Description

The Invention of Stepped Terrace Housing

We are part of nature. Contact with nature is essential for our physical and mental health.[1] The experience of nature establishes a deeper understanding of life: change, growth, blossoming, developing, and passing away. Smells, sounds, the variety of colors and shapes, the humming of insects, the singing of birds, the wind in the leaves and grass, the taste of fruits. Nature activates all our senses. Opportunities to move freely in a natural environment and discover oneself in the process have been radically reduced for children over the past decades. What does growing up without the possibility of these everyday experiences do with these developing beings? [2]

Another interpretation of urbanity

It is necessary to arrive at a new understanding of urbanity and to dissolve the alleged contradiction between city and nature: from a city of representation, hierarchy, military considerations, and traffic to an eco-solar city radically oriented towards those who use it. This book brings back into view a prototype that was planned and realized in the 15 years around 1968 as a solution to the challenges of housing and urban development, namely the stepped terrace apartment building. The protagonists of this residential typology re-envisaged the city, offering an alternative to the car-centric, monofunctionally structured cities of the 1950s and 1960s. Stepped terrace housing fulfilled the desire of a large majority of the population for contact with nature, for a sufficiently sized outdoor space with privacy, that can be planted, nurtured, and cared for. At the same time, these (large) compact structures offer the advantages of the city and a dense mix of housing and infrastructure. Stepped terrace housing replaces the principle of the facade with a categorical focus on the users. By individually appropriating and planting their terraces, the residents become co-designers of the city. Balconies, on the other hand, do not usually offer protection from view or privacy. They are regarded as formal elements of the facade and often cannot be altered to suit one’s own needs, and in some cases even growing plants on them is prohibited.[3]
The densely overgrown stepped terrace housing estates of the time we are looking at here herald a paradigm shift in the scale of aesthetic urban perception. The terrace vegetation, a vertical green space, merges almost seamlessly into the spacious communal green spaces. By separating traffic, public and semi-public spaces can be kept car-free. The stepped terrace structures also provide a new interpretation of urbanity in terms of privacy and community. Space for communication and community, for movement, for so- cial and urban life are all part of the stepped terrace living concept. The terraced structures planned during the era are mostly conceived as hybrids: housing, urban infrastructure, and (stationary) traffic.

Stepped terrace housing as an invention in the early twentieth century

Around 1900 and then especially in the 1920s, answers were system- atically sought for the first time to the question of mass housingas a central challenge for society. New urban typologies were devel- oped, new construction methods were made usable for housing, “air, light, sun” were seen as basic needs to which everyone is entitled.
The public sector and politics became actors and the social, urban planning, and architectural programs could thus be implemented on a larger scale for the first time in the 1920s. In Rotterdam and Ams- terdam, in Vienna, Berlin, and Frankfurt, true alternatives to previous housing and urban development practices emerged on a larger and, in Vienna on a very large, scale during the 1920s. This included apartment buildings with courtyards and housing estates with generous green spaces instead of the highly densified perimeter block pattern. Apartments were tailored to the needs of the residents, and facili- ties for community, education, and personal hygiene were integrated. The prerequisites for this were the corresponding fiscal, legal, and land policy reforms that made subsidized housing possible in the first place.
One can say the invention of stepped terrace housing also took place during this time and in this context. Apart from the mythical Hanging Gardens of Babylon, this type of terrace is without precedent in the European architectural tradition. The impulses that led to its development in the twentieth century did not come purely from the discipline, as is so often the case with significant developments in architecture. In this instance, the medical and health sector provided the impetus. Air and sun were needed to cure the widespread disease of tuberculosis. The physician David Sarason therefore proposed the terracing of sanatorium buildings in the early twentieth century, call- ing in a next step for the application of knowledge on healing tubercu- losis in housing and urban planning.[4]

