Description

The architects Léon Wohlhage Wernik successfully proved with their estate of terraced houses in Biesdorf, Berlin, that so-called social housing does not necessarily equal monotony and anonymity. The design’s special and attractive qualities lie in the concept of planned randomness in the arrangement of the building units, without falling into a picturesque higgledy-piggledy approach. Thus the chance arrangement of the whole complex looks uniform, tying all the buildings together and showing much variety within that unity. What is in the foreground here is not bars or rows as familiar characteristics of large residential complexes that are often positively violent, but the unity of the building.

Comparable in their dimensions with a detached house, three different two and three-storey standard houses produce staggered rows of 64 house units in all. Narrow parcels with garden spaces give the occupants the feeling of a detached house in a group, and the staggered heights and depths avoid the usual sense of buildings in rows. All the types have the classical division into living, cooking and dining on the ground floor and bedrooms upstairs; the three-storey buildings have a separate apartment with a loggia right at the top. A passage-like access area in the centre, also staggered, tries to adopt urban qualities. With their uniform and yet varied and complex façades, the same colour-shade throughout and a disciplined, reticent formal language, the complex makes for a quarter with high residential and identity values.

---

Originally published in: Klaus-Peter Gast, Living Plans: New Concepts for Advanced Housing, Birkhäuser, 2005.