A Look at the Central Block of the Hufeisensiedlung Residential Complex (1925–1933)
Last year, at the suggestion and introduction of engineer Javad Hatami, I visited the Hufeisensiedlung social housing project (the Horseshoe Estate) (Figure 1) in Berlin—a work by Martin Wagner, architect and urban planner, and Bruno Taut, architect, urban planner, and prominent theorist of the early twentieth century. Upon my first encounter with the central block of the complex—itself part of a larger urban project—I realized that the experience far exceeded a mere visit to a frozen fragment of modern architectural history. It became one of my purest encounters with modern architectural spaces; and remarkably, this quality, unlike many pioneering works of modern architecture, arose not through formal exhibitionism but, like a spell, from the depths of formal humility. But where did this inexplicable magic originate? How is it possible that the enchantment of architecture, after nearly a century, still emerges from simple volumes and an apparently elementary arrangement, remaining effective? This question became one of my mental preoccupations over the past year. Interestingly, I had experienced something similar shortly before—not in the realm of architecture, but in cinema: Perfect Days, directed by the German filmmaker Wim Wenders, is a film in praise of everyday life, slowness, and nostalgia that challenges some of the most self-evident principles of mainstream cinema—such as dependence on excitement,
dramatic narrative, special effects, and technical innovation. If Wenders in Perfect Days seeks to critique these principles and propose an alternative aesthetics in cinema, the restless spirit of Bruno Taut's era—this socialist-anarchist architect and theorist, wandering between momentous industrial transformations and fundamental reconfigurations of social formations—yearns for the delineation of new architectural principles in the dream of perfect days: principles that compel us to reconsider certain taken-for-granted values of the mainstream architecture of his day.
Today, the field before architecture is dominated by star architects and their works. Names such as Zaha Hadid, Bjarke Ingels, Rem Koolhaas, Frank Gehry, and Thomas Heatherwick, with works like the Heydar Aliyev Cultural Center, the Vancouver House residential complex, the CCTV headquarters, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, and the Singapore Learning Hub, attest to the reality that contemporary architecture is increasingly crystallized in the form of iconic buildings—works meant to represent their privileged position within the hierarchy of the market institution. Although the historical bond between architecture and capital is undeniable, this degree of architecture's commodification and the growing importance of the free market in the field of architecture is a phenomenon specific to the contemporary era, standing in contradiction with a significant portion of the history of modern architecture.
The fundamental transformation of intellectual foundations following the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the formation of the urban middle class placed new needs and capabilities before architecture. From the end of the nineteenth century, a considerable portion of the concerns facing modern European and American architecture focused not so much on creating iconic structures as on responding to the fundamental social, economic, and intellectual transformations of the times. Among them, the question of redefining living space for the urban middle class directed a remarkable share of architectural efforts toward social housing and the public realm of the city. The focus of progressive architectural movements on responding to new conditions, supported by municipal administrations, shaped a trend to which a significant number of brilliant works of modern architecture belong. This trend, which began in the final decades of the nineteenth century, bore fruit in the early decades of the twentieth century and maintained its standing in the field of modern architecture until the beginning of the 1980s, but gradually declined with the expansion of neoliberal economic dominance. Many of the most celebrated architectural works after World War II—such as Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation, Moshe Safdie's Habitat 67, Berlin's Hansaviertel, and the works of the Japanese Metabolist movement—are the result of a trend previously established by figures and movements such as the Constructivists of the Soviet Union, Bruno Taut, Adolf Loos, Walter Gropius, and Le Corbusier. Taut, one of the prominent figures of German Expressionist architecture, represented between 1914 and 1920 an individualistic and expressive tendency known as "Kunstwollen" (the will to art), in opposition to the other tendency, "Normative Form," championed by Gropius. This historical opposition, rooted in the conflict between Henry van de Velde's organic form and Peter Behrens's
