Description
My ears have not yet drunk a hundred words Of that tongue’s utterance, yet I know the sound: Art thou not Romeo and a Montague?
—William Shakespeare,
The space of a house closed in on all sides by walls has been given a compensatory counterpart in modern residential architecture in the form of open architectural elements, either covered or uncovered: balconies, loggias, and terraces by the garden or on the roof, all of which satisfy the human desire for direct access to light, air, and sun. For many people, taking care of a small garden or a few flowers on the balcony is a fulfilling activity that helps them forget everyday concerns for a time.The “green room” is a desirable perspective in the contemporary world. The lack of such exterior space has the most lasting influence on dissatisfaction with an apartment.[1] A loggia or a balcony is thus more than a room with a view; it not only extends the apartment but makes it whole in the first place.
Determining whether separation of housing and earning a living will continue to shape the future of housing design is a topic of fervent debate in sociology and in studies on residential architecture. This strict separation of housing and earning a living is a relatively new development, a child of the industrial revolution that was given a theoretical basis by the reformers of residential architecture between the world wars and was realized on a grand scale during the postwar reconstruction. The home and its outdoor spaces as the place where the residents live and enjoy their leisure time has come under pressure by a transformed concept of labor, on the one hand, and by new forms of earning a living at home, on the other hand. If the home is no longer a private space, where gainful employment has no place, then “Balconia” no longer needs to be synonymous with spending a vacation within one’s own four walls.
As current trends suggest, at least, work and home are no longer strictly separated as they were during the postwar economic miracle, when the cornerstones of the laws and standards for contemporary residential architecture were laid and the majority of the apartments currently in use were built. When housing and working fuse, and the separation of gainful employment in public and restoration in private collapses, it is only logical that the relationship of open and closed spaces in a home have to be redefined.
In multistory apartment buildings, the exterior areas enrich a home and improve its quality and use value. Consequently, such outdoor spaces always top the lists of what apartment hunters want. Builders and marketers have long since recognized this and thus a connection to green space is always emphasized to good effect. Exterior spaces are a selling point on the housing market, intended to motivate renters and buyers to dig more deeply into their pockets than they had intended and put up with high prices or other disadvantages.
Nevertheless, the outdoor space offered is not infrequently held in odium as inadequate, since even a spacious loggia or generous balcony represents a modest space in comparison to the garden of a freestanding single-family home. The desire to spend time in a green space is the root both of the handkerchief-sized gardens of row houses and the flight of city dwellers to greener pastures in the form of weekend trips in the car. Despite this objection, it is both presumptuous and wrong to play off an individual’s legitimate desire to own a home in a green space against the outdoor areas of a multistory apartment building. The obvious comparison and juxtaposition of outdoor space and garden simply make no sense. Describing outdoor space in the urban context of a multistory apartment building in terms of its own qualities (and not in terms of something it cannot be) is the goal of this section. The inventiveness of architects has ensured that the design of outdoor spatial compartments offers a broad, increasingly diverse spectrum. All the possible forms of exterior building elements found in residential architecture have historical precursors; although they retain the same architectonic form, they have sometimes taken on entirely different tasks and functions. Balconies and loggias are perfect case studies for typological studies since they show how elements can “shift,” how a given word can obtain a completely different meaning through use.
The balcony is by definition a horizontal platform that projects from the facade. The word is etymologically related to the Old High German word
A balcony is open on three sides and usually on top as well and is one form of outdoor seating. To prevent people from falling off, it is enclosed by a railing or balustrade. This parapet can be solid or open; it can be designed as a pane of glass or as an opaque element that keeps passersby from looking in. When a projecting building part is closed off on all sides, even if it has generous windows, we refer to it as an oriel, and it seems to be part of the apartment and not of the exterior space. Based on the history of its evolution, it cannot be said that the balcony was always closely associated with residential architecture. Quite the contrary, its original role was usually of a very different nature. On old farmhouses, the balcony was an open part of the building used for drying fruit and field crops. Boards would be placed on horizontal (squared) beams projecting over the wall and usually made secure with a wooden balustrade. They were found on farmhouses on the gables that were not exposed to the weather, where they were also protected by the large overhang of a saddle or hipped roof as well. They were often accessed via a central corridor on the second story, from the attic, or by an outside staircase. This corridor did not usually provide access to the chambers—that is, the bedrooms of the farmers and their servants. Such a balcony was not intended as a place to enjoy nature, to relax, or as an extension to the living space. Farmers simply had no time for that. Leisure time as a complement to wage labor is a feature of modern working life.
