Description
The visionary Ebenezer Howard was one of the founders of the first Garden City, named Letchworth Garden City, established as a cooperative near London in 1903. In 1909, the Homesgarth House (now called Sollershot House) was built in this Garden City by architect Clapham Lander and had a total of 48 apartments, which shared a central kitchen, dining hall, and other collective recreation rooms.[1] The Homesgarth House also included a nursery and collective circulation paths in the form of a colonnade that doubled as recreation and communication space. The shared living spaces of the residential project, which was built around a central courtyard, had similarities with the Central-Kitchen Houses but lacked full functionality. For example, there was no meal delivery to the individual apartments via dumbwaiter, which was a typical feature of Central-Kitchen Houses.[2]
The Homesgarth House was considered highly experimental, even within Europe’s first Garden City. The individual apartments functioned relatively autonomously and were less dependent on common areas than the housing models of Large Housing Complexes, Men’s and Women’s Hostels and Boarding Houses, and Central-Kitchen Houses. Ebenezer Howard, who himself lived on site until 1920, had to admit that the working-class residents preferred the terraced houses of the Garden City; the centralized organization of the household and the decentralized cityscape of the Letchworth Garden City seemed contradictory.[3] In the end, only around 24 families wanted to move in to Homesgarth House, according to some sources, the residential project was never fully completed. Only a handful of documents and plans concerning the project are known to exist.[4]
Selected project data
Exterior view today
Facade view of the two- to three-story Homesgarth House
Courtyard with garden
Private living area of a kitchen-less dwelling
Covered walkway (colonnade) in the courtyard
Collective dining hall
Footnotes
Data differs on the number of apartments. According to some sources, there were only 32. See Miller (1989): Letchworth, The First Garden City, p. 74 or also Muscheler (2007): Das Haus ohne Augenbrauen, Architekturgeschichte aus dem 20. Jahrhundert, p. 31.
Muscheler (2007): Das Haus ohne Augenbrauen, Architekturgeschichte aus dem 20. Jahrhundert, p. 29 f.
Uhlig (1981): Kollektivmodell Einküchenhaus, Wohnreform und Architekturdebatte zwischen Frauenbewegung und Funktionalismus, p. 12.
Muscheler (2007): Das Haus ohne Augenbrauen, Architekturgeschichte aus dem 20. Jahrhundert, p. 32.
Originally published in: Susanne Schmid, Dietmar Eberle, Margrit Hugentobler (eds.), A History of Collective Living. Forms of Shared Housing, Birkhäuser, 2019. Translation by Word Up!, LLC, edited for Building Types Online.