The pioneer in the development of the stepped terrace typology for residential construction based on medical knowledge is undoubtedly the architect Henri Sauvage[5] Together with Frantz Jourdain and others, he founded the Society for Hygienic and Affordable Housing (Société anonyme de logements hygiéniques à bon marché) in 1903. During several years of study and practical experience in worker housing, Sauvage developed stepped terrace housing as a solution to the pressing problem, aiming to build healthier cities by bringing more light and air into the apartments and streets, providing residents with their own private garden, increasing green in the city, and pro- viding communal facilities and infrastructure. Sauvage designed en- tire blocks of houses and streets with stepped terrace worker housing.
Sauvage was able to build terraces for the first time in the Rue Vavin apartment building (1909–1912). The client for the experiment was the Society for Stepped Terrace Housing (Société anonyme des maisons à gradins), founded shortly before by himself and others. Even in this early example, an essential element of the 1960s and 1970s facilities was in place, namely the planter, used with the dual purpose of preventing looking down at the terraces below.

Sauvage and his business partner Charles Sarazin were so certain that the stepped terrace principle was the future of urban architecture that they patented it in 1912.[6] Sauvage and Sarazin built the first subsidized stepped terrace apartment complex between 1916 and 1927 as part of the City of Paris housing program (Habitations à Bon Marché), The 7-story, 78-apartment complex is constructed in rein- forced concrete and fits into an existing block development on the Rue des Amiraux. It is terraced on three sides and each apartment has a terrace. The “belly” of the building, its interior, is used for social spaces and facilities. Sauvage had originally planned a cinema, but the City of Paris wanted an institution in place to help improve the poor health situation. And so the complex was designed with a swim- ming pool, still in operation today and now open to the general public. The windowless interior, problematic from a traditional point of view, was seen as an opportunity to integrate additional uses.[7]
Important impulses towards harmonizing density and quality of living (light, air, sun, and garden) also came from Le Corbusier, who, incidentally, wanted to solely claim the pioneering achievement of using reinforced concrete assemblies in housing construction at the founding congress of CIAM in La Sarraz in 1928, rather than Sauvage.[8] Le Corbusier developed the method of stacked single-family houses from 1922 onwards with his Immeubles Villas. In 1933, he tested the principle on a large scale in the Durand Apartments for Oued Ouchaia in Algeria. The project has rows of 300 apartments each, stepping back to create generous terraces on the longitudinal sides and correspondingly overhanging on the other side, where the access cores and balcony walkways are also located. Each block contains communal service facilities and all four are situated in a landscaped park with sports facilities, walking paths, and swimming pools that merge into the hilly terrain. Vehicular traffic is at ground floor level and pedestrian traffic is at first floor level.[9] With the Durand project, Le Corbusier designed the classic principle of a linear build- ing stepped back with terraces along one long side, a profile that can be continued virtually endlessly.

Adolf Loos — possibly inspired by Sauvage’s buildings and stepped terrace concepts for subsidized housing during his numerous stays in Paris after 1918[10] — became intensively occupied with stepped terrace structures in 1923. Three of these were characteristically planned for France: the most fully developed was the Grand Hotel Babylon for Nice in 1923, in which the interior is used as an impressive hall naturally lit from above. He also designed a sports hotel for Paris, and a house with a stepped structure in the affluent “20 Villas for the Cote d’Azur” sector.[11]
Loos likewise saw the stepped terrace model as a possible solution for dense social housing. In 1923, he proposed stepped terrace build- ings for two locations in Vienna, at Inzersdorfer Strasse and Winars- kyhof, both projects developed for the Vienna Association for Set- tlement and Allotment Gardening. Unlike Sauvage, however, Loos’s terraces are not private open spaces, but instead form “elevated streets”— actually access balconies to the apartments that are intended for shared use. However, Loos was met with skepticism from the city for this new type of planning. In the same context as Loos, Oskar Strnad and Peter Behrens also planned a stepped terrace apartment complex at Inzersdorfer Strasse for the Vienna Association for Settlement and Allotment Gardening in 1923 (part of a proposal for a master architectural plan for Vienna).
The revolutionary housing programs of Red Vienna and New Frankfurt came to an end in the early 1930s. Not least because key protagonists were Jewish and were deported or murdered.[12]

Stepped terrace structures as a housing and urban development approach in the 1960s