When the city dwellers of the nineteenth century moved out to their country homes and villas began to be built, these kinds of traditional architecture forms of old farmhouses took on a new role. Isolated from the original functional context, the balcony became a projection screen for the society of the late nineteenth century. It was not far from there to the integration of this element into modern residential architecture. The Villa Neumann (1894) and the Villa Bittner (1895) on the Semmering by the architect Franz von Neumann reveal how motifs of local architecture found their way into the architecture of urban elites in the country house or cottage style.[2] The steep, shifted saddle roof of the Villa Neumann and a pagoda-like hipped roof from a barn are used as a converted living space (and not to store hay), whose dormers and chimneys create a whole that radiates a sense of security, and the “continuous balconies with sawn-out
A second point of view is the balcony as a status symbol. It is found on medieval town halls and baroque palaces, and the pope offers the blessing “urbi et orbi” from the so-called benediction loggia, a shallow balcony projecting over the facade located on the central axis of Saint Peter’s Basilica. This role of the balcony as part of a political mise-en-scène in which it can serve as a tribune—recall El Lissitzky’s orator’s tribune for Lenin—places it in the tradition of the rostrum of antiquity. Residential architecture of the nineteenth century adopts this element again as an architectural status symbol. However, it becomes a strange hybrid, borrowed from the castle or palace of the nobility for the homes of the bourgeoisie, but they had nothing to announce to those on the street below. The forum of the constitutional monarchies was the parliament, not the balcony of the
On the ring roads and large boulevards of Vienna, Berlin, and Paris, balconies were not particularly pleasant places to stay; no one really spent time there and whispered sweet nothings down to the busy streets filled with hansoms and streetcars. They were, however, not without function. The balcony of a late-nineteenth-century urban villa or tenement is a sometimes elaborately designed buffer zone to filter the outside world. The late-nineteenth-century apartment was constructed according to a kind of layer principle. On balconies and loggias, there are door elements in lieu of multipart casement windows, and they certainly provide more light in the deep and tall spaces behind them. This light often took on a soft, muted atmosphere thanks to deep reveals, which often had wood paneling, fabric wall coverings, paintings, and plants in such apartments. The cigar smoke of the men and their full, flowing beards also softened the sound and the light. German speakers of the nineteenth century spoke of
The trail leads from the balcony of the late nineteenth century to the modern residential building, where it became established as a building part open to new uses. Under historicism, it eked out an impoverished existence as a pseudo status symbol, a decorative element on the facade, or as a maintenance balcony facing the interior courtyard, but it had nevertheless become a standard feature of residential architecture. This relationship began to be redefined in the early nineteenth century, as Werner Oechslin has remarked: “In 1912, using the Civil Servants’ Union Housing Block in Berlin-Charlottenburg as an example, Walter Curt Behrendt demonstrated the way in which the entire scope of legally permissible bay windows and setbacks could be exploited while maintaining a ‘placid, planar wall treatment.’ ‘The balconies do not face the street, but rather the residential courtyards which open onto the street. The possibilities for the balconies’ use are thus multiplied and their functional value increased.’”[4] This quotation clearly shows that Behrendt was aware of the relationship of an outdoor space facing the public space of a boulevard and the look of the building. An awareness of this problem seems to have been lost today, especially when it comes to arterial roads with heavy traffic, where the apartments not only disappear behind faceless facades but also behind noise barriers.
The balcony exposes more than other parts of a building: when Juliet steps onto the balcony and ignores the admonishing cries of her maid in the room, her exposure becomes palpable. Here she meets Romeo alone for the first time after the party. She steps over the bounds of the protective walls of the house—a metaphor for the House of Capulet—and meets her beloved archenemy from the House of Montague. This theatrical motif of stepping over boundaries also refers to another function of the balcony. It is not always a stage facing outward; it can also be a stage in the interior—specifically, in the theater. The balcony is the location of the cheaper seats where the commoners romp, as opposed to the protected loge (loggia) for the nobility in the audience. The frescoes by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in the Palazzo Publico in Siena (ca. 1319–48) not only show us urban life in that central Italian city but also the extreme density of buildings within the city walls and the buildings with windows, loggias, and balconies. They are all located on the upper stories, and their forms look as if they are about to cause the robust walls to collapse. The pressure that dominates within the city walls is tangible from this opposition of closed and open building components. Live unfolds on this urban stage.
