ownership of architectural projects after the turn towards neoliberalism in western countries during the 1980s. Simply put, no one project can build a city from scratch or a quarter from rubble; there is no firm and no will to handle such projects today.

The sense I get though, when I meander through the modernist buildings of the Hansaviertel is a sense of big dreams, of hope for a more equal world where everyone had the opportunity to live amongst art and nature in large flats with big open windows allowing the world to rush in every morning and every evening. Perhaps those dreams are in fact worth remembering. The Hansaviertel perhaps teaches us that architecture must reflect the people who live in the buildings, because without the will to reflect the ideals that built the buildings the society is unable to live up to the potential of the walls that surround it.  

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