As if in the wake of a major traffic jam, new social approaches devel- oped over the course of the 1960s. Fair distribution was a political stipulation: Everyone should have a share of the prosperity. Until the mid-1970s, the rising productivity curve followed parallel to the wage curve. The simultaneous technological developments made anything seem possible.
Resistance to car-centric urban development geared to the inter- ests of the construction industry, the economy, and technology has been active in Europe since the 1950s, although criticism did not primarily come from architectural and urban planning circles. Since the 1930s, the US historian, sociologist, and philosopher Lewis Mumford had been criticizing technocratic urban development that ignored human beings and human nature,[13] pleading for urban and architectural development in harmony with the conditions of the human body in the sense of “organic humanism.” The sensational photograph of the Earth rising across the lunar horizon, taken from the Apollo 8 spacecraft in 1968, became an image of the epoch. Suddenly the beauty and vulnerability of the blue planet and the interconnectedness of its inhabitants was made visible.

In 1965, the psychoanalyst Alexander Mitscherlich published the book Die Unwirtlichkeit unserer Städte (The Inhospitality of Our Cities), influential in the German-speaking world, writing: “One crams the employee behind uniform glass facades and then into the uniform monotony of apartment blocks. One has created a state of affairs that makes any planning for democratic freedom illusory.” Mitscherlich thus criticized both capitalist and socialist construction practices. He pleaded for citizen participation. Mitscherlich was appointed special advisor for the planning of the Olympic Village in Munich in 1968.
In the 1960s, architects and urban planners developed densified stepped terrace structures throughout the industrialized world. These structures, which were designed a great deal yet realized in small numbers during those years, made use of industrial construction methods and were generally planned as large structures in order to conserve land resources. However, at the same time, they developed as a reaction to purely technocratic urban development, a departure from the mainstream of car-centric cities, and as an alternative to mono-functional urban expansion. The planned stepped terrace structures were based on the idea of separating traffic levels and mixing uses — as long as these do not interfere with each other. The result was traffic-free shared (green) spaces.
The ecological concerns of the era played an important role in the development of stepped terrace concepts. Our current environ- mental situation was forecast with clarity 50 years ago.[14] The emerging housing concepts were also founded in the increased open- ing of architecture to other disciplines, such as behavioral research, sociology, environmental research, traffic engineering, demography, and others. Above all, the idea of participation began to enter the debate. With their private terraces and gardens, the complexes pro- vide space for the individual needs and the nature of humans.
Ideas for new, democratic ways of creating housing and urban development for the masses circulated in the 1960s not only as theoretical constructs within a circle of experts. They influenced the building policies of nations and cities. However, no clear attributions to specific political parties can be made. In France, the Gaullist state under Georges Pompidou realized social architectural concepts just as innovative as those in communist-led cities. In Austria, the Christian Democrat government initiated the Wohnen Morgen (Living Tomorrow) series and the Social Democratic leadership of the City of Vienna came closer than ever before to fulfilling the demand for “luxury for all” in subsidized housing with an entire series of stepped terrace apartment buildings. In Italy, the Christian Democratic govern- ment implemented the largest social housing plan in the country’s history. Socialist Yugoslavia experimented on a large scale with highly diverse housing typologies and neighborhood concepts. Creating housing for the masses requires the will and commitment of public authorities. Stepped terrace housing is an indicator of political will: “The greatest possible happiness for the greatest possible number.” [15]