Frescos by Ambrogio Lorenzetti (ca. 1319-48) in the Palazzo Publico, Siena
The word “loggia,” borrowed from the Italian, is understood to mean a covered architectural element that is open on at least one side. In addition to its floor and ceiling, it is surrounded, as a rule, on three sides by the outer walls of the building; it can, however, extend around a corner, in which case it is surrounded by walls on only two sides. In contrast to a portico or a balcony, a loggia does not project beyond the building facade. This, by the way, is a strong argument in favor of the loggia, since, if its advantages are deliberately emphasized, it can be pleasant place to spend time and accordingly fits in with the look of the facade. This fact has led contemporary architects to prefer the loggia to the balcony: “In addition, many architects have declared war on individual privacy screens from the home improvement store and unrestrained colorfully patterned awnings. Particularly in expensive locations in the city center, a tasteful appearance is very important to investors.”[5] A loggia on the ground floor behind a row of columns is also known as a colonnade.
Especially since the Italian Renaissance, loggias have been used frequently for stately buildings and often had a role as a place for official announcements by the city council, for example. Hence they are sometimes found as freestanding buildings on Italian piazzas, consisting solely of a colonnade but nonetheless called
A loggia is like the bell of a wind instrument, which, to exaggerate a little, amplifies like a megaphone whatever is spoken there. One of the earliest examples where a loggia unquestionably contributed to the quality of life in the building and served as a place to look out into the surrounding landscape is the northwest wing of the Château de Blois. It was probably designed by the Italian architect Pietro da Cortona, who brought this architectural element to France by adapting it for the château in the early sixteenth century. Its round-arch loggias, placed in front of the two top floors of the existing building, correspond to interior rooms and are not connected. Their variations in width, which are only noticed on closer inspection, follow the configuration of the rooms inside. The architect used a system of loggias and axes of different width to turn the irregular structure of the existing building into a floor plan that obeys Renaissance principles.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, loggias are found on hospitals and hotels and finally on residential buildings as well. These outdoor areas often used to be called porticoes; today, however, even smaller outdoor seating areas that do not project beyond the line of the building are almost always called loggias. Another German term for part of a building is
Altana of the Palazzo Davanzati, Florence, ca. 1880
Things began to change rapidly in the twentieth century. The idea of the garden city, which was developed primarily in highly industrialized England, as a critique of unbearable living conditions in the cities there, struck a chord in all advanced industrial societies. As a type, it remained a phenomenon that was unable to solve the problems of the city. Because it required a great deal of space, it created privileged living conditions that the middle classes could afford but not the proletarian masses. Nevertheless, hygiene, health, light, and air—the subjects of discussion that had shaped the nineteenth century—were firmly established as concerns of the reformist programs for residential architecture in the early decades of the twentieth century.
