With the kind permission of Strelka Press, we are publishing an excerpt from the book Towers and Boxes. A Brief History of Mass Housing Florian Urban.
Fragment of the chapter "West and East Berlin: panel vs tenement houses"
A sudden change in attitude towards the Merkisches Fiertel [the largest new residential area in West Berlin - approx. Archi.ru] took place during the 5th Bauvohen fair in 1968. In addition to the official program, Antibauvochen was organized there - an exhibition of young architects who offered their own vision of the future of cities. The Berlin City Hall allocated a sizable amount of 18,000 DM for the event (at the time it was equivalent to a roughly fifteen-year lease of a two-room apartment) - and received relentless criticism of its building policies in return. Instead of showing off their own designs, young architects resented the budget-funded panel housing. In Merkishes Fiertel, they saw a classic example of the pride of modernism, a combination of disgusting architecture and ill-considered urban planning. The lack of kindergartens, public transport and shops - which were often foreseen but not yet ready - they denounced as a fundamental flaw in box-and-tower development. The project was also criticized from an aesthetic point of view: the buildings are too large, there is too much "dead" space between them, and typical forms give rise to a feeling of monotony.
This outrage was readily echoed by the respected weekly Der Spiegel, which called Merkishes Firtel "the most bleak piece of concrete architecture." The diagnosis sounded deadly: "This is a gray hell!" Five months later, the magazine devoted another piece and the cover of the issue to the same topic. Exhausted residents of apartment buildings from all over Germany vied with each other to complain to the reporter: "It's like I'm in prison," "You can die from this monotony" and "Coming home in the evenings, I curse the day we moved to these barracks." Residential complexes have been described as "monotonous rectangular high-rise towers," "inhospitable square mountains," "battered residential cubes," and "bleak clusters of barracks." The article overnight changed the mood in the press, and Merkishes Firtel began to be described in apocalyptic tones: this is both an example of “inert uniformity and sterile monotony”, and “perhaps the saddest result of both state and non-state construction activities … there for no apparent reason Housewives drink too much”, these are“concrete quarters”, where“from the age of four, children are doomed to become low-skilled workers”.
Different sides of the project were criticized. The quality of construction is often low, the apartments are relatively small; repetitions of the same forms are endlessly monotonous, the huge scale makes the inhabitants feel defenseless. Spacious green areas do not fulfill the role assigned to them as places of communication and meeting; on the contrary, it is quite dangerous to walk there at night. The destruction of the structure of the former neighborhoods and the anonymity of life in giant towers lead to a lack of mutual trust among people and a disregard for public spaces. Another problem is negative selection among residents. Most of them were quite poor (more than 20% of them received social benefits), and the share of local youth who were noticed in criminal behavior was about a third higher than in neighboring areas. Of course, compared to the residents of Chicago's municipal complexes, who almost all received welfare benefits, the residents of 1970s West Berlin boxes were relatively wealthy and well-integrated into society. However, the gap between rich and poor in German cities was now wider than ten years earlier, and this change was perceived as extremely important.
Many of Merkisches Fiertel's architects were leftist and saw their work as the best possible solution to the housing shortage for the working class. All these attacks came as a complete surprise to them, although the ground was being prepared for them over the past decade. Particularly decisive among the attackers was the journalist Wolf Jobst Ziedler (1926–2013), who can be called the German Jane Jacobs. In collaboration with the photographer Elisabeth Niggemeyer (b. 1930), Ziedler published the pamphlet "The Killed City" in 1964, in which he accused modernist architects of "murdering the old city." The book, convincing primarily through its visuals, has become a bestseller. It was a successful counterattack in the war of images, in which modernism had the advantage for a long time, but was not able to win the final victory. Niggemeier's expressive scenes - for example, children playing in ancient courtyards - contrasted with bleak compositions with No Entry signs and inhospitable spaces around the tenement towers. The book visually contrasted the stucco to the concrete, and the talkative visitors of the corner shop to the deserted parking lots. Ziedler used the negative attitude in society towards apartment buildings, the construction of which began after 1870, and accused his contemporaries that a century later they launched the "second era of grunding", and it will lead not to the construction of overcrowded houses for the working class, but - what is worse - to the destruction of a city convenient for life.
At about the same time as Siedler and Niggemeier, the psychologist Alexander Mitscherlich (1908–1982) formulated claims against modernist architects. Speaking about the “inhospitable environment”, Mitscherlich did not resort to illustrations, but his text is expressive in itself: “Cubic meters are piled up on cubic meters. All this looks like a switchman's booth, brought to monstrous proportions in the course of selective breeding. In the late bourgeois era, which really excited the urban slums, people often talked about the nightmare embodied in stone. It does not fit into my head that such a nightmare became a reality seventy years later, in a society that calls itself progressive."
Both Ziedler and Niggemeier and Mitscherlich anticipated the condemnation of Merkisches Fiertel, which would become commonplace a few years later. The external features of new projects, such as large open spaces or clear separation of functions, were presented as factors changing the economic and social structure of Berlin: small grocery stores are closed, contact with neighbors is lost, the importance of the extended family is diminishing. In addition, such criticisms shed light on the long-term task of the city's building policy (which was rarely discussed openly at that time, but it is evident from the design documents of the time) to rid the city of "outdated" buildings and completely replace a significant part of the existing urban fabric.