As in socio-political and philosophical matters, France was also a trendsetter for architecture and urban development in the 1960s. A line can be drawn from Sauvage and Le Corbusier to Georges Candilis and Jean Balladur. The Marxist architect and urban planner Georges Candilis had been associated with Le Corbusier since the fourth CIAM Congress in Athens in 1933. From 1945 into the 1950s, he was one of his main collaborators and responsible for the realization of the Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles (1947–1952). From 1951 to 1952, Candilis and Shadrach Woods planned housing estates in Casablanca for the French civil engineering firm ATBAT Afrique, attempting to adapt modernist architecture to the climatic and cultural conditions there. Taking up on local tradition, they stacked court- yard houses to form a Cité Verticale, or vertical city, an adaptation and development of Le Corbusier’s Immeubles Villas.
Also influenced by these experiences in North Africa — where the struggle against French colonial rule was taking place at the same time — Candilis and others founded Team X at the 10th CIAM Congress in 1953. They were in opposition to the universalist dogmas of CIAM and particularly against the dogma of separating functions in urban planning. However, Candilis also continued to be a bridge to Le Corbusier. In France, in partnership with Shadrach Woods and Alexis Josic, Candilis built tens of thousands of subsidized housing units, entire districts based on social mixing, radical equality for all, and having a multitude of functions within walking distance of the city center.
Candilis was probably the most influential protagonist in urban planning and housing for the masses after the Second World War.[16] He was also an architect in France’s state planning enterprise for the coastal region of Languedoc-Roussilion. Instead of the highly economized sprawl of hotels, as on the coasts of Spain, a holistic and social approach to the new phenomenon of (travel) holidays for the masses was sought. Five new (holiday) cities with harbors and traffic infrastructure emerged out of nowhere.[17] The most remark- able achievement of this massive project is undoubtedly the town of La Grande Motte, built starting in 1963 as an entirely stepped terrace town.

In Japan, impacted by the complete annihilation of the atomic bomb, new concepts of architecture and the city emerged from the rubble: growing, large stepped terrace structures with individual modules that could be inserted and removed (plug-ins), bionics— the transfer of phenomena from nature to technology and architecture, the connection between humans and nature. With these ideas, with their projects and manifestos, the Metabolist group of Kenzo Tange, Noboin Kawazoe, Kisho Kurokawa, and Kyonori Kikutake began to inspire architects in Europe and the USA in the late 1950s.

In the USA, projects for superstructures on transport axes and master plans on previously unimaginable scales were created. Kenzo Tange’s urban expansion on Tokyo Bay and Paul Rudolph’s super-structure project over the planned Lower Manhattan Expressway in New York (which would have, in line with a car-centric city, cut a path through Manhattan) were both designed as stepped terrace structures. A 1962 project for San Francisco shows parabolic stepped terrace towers 60 stories high with a thousand apartments in each one. The usual hierarchy of high-rise residential buildings is compensated for: The apartments on the lower floors don’t have views, but do have large terraces. Alt-Erlaa, Graz-St. Peter, and Schlangenbader Strasse are all based on a comparable concept.

Habitat 67 at the 1967 World Expo in Montreal was the first realization of a stepped terrace apartment complex on a very large scale. The Israeli-American architect Moshe Safdie combined single- family homes with gardens horizontally and vertically to form a representative urban structure. Each of the generously sized apart- ments had at least one terrace ranging from 20 to 90 square meters in size. Pedestrian, cycling, and automobile traffic levels were separated. However, consisting of individual prefabricated housing mod- ules, Habitat 67 is not a prototype for low-cost housing, as it lacks the necessary compactness. The focus was on the sculptural effect and on creating an image at the world exhibition. Subsequently, however, stepped terrace housing was hardly realized in North America and Japan, but was instead built predominantly in Europe and Israel.
As in France, the three decades after the end of the Second World War were a time of investment in social and cultural emancipation. Social goals were the driving force of politics and municipal adminis- trations. In the 1960s, the London City Council built two stepped ter- race housing estates that reinterpreted the relationship between city, street, and home, namely the Brunswick Centre and the Alexandra Road Estate, both built by the progressive Building Department of the London Borough of Camden. A sector of the huge Thamesmead urban development area in Greater London was also built up with four to five-story stepped terrace complexes, with the building style drawing international attention to the project.