For hospitals and sanatoriums in particular, outdoor areas were constructed—usually in the form of loggias or covered terraces—to improve the healing process. Whereas hospitals and their precursors—such as infirmaries and the hospitals of the Knights Hospitaller—were closed blocks whose typology can be traced back to monasteries, beginning in the nineteenth century they were designed with airy outdoor areas. Frequently using a pavilion system—as garden cities for the patients, so to speak—large examples like the Charité in Berlin (1897–1916) had outdoor areas integrated into the building. The Charité, for example, has open, colonnade-like halls in front of the large wards.[8] The municipal hospitals of Düsseldorf (1904–7) and Görlitz (1901–5) have deep loggias in front of the rooms. The design for the university clinics in Freiburg has long balconies and other open elements. Hospitals with terraces gave architectural form to the “fresh-air principle” and the climatic therapy advocated at the time. The monumental Chirurgische Universitätsklinik in Tübingen by the architect Hans Daiber (1930–35) is a logical large structure, competing in formal terms with the large housing complexes of “Red Vienna,” built under Social Democratic rule between the wars, except that the hospitals mentioned rigorously pursued the call for light, air, and sun, without having to yield primacy to an aestheticizing of the proletarian masses. Alvar Aalto’s Paimio sanatorium (1928–33) became an icon of style, and its image was reproduced so often that it entered the canon of architecture, far beyond the domain of the building’s specific function, since what was good for the sick surely will not harm the healthy. With the collapse of the old aristocracies after the First World War, new sociopolitical approaches emerged, especially on the local level. In the 1920s, it was above all municipalities governed by Social Democrats that sought to make a sufficient number of hygienic, inexpensive apartments available to the masses concentrated in cities. The famous housing program of Red Vienna is one example, and it contrasted sharply with the politics of the federal government of Austria, which tried with all its might to torpedo such approaches to housing policy. In Germany, the cities of Frankfurt am Main and Berlin implemented similar programs to building housing under their respective directors of urban development, Ernst May and Martin Wagner. Then there was Rotterdam with J. J. P. Oud and Lyons with Tony Garnier. Outdoor spaces were supposed to be made truly usable zones that would increase living space. The four-story housing complex built by GEHAG in Berlin-Zehlendorf demonstrates, moreover, how the open space of a balcony can function in turn as a decorative element thanks to a strict rhythm, giving the complex a monumental character.[9]
Housing Complex in Berlin-Zehlendorf 1
In parallel with this, however, balconies continued to be built for bourgeois residences into the 1930s, both as status symbols facing the street and as utility areas on facing interior courtyards. These utility balconies were usually connected to the kitchen and were intended for doing household chores outdoors or for drying laundry. The standard was based on a minimum depth of one meter, to provide room for a chair. As housing quality began to improve in the mid-1950s, balconies became a regular feature of new buildings and were increasingly added when older buildings were renovated. The Charter of Athens of 1933 analyzed the problems of cities and called for a rigorous approach to hygienic and health concerns in modern architecture and urban planning. The two-story loggia with an elegant curved recliner on the balcony of the upper story, as sketched so casually by Le Corbusier, remains a rarely fulfilled fantasy of residential architecture even today. In search of an urban pendant to the single-family home, Le Corbusier developed the Plan Obus for Algiers in 1935: a stacked garden city intended to run along the sea like a ribbon for kilometers. Such utopias still stand in conflict with real economic limits. Although the so-called
The enormous offerings of private open space for leisure time, as conveyed in Le Corbusier’s images remained a dream, except in luxury residences. Urban lots are expensive, and even if the apartments are stacked on top of each other, it is certainly cheaper to build closed living spaces rather than generous outdoor areas. The private outdoor space in a multistory apartment building—be it a loggia, balcony, or terrace—is thus, despite users’ demand for it, a benefit subject to strict limits. That continues to be true, even though a recent study has shown that the size and quality of private outdoor space is one of the most influential factors in the decision to purchase an apartment: “Sufficient size of private outdoor space is the most important criterion in choosing a home. Private exterior spaces smaller than four square meters are not in demand.”[10] Apartment hunters also express precise notions of the nature and use of these outdoor spaces: “It should be suited to various activities, like a room outdoors: dining, relaxation, children’s games, sunbathing, socializing, a living room during the summer, and garden.”[11] That is almost exactly what Le Corbusier intended to offer in his
The Bellavista residential complex in Copenhagen was built between 1931 and 1934 from plans by Arne Jacobsen. A U-shaped form around a courtyard, the two-story structure for a wealthy clientele is one of that architect’s masterpieces, and it formed part of a larger urban development project on the coastal street of Strandvejen in north Copenhagen. The two parallel wings, joined by a short connector, have balconies facing south. The staggered facade ensures they are protected from the neighbor’s line of sight and provides all the apartments with a clear view—of the sea, in this case. This quality—that is, an individual outdoor space that is protected from all too curious gazes but at the same time offers an open prospect—is famously one of the most common features apartment hunters demand. That is precisely the reason for the success of Jacobsen’s floor plan. It also has disadvantages, however. Among others, its rigorous form is difficult to fit into an urban structure. A large housing complex in the Seebach district of Zurich by Esch Architekten, completed in 2007, takes up this type and produces a clever variation on it. In the two parallel wings of the four-story complex, the dentil-like pattern of the balconies is moved to the inside, while the outside has a traditional perforated facade. While, on the one hand, this results in a view of public space that continues the context of the city, the lively facade and its roughly eight-square-meter corner balconies faces the quiet courtyard. Both Jacobsen’s and the more recent Swiss example create a degree of privacy for the balconies by placing them on corners.