industrial architecture, was ultimately embodied in two symbolic works: Taut's Glass Pavilion (Figure 2) and the Fagus Factory by Gropius and Meyer (Figure 3). But after this period, in the social and economic conditions of Germany following World War I, Taut directed a significant portion of his efforts toward middle-class housing and large-scale project design. The Hufeisensiedlung social housing complex (1925–1931) in Berlin, the product of his collaboration with Martin Wagner, was designed and built during this period. In confronting the economic realities of the Weimar Republic and the dramatic growth in housing demand, Taut shifted from Expressionism toward a kind of pragmatism. For example, the synthesis of Le Corbusier's Domino (as a replicable typology) with the simple and unadorned language of Adolf Loos in this complex can be seen as a direct response to the necessity and urgency of middle-class housing at the time. This shift may at first appear to be a retreat from Taut's Expressionist positions, but in reality it represents a deliberate change of playing field and an engagement with architecture as a powerful tool for designing scenarios of contemporary social existence. The sources available to me have addressed the technical, functional, and social aspects of this project, paying less attention to the architectural strategies and devices that are worthy of reflection from the perspective of architecture's internal disciplinary qualities. The following text attempts to examine some of these qualities through an analysis of the architectural strategies embedded in the work, a reading of its form, and an investigation of the relationship between its components and their urban context. Accordingly, and with a focus on these qualitative dimensions, the functional, technical, and historical aspects of the project—despite their pioneering nature for their time—have been deliberately set aside in this text.
Urban Node and Grid. The design of the Hufeisensiedlung complex seeks to redefine the concept of dwelling and to represent contemporary social habitation within the urban fabric. Social housing examples of that era were generally formed either as row houses, like the Dessau-Törten project (Figure 4) by Gropius and Meyer; or as closed structures independent of the urban context, organized around a central courtyard, like Karl-Marx-Hof by Karl Ehn (Figure 5); or as independent objects, like Mies van der Rohe's residential buildings at the Weissenhof Estate (Figure 6). In all these cases, architecture is a function of the urban grid. But Taut and Wagner, in designing the central block, offer a synthesis of these three approaches in an innovative form that interacts with the urban grid (Figure 7). The urban grid is a replicable and expandable pattern, but Taut's project, by creating an urban node within the grid, establishes a new interaction between this node and the surrounding urban network. The formal contrast between the horseshoe shape of the complex and the urban grid is an effort to create a collective identity within the monotonous and repetitive context of the city. In this regard, the work can be seen as a prophetic critique of the issues of identity, legibility, and repetition in the urban grid. The transformation of the complex into an urban node does not remain limited to the morphological dimension; rather, by creating a social focal point embraced by the rows of residential units, it offers a new definition of collective living—a definition resulting from a kind of collective self-awareness and a sense of individual belonging to an
encompassing whole, made possible by the curvature of the architectural body, which allows the project to be observed from within itself and establishes new relationships between part and whole (Figure 8).
The Relationship Between City and Architecture. The openness of the horseshoe form to the urban access network causes the central courtyard to be perceived not merely as an interior space for residents but as an extension of a larger whole—the city. This intelligent arrangement responds to one of the most fundamental challenges of modern architecture: designing a new relationship between individual and society by redefining the bond between architecture and city (Figure 9). The penetration of the urban realm into the complex, and the bending of the residential block rows in response to the densification of this urban node, recalls the tendency toward "organic form" in the works of Hugo Häring, another German Expressionist architect—a tendency that was marginalized for years under the dominance of Le Corbusier's ideas and the prevailing discourse of the International Congresses of Modern Architecture (CIAM). In fact, the Hufeisensiedlung project can be regarded as the crystallization of early critical attitudes toward certain dominant tendencies in CIAM—tendencies whose manifestation can be observed in Le Corbusier's Ville Radieuse (1930) (Figure 10).