The Golden Mile Complex (1967–1973) at the center of the former British colony of Singapore is, like the Brunswick Center, a hybrid experiment. Initiated and carried out by the state as an urban revital- ization project, it primarily houses shops and offices, as well as apartments on the floors with terraces. As in the Brunswick Centre, circulation is given high design significance, filling the belly of the terraced structure across several stories. The Golden Mile Complex is a “collective form.” [18]
In Italy, the biggest campaign to improve housing for workers in the late 1940s was initiated by the Christian Democratic government. The driving figure was Amintore Fanfani (1908–1999), Minister of Labor and Social Affairs among other positions, and advocate of state housing construction. His many years of involvement with the housing conditions of workers was rooted in the principle of Christian charity. The so-called Fanfani Law made the INA-Casa housing plan possible, which built 355,000 apartments in Italy between 1949 and 1963 following a principle of individual neighborhood establishment. The industrialist Adriano Olivetti was an important advisor in the implementation of INA-Casa and probably the most important private client of social architecture in Italy in the 1950s, a pioneer in urban and regional planning,[19] embodying the model of “democratic or participatory paternalism.”[20] As an advisor to INA-Casa and as presi- dent of the Istituto nazionale di urbanistica, or National Institute of Urbanism, he played an essential role in public building. Within the framework of Olivetti’s architectural initiatives around his company headquarters in Ivrea, the experimental intervention of the super- hybrid Centro di Servizi Sociali e Residenziali (Social and Residential Services Center) in Ivrea was created.[21] The stepped terrace complex in Via Airolo in Milan, built in the second phase of INA-Casa (1966– 1972), was designed as an urban renewal project consisting of rows and infill structures inserted into the perimeter edge of the block, with a commercial area on the ground floor.

In 1965, the book Neue urbane Wohnformen (New Urban Dwelling) by architects Ot Hoffmann and Christoph Repenthin gave an im- pulse to the German-speaking world for a new interpretation of urban planning schemes using buildings with garden courtyards, carpet settlements, and stepped terrace buildings. The idea behind the stepped terraces is derived genealogically from the densification of carpet settlements: “With further densification, the dwelling levels begin to slide over each other and we can then speak of a stepped terrace building.”[22] Ecological aspects already played an important role in the book. Ot Hoffmann’s own terraced tree house in Darmstadt (1968–1970) can be understood as a green statement in this regard.

The hill housing concepts, which emerged from the late 1950s as a special type of stepped terrace housing,[23] were in response to the massive urban sprawl and destruction of the countryside by single- family detached homes. Starting in 1965, four residential “hills” were built in Marl, Germany. Cars are routed into underground garages, thereby creating open, car-free communal spaces. Each apartment has a terrace or a garden. Hermann Schröder, one of the architects of the Marl apartment buildings, built an early stepped terrace building in Germany together with Peter Faller, namely in Tapachstrasse near Stuttgart from 1965 to 1973. It followed along the lines of the model developed by Le Corbusier in his Durand project, namely a row of buildings with terraces along one long side and cantilevers protruding on the opposite side, where the vertical accesses and balcony access corridors are located.
The City of Munich took the risk of planning the prestigious pro- ject of the Olympic Village for the 1972 Olympic Games as a green stepped terrace city — a remarkable social and architectural act. Today, the self-sufficient district is one of the city’s most popular residential areas. Its planning and realization within an extremely short period of time between 1968 and 1972 has influenced other large-scale stepped terrace projects in central Europe.
The earliest built stepped terrace housing estates in Austria, and one of the earliest in Europe, is Hans Puchhammer and Gunther Wawrik’s Goldtruhe settlement in Lower Austria (1966–1969). In 1969, a research project by Puchhammer and Wawrik looked at the possi- bilities for constructing stepped terrace housing within the framework of Vienna’s building regulations.[24]
An important initiative for Austria was the “Neue städtische Wohn- formen” exhibition, or “New Urban Housing,” in 1966–1967, organized by the Austrian Society for Architecture, which had been founded the previous year. The title is probably a reference to Hoffmann and Re- penthin’s book Neue urbane Wohnformen. The projects shown in the exhibition were almost exclusively stepped terrace structures. A mani- festo-like catalog of demands for residential construction was pub- lished in conjunction with the exhibition.[25] How much was truly possi- ble in the period around 1968 is shown by the consequences of the exhibition: the City of Vienna commissioned the exhibition organizers to design a housing complex, the Schöpfwerk, with over 2,100 apart- ments. Furthermore, in 1968, a municipal housing cooperative commissioned one of the largest experiments in Viennese housing construction for the same urban expansion: the Alt-Erlaa residential park. Planning for Alt-Erlaa as stepped terrace high-rises began in 1970, with the number of apartments roughly equivalent to the number of stepped terrace dwellings in the Olympic Village in Munich. Vienna is the only city in the world that was able to establish stepped terrace housing by building a great number of projects, with Red Vienna’s housing program of the 1920s creating the foundation upon which the Viennese stepped terrace housing phenomenon could be built.[26]