Another way to achieve a similar result is demonstrated by a residential complex by pool Architekten on Leimbachstrasse in Zurich (2002–5). The architects pulled balconies about three to four meters deep like drawers out of the facade of the very deep building volumes, thus extending the apartments axially. Usually, in apartment buildings as well as in the theater, balconies are simply stacked one above the other. These architects not only staggered the facades spatially but also created a variety of apartment types—for example, various diagonally shifted maisonettes—that result in a quite complex inner structure. On the facade, the balconies are never directly above one another from one story to the next, which gives a feeling of distance from one’s neighbors. Elements such as the uniform window size and the Eternit paneling covering everything prevents the variety of types from undermining the unity of the facade’s appearance.
This building demonstrates that the supreme bourgeois paradigm of individuality can be presented as a communal whole without sliding into the design chaos of participatory approaches to residential architecture. Édouard François took this a step further in his project for Montpellier (2000). His seven-story, terraced apartment building with a recessed top floor plays with rustic motifs. The building, featuring gray, undressed quarry stone on the facade and balconies on tall, slender supports, does away with urban metaphors of modern residential architecture. This building as rampart, with its treehouselike, enclosed outdoor boxes, some of which are connected to associated apartments via long corridors and open to the sky, is not intended to look like a self-contained facade. The anarchic design promises nothing less than individual freedom, thanks to seemingly randomly arranged elements that provide open spaces.
For an apartment building in Louviers, the same architect managed to combine the access areas and the outdoor spaces assigned to the apartments. In between three rows of apartments placed at angles to one another, two three-story access elements have been wedged in; the latter contain not only a stairwell but also spacious terraces, one for each apartment. The advantages are clear: The residential wings remain compact; minimizing the surface area of the shell is economical; and the outdoor spaces and access areas are “outsourced.” The conviction that balconies should be of greater utility to residents has not always been persuasive. Giuseppe Terragni’s Casa Rustici (1933–36) in Milan is, however, one example.
Giuseppe Terragni, Casa Rustici, Milan, 1933-36
The street facade of the complex compellingly signals the features of Italian rationalism. A crowning gangway and footbridgelike balconies on the five standard floors bracket the short sides of the two parallel wings and create a visual whole. The railings are delicate metal bars, which represent no barriers to the view of the street. A purely private use of these outdoor spaces is difficult to imagine: as soon as one steps out onto the balcony, one is inevitably part of the performance. The plants seen on the balcony in historical photographs seem more than a little draped. The staggered building volumes do have balconies on their long sides, which look out into the courtyard between the two wings. Terragni thus achieved two things: relatively intimate outdoor space vis-à-vis the interior and a staged performance for the public space.
It was the Swiss architects of the Tendenza movement and their successors who showed how to extract the qualities of such designs from their historical context. The German-speaking Swiss architect Michael Alder used an element similar to Terragni’s for his Vogelbach residential complex in Riehen, near Basel (1992). Admittedly, the architectural context is not the same, and it may be that the differences outweigh the commonalities. Nevertheless, the balconies docked to the building—they could also be described as gangways with the depth of a loggia—determine the form. The U-shaped complex is enclosed, courtyardlike, by outdoor elements docked at right angles to their corresponding residence, but without creating a barrier. Alder, like Terragni, uses these parts to demarcate the site from the street, but here the boundary seems airier and more cheery. Their structuring, ordering function is not heightened into something monumental but rather offers genuine living space. Unlike Terragni, who puts the residents on display, Alder designs his balconies as counterparts. They look out at the maisonette apartments in the rows; from the balcony, residents look into their own apartments. Jean Nouvel played through the possible themes of the balcony and external access corridor in his Nemausus project in Nîmes (1987).