Criticizing modernist complexes of mass housing, the journalists of the late 1960s reproduced the same logic of material determinism on which the most ardent modernists based their calculations - but only with the opposite sign. If once boxes and towers were perceived as incubators of a just society, now they are breeding grounds for crime and deviation. The stigma of “slums”, which was formerly carried by the districts of old tenement houses, stuck to Merkishes Fiertel. It was called the "modernist backyard", thus referring to the image of the gloomy backyard, characteristic of the tenement houses of the past, XIX, century. There even appeared the expression "typical nature of Zille" - Heinrich Zille was a famous artist of the early 20th century, depicting the life of the poorest Berlin districts. The new apartment buildings did not escape accusations that “greedy speculators” were behind its construction: the unrestrained resale of real estate was invariably considered the cause of flaws in the urban structure of old Berlin. The diagnosis of modernization sounded disappointing: the slums were just "ousted" from "the affected parts of the center into satellite cities and other ruthless ghettos of modernist housing." Journalists pressed on disappointment in the promises of modernist architects to build a more humane society. One daily put it this way: "By now, even the most gullible should have realized that building with concrete panels is by no means capable of producing comfortable housing or vibrant urban areas."
The rhetoric remained unchanged. As in previous decades, social problems were blamed on architecture. The automatism in the use of late 19th century imagery to describe the 1960s situation is especially evident in the case of exposing the "speculators" - a bit ridiculous in a city where government control over the construction industry was more pervasive than it ever was in the modern era, and where it was much easier to cash in on government contracts than on market speculation.
In the relentless search for a scapegoat to blame for the failures of Berlin's urban policy, party affiliation has ceased to matter. Both Ziedler and Mitscherlich appeared in their books as bourgeois opposition. Mitscherlich mourned the loss of such burgher virtues as "courteous dignity" and "civic responsibility," and Siedler sang the glorious heraldry of the Prussian aristocracy on the Berlin gables of the 19th century. At the same time, both of them believed that they were defending the interests of the oppressed strata. Mitscherlich again and again mentions the poor tenants of typical apartments in residential towers, and the happy inhabitants of the old quarters, so beloved by Siedler, are all factory workers, pub owners or zealous gardeners - that is, they do not belong to the elite of post-war Germany.
To understand the tangled party sympathies of German critics of high-rise housing, it is necessary to remember that the state-funded mass housing program was the brainchild of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and its supporters in the trade unions and the labor movement. At the same time, this policy was supported by socially responsible conservatives. Again, a typical example here is Merkishes Fiertel. Its construction and maintenance was carried out by a state corporation headed by Rolf Schwendler, Minister of Construction in the Berlin Senate controlled by the Social Democrats. West Berlin may well be called the least capitalist metropolis in the Western world: there is a complete absence of large corporate players, and the predominance of voters with left-wing convictions, and legislative regulation that is beneficial for tenants. Critics of the regime called it "social-authoritarian." Nowhere else in Western countries has the leftist dream of resolving the housing crisis at the expense of the state been realized in practice on such a scale, and nowhere else has its failure become so obvious.
The fiercest criticism of this policy, however, came not from the Conservatives, but from the extreme left. In West Berlin, as elsewhere in the Federal Republic of Germany, this was a growing student movement known as the "extra-parliamentary opposition."In an article that broadly endorsed the provisions of his program, Der Spiegel attacked the very foundations of capitalist economics: "The success of modern urban planning and urban renewal programs is directly dependent on the reform of private land ownership." From the point of view of the extra-parliamentary opposition, one of the main reasons for the poor quality of mass housing was the potential for generating income from land speculation. Journalist Ulrika Meinhof also believed that the front line in Merkisches Fiertel does not run between the proletariat and the middle class, but between the workers who live there and the state-owned company GESOBAU, which owns the land and maintains the complex. At that time, Meinhof was still an activist, but very soon she will be recognized all over the world as a member of the terrorist organization "Red Army Faction". Neither she nor her leftist associates questioned government planning; on the contrary, they attacked moderate officials because, in their opinion, they did not actively defend the real interests of the residents. Cooperative developers are chasing big profits, and the federal government, controlled since 1966 by a coalition of the SPD and the conservative CDU, is aiding them with tax breaks. The lack of mention in this debate of private landowners and large corporations, who in any other city would be the main actors in the new housing market, speaks for itself.
The inhabitants of Merkishes Fiertel themselves had mixed feelings about this. Yes, they shared a general dissatisfaction with the poor quality of infrastructure and complained about the lack of kindergartens, shops or public transport routes, but newspaper articles, which portrayed them as criminal scum or, at best, helpless victims of cruel architects, could not help but shock them. … As a result, the desire to protect oneself from the press pouring slops on the complex turned out to be stronger than the critical fuse. Journalists who painted the Merkisches Fiertel in a high-rise ghetto faced growing mistrust and even aggression from local residents who felt offended and who were not at all convinced by the arguments that all this was being done for their own good. In addition, it became more and more obvious that many residents of the area, comparing it with their previous houses, were more or less satisfied with the new habitat. The main problem for them, as it turned out, was not cruel architects or urban planning mistakes, but rent. Despite subsidies from the budget and strict state control, it was still twice as high as in old and imperfect apartment buildings in the central part of the city - and even the Social Democrats were unable to cope with this.