Typological Appropriation. Perhaps the boldest approach of the Hufeisensiedlung designers is the appropriation of a historical architectural typology—the amphitheater—and its extrapolation to the scale of urban design. This approach transforms architecture into a theatrical event. In this complex, the physical elements recall the components of a classical amphitheater: the rows of apartments are gathered like reserved seats in a theater-like hall around the
central green space; the central pond functions as the stage, and the gentle slope of the grounds toward it plays the role of the audience seating. In this scheme, the correspondence between the position of the city street and the backstage of the amphitheater, and between the main entrance of the complex and the passageway through which the actor enters the stage, constitutes the project's most brilliant spatial device. The viewer is no longer merely an observer but an actor who actively participates in the spatial action and shapes part of the performance (Figure 11).
The near-elliptical form of the grounds, together with their gentle slope toward the (de)center—which is in fact the product of a spatial tension between the two foci of the ellipse—beckons the viewer with irresistible pull into the depth of the project. In this way, the public green space is transformed from a static surface into a dynamic arena. While moving through this sloping space, as the horizon line gradually lowers, the viewer is progressively enveloped in a natural landscape. This device, in its simplicity, creates an unparalleled visual and spatial experience during which the viewer's connection to the built urban environment gradually fades, until one suddenly finds oneself in the midst of a green, tree-filled space. The climax of this spatial scenario is the dedication of the performance's focal point to a calm and beautiful pond in the depth of the project—a pond that, by rendering the project's center unreachable, becomes a symbolic element; an element whose reflection of light and the image of the sky on its surface creates a poetic experience (Figure 12).
Conclusion. In today's architecture, just as hope for the realization of a utopia has dimmed, a return to perfect days is likewise regarded as nothing but groundless fantasy. Nevertheless, the present text is a tribute to the original dream of modern architecture for creating a utopia worthy of contemporary humanity, through a re-reading of qualities that have acquired a transhistorical and enduring character—architectural qualities that, despite the profound social, economic, and technological transformations of the past century, have retained their validity and effectiveness and can be instructive for contemporary architecture. The important quality of Hufeisensiedlung lies not merely in the design of form but in a kind of scenario-making for life, embedded in the relationships between the components of the design with one another and with the urban context. The realization of this scenario is as much the result of the complex's interaction as a social focal point (node) with the urban grid as it is shaped by a physical design that transforms the work and the social interactions within it into a theatrical event. The enchantment of Hufeisensiedlung lies, on one hand, in linking this scenario of contemporary existence with the aesthetic, and on the other, in achieving architectural richness while maintaining the work's outward humility. In an era when art has become more than ever entangled in the vortex of commodification, this coexistence of aesthetic richness and apparent humility is a call for the reassessment of the dominant current in architecture and art, which seeks to maintain its market dominance by dazzling the audience with grandiose forms and special effects—a call for reflection, an invitation to slowness, and a discovery of the possibilities hidden in the path traversed over nearly one hundred years between Hufeisensiedlung and Wenders's
Perfect Days.
Postscript: It is worth noting certain architectural subtleties of this project whose traces can also be detected in the architecture of subsequent decades. For instance, the use of diverse colors as complements to the plain cement surfaces of the block facades creates a distinct and varied visual identity that strengthens residents' sense of belonging and connection to their living environment. This approach has also been applied to the interior design and entrance doors, which share a similar form but feature diverse patterns and color schemes, thereby providing the possibility of differentiation and a sense of belonging for residents while maintaining unity (Figures 13 and 14). Another example is the vegetation of the private courtyards in front of the apartments, separated from the public green space by rows of boxwood hedges,
shaped according to the owners' tastes, which in addition to providing a space for leisure at the neighborhood scale, on one hand adds diversity and dynamism to the complex's scenery and on the other—like Adolf Loos's Heuberg collective housing project—provided the possibility of growing vegetables and fruits amid the crisis-stricken economy of the Weimar Republic. The gardens facilitate residents' interaction with the architecture and their participation in shaping the urban landscape of the complex. Here, one must acknowledge the complementary role of the project's landscape designer, Leberecht Migge, whose green space design presents, instead of opposition, a concept of "intertwining" and "interaction" between architecture and urban landscape—a definition of livability that remains inspirational for contemporary architecture (Figure 15).