Jean Nouvel, Nemausus, Nîmes, 1987
The two parallel six-story buildings in an industrial district of this city in southern France house 114 public housing units. As the French examples demonstrate again and again, architects in France try to counter the deficiencies of public housing with visually powerful solutions. For all the differences between Ricardo Bofill’s “Versailles for the proletariat” and Jean Nouvel’s projects, they are still comparable as powerful, pointed architectural statements. Nouvel insists on “cheap” industrial materials: metal stairs located on the exterior, industrial floors, metal railings, and garage doors used as elements for the entrances to the apartments. The cross section of the building reveals its symmetrical structure: whereas the middle section houses the apartments, which extend from one side to the other, there are wide corridors on the left and right. One side provides access, while the other side is used for private balconies, separated from the neighbors by canvas spanned on poles. With their residential complex on the St. Alban-Ring in Basel, the Swiss architects Morger/Degelo show how the same theme, for all its architectural rigor, can become a picture of bourgeois noblesse.
Environmental awareness as a slogan became its own realm of politics with the rise of the “green movement,” which not infrequently saw the condition of cities as a bogeyman. In urbanism, this uneasiness with cities was expressed in a massive critique of their form and function: they destroy the surrounding land as they grow; they use enormous resources; and they are inhospitable, as the title of a very successful book described them: Alexander Mitscherlich,
Seen historically, this criticism of the cities, of Moloch the metropolis, is nothing new. Since the nineteenth century there has been an unceasing flow of critiques that demonize the city. They repeatedly use the language, metaphors, and images of the Old Testament, with the “great whore of Babylon” as a symbol of the reprehensible features of the city. Architects, urban planners, and social utopians react to this image of the city with nature as the cure. It is remarkable that the poles of design, formally diametrical approaches, are rooted in precisely the same diagnosis. Raymond Unwin’s Letchworth garden city in England (1903) and Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin are closely related in the objective of their criticism. They differ, however, in the stereometry of their designs for the city: whereas the British architect spreads out horizontally his green garden city, which is based on an irregular network of paths, the Calvinist master strives upward with geometrical severity. Beyond these radical concepts of society, based on socialist or paternalistic ideals, there were also architects who did not by any means reject large cities as a place to live but rather wanted to develop them in a directed way according to rational designs. Otto Wagner in Vienna, and his epochal volume
This period also saw the development of a modern terrace building, which tried to unify the maximizing of outdoor spaces with the established layout of the city. Henri Sauvage, a pioneer of the terrace building, constructed his first such project on the rue Vavin (1912) in Paris; he followed it in 1922 with a complex of seventy-eight public housing units on the rue des Amiraux, which remains impressive even today.[13]
Terraced housing complex in large cities nevertheless remained rather rare. Adolf Loos unsuccessfully presented such a concept for Vienna-Inzersdorf (1923) to the Viennese city council. In no small measure because of that affront, he resigned as head architect of Vienna’s Siedlungsamt (housing office) and moved to Paris.[14]
Michael Rosenauer, an architect with Viennese roots and a vocal critic of Le Corbusier, employed this type in the heart of London for Romney House in the 1930s.[15] Likewise, in the context of the existing layout of the city, Innocenzo Sabbatini integrated his eclectic terrace apartments, which he called
Terrace buildings fell out of favor in the 1950s and 1960s, but in the 1970s they enjoyed great popularity again. A wide variety of forms were built, often developing areas not previously used for residential architecture. In Alpine regions in particular, hillsides were completely covered with such terraced residential buildings. What had been built up on land should be returned to nature. The examples range from such style-setting icons as the Halen residential complex by Atelier 5, which had numerous imitators, to washed concrete fortresses with the obligatory decoration of a deep balcony parapet with a planter for evergreen artificial greenery as a suitable continuation of the thuja hedges of suburban single-family homes.