The French firm ANPAR (Michel Andrault and Pierre Parat) worked on the stepped terrace typology for decades. Following in the foot- steps of their compatriots Sauvage and Balladur, ANPAR continued to develop pyramid-shaped stepped terrace buildings, taking it all the way to pyramidal forms stepped on all sides, called a Hügelhausin German, or “hill house”. These buildings had, in addition to the inte- rior circulation, exterior paths that also led to the apartments, and were either stand-alone or joined together to form a network, as in the 2,000 apartments of the Pyramids of Evry, a new town in the belt around Paris.
Ivry-sur-Seine is one of the communist-governed towns in the Paris region which, from the 1950s onwards, pushed for the con- struction of new housing estates, often based on the Soviet model of multi-story prefabricated concrete slab buildings. As part of this housing offensive, but as an alternative to the slab buildings, from 1970 onwards Jean Renaudie and Renée Gailhoustet built star-shaped stepped terrace “hills” in the midst of the historic city center and 1960s high-rises. Their approach was a dense mixture of apartments, offices, shops, and a cinema, linked by a winding network of pedestrian paths and (semi-) public squares. No two apartments were alike and each had a private terrace garden. While the most prominent example of Soviet-style concrete slab buildings in the banlieus rouges, the Yuri Gagarin Estate in Ivry-sur-Seine completed in 1963, was demolished in 2019, the stepped terrace buildings of Gailhoustet and Renaudie are now completely overgrown with greenery and remain sought-after places to live.

Formerly socialist Yugoslavia emphasized its special position as a non-aligned state through distinctive and independent modernity in architectural and urban planning. The district of Novi Beograd, started in 1948, was a veritable urban planning laboratory in the 1960s and 1970s. Highly diverse residential and other typologies and community models were tested here. The stepped terrace typology was imple- mented in a prime location on the banks of the Sava River, in a cluster of four to five-story stepped terrace blocks, each arranged in an open U-form.

Features of stepped terrace housing

The construction method of the stepped terrace scheme is cross wall construction. The loads are transferred by slabs positioned at a dis- tance of around five to six meters. There are no load-bearing outer walls. This makes room-high and room-wide wall openings possible. Industrialized production, repetitive construction, and the sequenc- ing of similar modules are all means of building economically. Circu- lation options are manifold: balcony access corridors, cluster access, central corridors in various combinations, and direct access via external staircases. Maisonette and split-level apartments are frequently used as an alternative to single-level apartments. On the one hand, this saves on construction costs by reducing overall access areas, and on the other, it provides a living experience more similar to that of a single-family home.
The material is concrete, often exposed. For a number of buildings, however, architects and developers have chosen a white painted finish and, if necessary, insulated industrial panels made of sheet metal or fiber-cement panels.[27] The main characteristic of the complexes is of course the terraces: an outdoor space usually the size of a room. “The balcony or loggia as demanded by past ways of life no longer meet our living requirements,” wrote Viktor Hufnagl in 1968, co-initiator of the “Neue urbane Wohnformen” (New Urban Dwelling) exhibition and architect of the Schöpfwerk in Vienna.[28] Terraces, on the other hand, provide both privacy and contact with nature.
The use of simple planters is extremely effective. When a planter is made available, the probability of planting by residents increases. Such large trough-like planters also make it possible for deep-rooted shrubs and trees to flourish. Hanging gardens can be cultivated, creating visual protection. Through a personal terrace, people have the opportunity to reveal their individuality visibly to the outside.
An important feature of the stepped terrace structure is its mixed use, the idea of combining dwelling with additional urban and social functions. The facilities have rooms for communication and com- munity: youth clubs, hobby rooms, swimming pools, saunas, community centers, schools, etc. They expand the residential function, for example, by adding guest apartments and workrooms. A wide range of spatial possibilities is used for this purpose, transforming above all the “belly” of a stepped terrace building from a problem zone into an opportunity to provide shared spaces. Another possibility is an entire community floor, as in Graz-St. Peter, or a continuous walthrough meeting zone with communication areas and hobby rooms, as in the Schlangenbader Strasse, which also has community terraces. The ground floor zone is used for business premises, and large facilities often have their own shopping centers.
Cars are routed into garages below the apartment blocks. This allows for extensive greenspaces and semi-public spaces within walking distance. These greenspaces are not schematic, low-main- tenance greenery, but landscaped terrain with hills and hollows and a variety of trees and shrubs. Here, landscaping is designed to create intimate and protected areas. The terracing of the buildings and the openness to the urban space prevent the cramped kind of situation that can occur with courtyards that are enclosed on all sides. The park-like terrain of larger facilities also provides space to move around— even to toboggan in the winter. Movement and physical exercise are likewise made possible by the swimming pools, an impor- tant part of Harry Glück’s residential buildings. The swimming pool
is also a place where social contact can easily be made. Even the first social stepped terrace housing in the history of the typology, built in the 1920s, is equipped with an indoor pool.

