Architecture, Town Planning, and Large-Scale Housing Estates
Architecture and urban planning were facing great challenges during the Weimar Republic, given the difficult economic context of the time. The housing conditions in Germany had already been problematic prior to the First World War. In the Weimar Republic, their improvement was defined as a communal, not-for-profit task. New urban quarters emerged and a new urban infrastructure had to be created, while many historic urban cores changed into a ‘city centre’ dominated by business and consumerism. In the optimistic, euphoric situation of societal renewal after the war, many architects produced visionary projects. Yet at the same time, they had to develop pragmatic approaches for a cost-saving, industrialized type of housing construction. Large settlements in Berlin and in Frankfurt, or the experimental Weißenhof settlement in Stuttgart as well as the Bauhaus represented the ideas of an architectural avant-garde that was internationally connected. The protagonists of modernism, the so-called Neues Bauen, dominated contemporary coverage and contributed, once they had been forced into exile in 1933, to the global reach of this current. Yet in reality, architecture and housing construction in the Weimar Republic were not dominated by the Neues Bauen. They can rather be described as multiple modernity, which showed fluid boundaries and permeability between radical modernist forms and traditionalist elements.