Atelier 5, Halen housing complex, Bern, 1958
In contrast to these private terraces, the communal roof terrace was one of the striking motifs of modernism. In order to embed this element in history, the advocates of modernism sought precursors in the architecture of early Mediterranean cultures, such as the archaic structures on the Cyclades, and also the pueblos of North America. In contrast to the sloped roof—no matter whether pitched, saddle, or hipped—as it was propagated by conservative schools of architecture, modernism saw the flat roof and the roof terrace it made possible as an advantage with positive effects for society. On the Unité d’Habitation, the roof terrace is a metaphor for community. Le Corbusier was thinking of the youngest members of society; he effectively depicted that by illustrating children playing on his roof terraces. The nursery and the pure, stereometric exposed concrete volume in the harsh light of the Mediterranean sun look like an architectural hygienic education program. The ideological struggle over the flat roof was fought with all available means, even with cricket bats, as demonstrated by an image from the United Kingdom of the 1930s intended to show the advantages of a flat roof.[17]
One of the most successful examples of communal roof terraces is found in the Alt-Erlaa district of Vienna. The residential high-rises by Harry Glück, which loom upward like cooling towers, have been much disparaged, but in certain respects they are, after the Red Vienna of the 1930s, the most essential contribution to postwar residential architecture in Vienna. As an advocate of high density, Glück made no secret of the fact that communal facilities are only affordable above a certain level of usage. He was often—unjustly—criticized for that, there the critical assessment of his work has changed clearly in recent years. His residential towers have found followers in typological respects, as well, such as the designs by JDS Architects, which are contemporary interpretations of the terraced apartment building (as urban hybrid). Since that time, as the casually formulated roof terrace created by Taller 13 Arquitectos (Elías Cattan / Patricio Guerrero) on the avenida Amsterdam in Mexico City demonstrates, it has largely lost its ideologically covered sense of mission. The roof gardens of Peter Scheifinger’s Interethnische Nachbarschaft (Interethnic neighborhood) housing project in the Liesing district of Vienna show that the biotope on a roof can also touch on other social themes: alongside a large meeting room and other communal facilities there are communal penthouses with roof terraces at the top of every stairwell in this community roof garden.[18] There are small gardens for the immigrants, where community gardens are intended to remind them of their rural origins.
Peter Scheifinger, Interethnische Nachbarschaft (Interethnic neighborhood) housing project on Anton-Baumgartner-Straße 127-129, Vienna-Liesing, 2000
The roof terrace has thus had many functions; more precisely, they have been and will continue to be attributed to it. We do not know whether modern people are being raised there, as Le Corbusier proposed, whether it is actually inviting to swim up there on the windy eighteenth floor, or whether the well fertilized community roof garden might not lead to conflicts between neighbors. In any case, the roof terrace continues to be a refuge in the middle of the inhospitable city, tied to the hope that it makes it a bit more livable. In that sense, Shigeru Ban’s Hanegi Forest housing park from 1997 is a concluding footnote to this chapter. The complex was arranged around existing trees. Shigeru Ban did not begin by removing nature only to place a green feather in his hat but rather respects it by taking it as given. Nature is thus effective both as metaphor and reality.
Shigeru Ban, Hanegi Forest housing complex, 1997
Footnotes
Two large research projects by the Lehrstuhl für Wohnungswesen und Wohnungswirtschaft (Chair for housing and housing economy) of the Technische Universität München concerning the housing market in Bavaria have clearly expressed this fact. The house hunters surveyed in this study identified a private outdoor space as the most important criterion when purchasing a home. In the state capital, Munich, 74% of those surveyed specified a large outdoor seating area (balcony, terrace, garden) as a crucial criterion. Conversely, only 5% of those surveyed would purchase an apartment without a balcony. See “Primärerhebung zum Wohnungsmarkt in der Landeshauptstadt München,” in Bayerische Landesbodenkreditanstalt, ed., Wohnungsmarkt Bayern 2005: Beobachtung und Ausblick (Munich: BayernLabo, 2005), 82. These results were confirmed two years later by a study posing the same questions in the regional cites of Bavaria. There too just under 70% of the apartment seekers surveyed wanted a large outdoor space. See “Primärerhebung zum Wohnungsmarkt in Nürnberg/Erlangen, Augsburg und Regensburg,” in Bayerische Landesbodenkreditanstalt, ed., Wohnungsmarkt Bayern 2007: Beobachtung und Ausblick (Munich: BayernLabo, 2007), 120.
Österreichische Gesellschaft für Denkmal- und Ortsbildpflege, ed., Landhaus und Villa in Niederösterreich, 1840–1914 (Graz: Böhlau, 1982), 133 (figs. of Villa Neumann and Villa Bittner on p. 119).