 

Selection of examples

The selected examples are all experimental stepped terrace housing projects built in Europe around 1968. The selection illustrates how such structures can be implemented in a variety of urban conditions and different typological variants. The examples cover the field of urban planning to a great degree and are fundamentally prototypical for housing and urban development. Further selection criteria were building site size, urban location, positioning along traffic arteries, and clustering of various urban functions.

Five urban development categories can be identified: autonomous districts, along the edge, shaped by traffic, density in block grids, and inner-city hybrids.[29] The examples for each category also show different interpretations of the topic.

Autonomous districts  The Olympic Village in Munich and Alt-Erlaa residential park in Vienna are, with over 3,000 terraced apartments each and corresponding infrastructure, facilities that can be defined as self-sufficient urban districts. Alt-Erlaa follows a strictly modular concept with a consistent east-west orientation of the apartments and central corridor access throughout. A superstructure, Alt-Erlaa defies conventional European urban concepts. In contrast, the Olympic Vil- lage has approximately the same number of apartments, but is based on an organic urban idea. Staggered buildings unfold in a wing-like arrangement. The terraces are primarily south-facing and the apart- ments are interspersed and accessed via circulation cores and balcony access corridors. The density is far lower than in Alt-Erlaa. Both share the achievement of making a “small town” completely accessible by foot. In Munich, this is done starting with the second upper floor.

Along the edge  The Koseze stepped terrace housing estate near Ljubljana, the Nittel-Hof in Vienna, and the St. Peter estate in Graz are all prototypes for dense neighborhoods on the outskirts of the city, ranging in size from 500 to 1,500 apartments. Koseze and the Nittel- Hof both have around 1,500 apartments and, like Alt-Erlaa, both demonstrate an emphatically rational, unsentimental, and urban ap- proach. In Koseze, each module is an autonomous building, with 34 identical modules arranged in 10 parallel rows. Each row has its own underground car park; cars drive down into the garage at the front end of each row. The rows are arranged in a strict north-south direc- tion, making maximum use of the irregular building plot.
With 530 apartments distributed across four blocks, the St. Peter stepped terrace estate in Graz is likewise modular in design. However, the architects of St. Peter were keen to create a certain design ex- citement between the buildings by breaking them down into smaller parts. The individual blocks were designed with special front build- ings. The modules were staggered in height, allowing for far-reaching views for the apartments in the rows vis-à-vis.
With its characteristic structure and size, the Nittel-Hof can even be recognized from an airplane. Its meandering ribbon-like structure defies all contextual demands.

