For Stefan Forster, housing is his main specialization, and within it he distinguishes two directions - the reconstruction of "dying" panel five-story buildings and large residential projects in Frankfurt. Forster himself sees two main aspects of the development of residential architecture in Germany as a whole, "on the one hand, rather backward approaches to the construction of residential buildings, and on the other, what is being done in developed cities."
Oddly enough, Stefan Forster made his name and career precisely from the experience of working with such an unattractive material as "Khrushchevs". This Soviet product on the territory of the former GDR turned out to be a real social disaster for the scrupulous Germans, with the consequences of which Germany faced after unification. The panel “boxes” seemed to the German engineers so hopeless that the only thing that could be done with them was to demolish them, even though 80% of them had a lot of money invested in repairs. Stefan Forster told how his incredible project to "revitalize" almost dead areas began.
Stefan Forster:
“After the first joy of unification, we had to face the realities of the GDR. All historical buildings were practically devastated, after 1946 almost nothing was done there to restore. People lived in satellite cities, in new panel buildings. I remember how Mr. Kohl publicly promised to restore this country in 5 years, which was abandoned and did not develop at all for 50 years! From that moment on, for us people in western Germany, the end of the 'golden 1980s' came, as all investments were redirected to the eastern part to restore historic urban centers and improve the panel new buildings that surrounded them."
The problem, as it turned out, was not only the reconstruction, but also, as Stefan Forster put it, in the "settling" of people, whose migration from the GDR after the unification became widespread. The reason was the lack of production and, consequently, work, and, I must say, the very "image" of these areas was extremely negative, in fact, only old people remained here, and some of the houses were generally empty. As a result, the Germans nevertheless decided to destroy 350 thousand apartments in eastern Germany, although all of them had already been restored and renovated before. But Stefan Forster offered an alternative.
Stefan Forster:
“If we approach these characteristic areas in terms of space, we will see that panel houses have no future. My task is to transform the existing space into a humane, worthy of life. We came to the conclusion that if something is to be done with the five-story buildings, then they must be transformed into something completely different. The systems are as follows: we broke or transformed two blocks and built a new one between them, where people gradually moved. The population there is mostly elderly, so it was necessary that the new housing would correspond to their way of life. But for the future, I still hoped that the new houses would attract young people there too. We have found that these panel buildings exhibit great flexibility and can be exploited. The standard floor plan made my job a lot easier."
All the properties of the German "Khrushchevs", such as: a tiny kitchen and bathroom without daylight, narrow balconies, dark staircases without windows, Stefan Forster leveled by changing the floor plan, not affecting the load-bearing walls. He has developed about 100 variants in order to create a wide variety of apartments within one house. As a result, the living room was expanded due to the old balcony, which became part of it, and instead of it, large open terrace-decks appeared outside. The entrances have changed, daylight into the bathroom began to flow through the glass wall. As a result, the apartments have been greatly modernized, they have become light and now do not at all resemble standard panel "cubicles".
An important step, which Stefan Forster decided to take, is to lower the height of buildings, which is quite rational - there are no elevators anyway, and it makes no sense to add them to the building. this makes the rent more expensive. The attic is not used, so it was safe to cut off a couple of floors, especially since the houses were partially empty, and no one had to be relocated. As a result, according to Forster, “now all this is perceived not as one building, but as a series of houses standing next to each other. The idea was to change the image and make the area look like a traditional German city - a garden. " And this, I must say, succeeded, in appearance the buildings looked like small villas, no higher than the surrounding trees. The residents of each house received small gardens, or "green rooms" as Stefan Forster called them, their own cozy private spaces, fenced off from the street by a low fence - everything is very German.
“It is easy to reconstruct old buildings,” says Stefan Forster. “The main thing is that you can be proud of the fact that the building is going down, not growing up - this is very unusual for modern architecture.”
Working with the reconstruction gave Forster a lot of experience, after all, even in Germany itself there are not so many architects who know this specific area well. In the second part of the lecture, the architect spoke about his subsequent practice - the construction of new housing, using the example of seven projects in Frankfurt. Here the difficulties were related to working “in context”, and the architect explained exactly what he meant.
Stefan Forster:
- “Before building, we need to determine which city we live in - Asian-American, where everything is being built and destroyed very quickly, and there is no history. Or in a European city, where there is always a history that must be taken into account. However, taking into account, say, the typology of the existing development does not mean to build in the same way, but to have it in mind and build different buildings. There are three categories of space that make up a European city - open, semi-open and private. The search for interaction between them is the task of the architect."
The traditional solution for German residential buildings is a closed private courtyard space, and this is precisely the problem of its interaction with the public for Stefan Forster one of the key ones. This courtyard is present in almost all seven projects, in one of them it is even a "feng shui" garden, as the author himself says, "the quality of life largely depends on what is in front of your eyes."
The layout of apartments can be quite flexible, in several projects the architect has used "units" or blocks of 3 apartments. In one of them, the layout takes into account the possibilities of the disabled and the elderly, for whom Forster rebuilt the house in the post-war period. They tried to eliminate all possible barriers to free movement in a wheelchair in the apartments. By the way, they are building in stages so that people do not leave this place and gradually move to new parts of the building, Stefan Forster considers this important. Another house, the one with the "Feng Shui" garden inside, is part of a respectable quarter, the contract for the further development of which, perhaps, will soon receive their bureau. The house was built by Forster as a social housing, but in the future it will turn into an ordinary one, so here they tried to make large open windows from wall to wall and not yet have a supermarket downstairs, otherwise the apartments above it will be difficult to sell. Stefan Forster designed the house to completely close the supermarket, which ends up in the courtyard.
Forster builds both social and luxury housing, an example of the latter is the private villas located on the outskirts of Frankfurt in the middle of the city garden.
Stefan Forster's story about the reconstruction of five-story buildings must be recognized as very relevant for modern Moscow urban planning, one of the problematic tasks of which is the demolition and reconstruction of five-story buildings and block houses. Forster managed to go beyond reconstruction, but did not bring the case to complete demolition. He radically changed the internal and external environment of the five-story buildings, expelling any negative sediment, and significantly improving the way of life of their monasteries.
It's amazing how zealous the Germans are, even with the Soviet legacy, and even more surprising - how many changes need to be made in order for the five-story building to become suitable for a normal (albeit not rich) life. We must admit that the German five-story buildings are not quite Khrushchev, they look more like abandoned Soviet sanatoriums. Still, in the GDR they built what seemed to be the same thing, but somewhat better and more varied than in Moscow. And it’s amazing how many changes need to be made to turn this “better” into housing for the average (poor) European. And - how diligently it is done. After all, from the old buildings after such a reconstruction, if anything remains, it is only the supporting structure. All these courtyards, front gardens, terraces, balconies - you don't want to, but you will envy the East German old people.