Mario Schwarz, “Die stilistische Situation im Villenbau um die Jahrhundertwende,” in Österreichische Gesellschaft für Denkmal- und Ortsbildpflege, ed., Landhaus und Villa in Niederösterreich, 1840–1914 (Graz: Böhlau, 1982),, 115–133, esp. 117.
Werner Oechslin, “Auf die lange Bank der Moderne / Tabled by Modernism,” trans. Lynnette Widder, Daidalos: Urbane Behausung, no. 60 (1996): 16–29, esp. 17, quoting Walter Curt Behrendt, Die einheitliche Blockfront als Raumelement im Stadtbau (Berlin: Cassirer, 1911).
This conclusion is drawn by Frank Kaltenbach, “Der Balkon ist tot—es lebe die Loggia? Neue Fassaden im Wohnungsbau,” Detail 46, no. 3 (2006): 163–65, esp. 163.
“L’impaginazione del fronte su strada palazzo Davanzati in via Porta Rossa: la facciata è organizzata con 5 aperture simmetriche e diviso in altezza secondo i tre piani originari separati da cornici marcapiano, sul tema del palazzo fiorentino del sec. XIV. L’altana (loggia) all’ultimo piano rappresenta un’aggiunta cinquecentesca, probabilmente al tempo in cui il palazzo fu dei Bartolini” (emphasis added), see http://www.limen.org/BBCC/tutela/Conservazione%20delle%20citt%E0/Toscana/Firenze/palazzi300/Davizzi%20Davanzati/palazzo%20Davizzi%20Davanzati.htm (accessed March 13, 2009).
Carlos Flores and Xavier Güell, Arquitectura de España / Architecture of Spain (Barcelona: Caja de Arquitectos, 1996), 61.
Axel Hinrich Murken, Vom Armenhospital zum Großklinikum: Die Geschichte des Krankenhauses vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart, 3rd ed. (Cologne: DuMont, 1995), 213.
The illustration is from Franz Schuster, Der Bau von Kleinwohnungen mit tragbaren Mieten / The Building of Small Dwellings with Reasonable Rents (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag des Internationalen Verbandes für Wohnungswesen, n.d. [1931]), 17.
Agnes Förster, “Primärerhebung zum Wohnungsmarkt in München,” Detail 46, no. 3 (2006): 156–57, esp. 157. The results of this study were published in detail in Bayerische Landesbodenkreditanstalt, , ed., Wohnungsmarkt Bayern 2005: Beobachtung und Ausblick (Munich: BayernLabo, 2005)..
Agnes Förster, “Primärerhebung zum Wohnungsmarkt in München,” Detail 46, no. 3 (2006), 157.
See Wolfgang Förster, Housing in the 20th and 21st Centuries (Munich: Prestel, 2006), 12. Otto Wagner, Die Groszstadt: Eine Studie über diese (Vienna: Anton Schroll, 1911).
Wolfgang Förster, Housing in the 20th and 21st Centuries (Munich: Prestel, 2006),, 14.
Otto Kapfinger, “Moderne Architektur in Österreich nach 1918: Terra incognita? / Modern Architecture in Austria after 1918: Terra Incognita?” Architektur aktuell, no. 226 (1999): 94–105, esp. 99–100.
See the obituary for Michael Rosenauer in Architektur aktuell, no. 34 (1973), 15–16. As early as 1928, Rosenauer wrote his “Kommentar gegen Le Corbusier” (Commentary against Le Corbusier), in which he countered Le Corbusier’s approach that the house and apartment had to be developed as a consequence of new materials with the remark: “Because new forms are dictated by new needs, the new form of the house and the apartment should be sought in the complete satisfaction of needs.”
See http://housingprototypes.orghttps://bdt.degruyter.com/cdn/wp-content/uploads/dgimport/images/.
Donatella Calabi, ed., Architettura domestica in Gran Bretagna, 1890–1939 (Milan: Electa, 1982), 150.
On this, see http://www.wien.gv.at/vtx/vtx-rk-xlink?S=020030428017.
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Originally published in: Peter Ebner, Eva Herrmann, Roman Höllbacher, Markus Kuntscher, Ulrike Wietzorrek, Typology +: Innovative Residential Architecture, Birkhäuser, 2009.