Shaped by traffic  One of the major issues of twentieth-century urban development is the question of how to deal with express traffic and the emissions it produces. The Alexandra Road Estate in London (522 apartments) deals with its location directly on the railway by turning away from it. Its rear façade follows the line of the tracks and is virtually hermetically sealed, looking somewhat like the outside of a stadium. In contrast, the Viennese complex on Hadikgasse (210 apart- ments), an arterial road, faces the street to the south. The design re- acts to the context by shifting back and staggering the buildings, with structural soundproofing that also acts as an architectural element, and with a dense filter of greenery. The Schlangenbader Strasse com- plex in Berlin goes a step further: the motorway disappears into the belly of the 600-meter-long stepped terrace strip (1,064 apartments). So far, it is the only superstructure above a motorway worldwide.

Density in block grids  The Inzersdorfer Strasse and Wohnen Mor- gen residential complexes in Vienna, with 200 to 300 apartments, illustrate how stepped terrace housing with greenspace can function within a block grid. One of the complexes reinterprets a courtyard (open to the south), the other the pattern of greenspace — street — greenspace. The greenspaces of both designs open towards the urban space, thus extending it and vice versa.

Inner-city hybrids The Centro di Servizi Sociali e Residenziali, or Social and Residential Services Center (later the Unità Residenziale Est, then Hotel La Serra) in Ivrea (55 temporary apartments) and the Brunswick Centre in London (560 apartments) both have a dense mix of uses that emanates even beyond the district. The Brunswick Centre combines apartments with a pedestrian zone, shops, offices, and a cinema. The Olivetti Social and Residential Services Center is a hybrid with a swimming pool, cinema, restaurant, auditorium, shops, offices, and plug-in capsules for short-term living. The complex cre- ates a bridge between the historic city, Olivetti’s modern company premises, and a park. Part of Adriano Olivetti’s architectural offensive, its spaceship-like forms have a more advanced architectural language than the public buildings. Super-hybrids are rare.

At the same time, similarities across categories can also be found. Alt-Erlaa and Schlangenbader Strasse are based on a similar concept: a linear structure with terraces on the lower floors, above which is a high-rise with loggias, central corridor access, and an access tower every sixty meters. The street or square as a space for meeting is the theme of Alexandra Road Estate, the Brunswick Centre, Wohnen Morgen in Vienna, and the Social and Residential Services Center in La Serra. In both Wohnen Morgen and Alexandra Road Estate, a number of apartments are accessed via external staircases directly from the street. Some of the schemes are experimental building projects accompanied by research projects.
In almost all examples, the client is the public sector. Only the Social and Residential Services Center is privately owned by the Olivetti company.
Not all schemes consist of rental apartments. The stepped ter- race complexes in Graz and the Olympic Village both have owner- occupied apartments, but are in the lower, i.e. subsidized, pricerange. Vienna occupies a special position when it comes to subsidized stepped terrace housing: In no other city have so many facilities been built with such high-quality infrastructure. For this reason, the selec- tion here includes five examples from Vienna.

The reaction: the media, critics, and residents

Most of the schemes were condemned by the media and professional critics after completion, which roughly coincided with the advent of postmodernism. The large structures disrupted the conventional idea of the city and abandoned the familiarity of facade and street. How- ever, by the twenty-first century at the latest, this assessment had been reversed, with structures receiving late recognition by experts and now largely protected as historic monuments.[30]
The residents, on the other hand, reacted positively to the complex- es from the very beginning. Various studies confirm a high level of approval. Identification with the residential complex is also reflected in community activities and residents’ initiatives. For example, appli- cations for the preservation of Alexandra Road and Schlangenbader Strasse both came from the residents themselves. Today, the com- plexes have a kind of cult status, with a remarkable number of artistic projects and film documentaries about the complexes.
With this Europe-wide synopsis of stepped terrace housing, an idea for better living, this book aims to raise awareness of what is possible and provide insight as a basis for future action.

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Originally published in: Gerhard Steixner, Maria Welzig (eds.), Luxury for All. Milestones in European Stepped Terrace Housing, Birkhäuser, 2020. Translated by Anna Roos, abridged and edited for Building Types Online.