Großsiedlung Törten: a modernist suburban satellite

Near the tiny village of Törten a few miles south of Dessau a suburban satellite was planned in the 1920s. After the move of the Bauhaus School of Architecture and Applied Design from Weimar to Dessau in 1925, Walter Gropius decided to build model housing on modernist principles. The Groβsiedlung Törten was set up as an exhibition of prefabricated family housing.  

The Stahlhaus was designed by the architect Richard Paulick with Georg Muche, painter, graphic designer and an important teacher at Bauhaus. This construction in steel and precast concrete panels was finished in 1927 and is an elaboration on the ideas advocated by Gropius. The building is named after the innovative steel frame and translates as “steel house”. This 90 square meter detached house is located directly north of the Bauhaussiedlung.

The buildings of the Bauhaussiedlung were also built by joining precast reinforced concrete panels. The central join between panels is a narrow fluted concrete standard that is clearly visible in these row houses. The openings for the windows and doors were integrated into the panels.

The cubist white houses with darker trim accents line streets that are typical of 1920s suburban housing estates. The streets are lines by trees and grass verges that replace the front gardens that characterise standard garden city estates. Here the straight street called Doppelreihe (double row).

The houses in this estate are built in only three types that are all composed of similar standardised concrete building panels. By varying the building line, resulting in a castellated row, visual interest is created along the streets.

The streets of the Doppelreihe and Enkelreihe are straight with a setback section at the entrance conform Unwinesque principles. The other streets all curve, thus following the artistic principles advocated by the followers of Camillo Sitte. The houses in these streets have front gardens.

Some of the buildings show the original intentions. Many other buildings -yes even those listed as monuments of architecture- show unsympathetic alterations and improvements by the owners. The buildings were conceived as cubist compositions with the horizontal and vertical lines emphasised by coloured accents that were inspired by the Dutch Style Movement made famous by Piet Mondriaan.

These houses along the north side of the thoroughfare, that was built as part of the housing estate, show the construction manner with prefabricated elements with panels that were slid between. The elements that were placed first are higher and give the facade a lovely rhythm.

These brick faced blocks of flats were built in 1930 around a concrete frame with concrete floor slabs. These slabs show on the outside as horizontal bands that recall the banded renaissance architecture with banding in natural stone. At the front these floor slabs extend as external walkways or galleries.

The Laubenganghäuser don’t look very special, but these low blocks of flats are a prototype of the gallery flat buildings that were an important type of mass housing of post-WW2 international modernism. The flats are arranged in sequence on each floor. Access is provided by an outdoor walkway instead of an internal corridor.

The southern section of the housing satellite was built in the 1930s in a traditionalist style that was favoured by the regime of the day. This style is also known as the Stuttgarter Schule (Stuttgart School) and can be seen as the opposite of the modernist idiom of the Bauhaus.

The Meisterhäuser were built as model villas on the edge of Dessau to showcase Bauhaus principles. These cubist compositions are still viewed as the summit of modern architecture. The large windows connect outside and inside. The villas were built by the city of Dessau to be rented to the main teachers of Bauhaus, here the Haus Kandinsky/Klee.

All remaining examples of Bauhaus architecture in Dessau are part of the Unesco World Heritage site and are linked by a cycling tour: the Bauhaustour. This tour takes you through the whole of Dessau. One of the stops on the tour is the iconic Bauhaus building that is still used as a school and a centre for design.

A far outlier on the Bauhaustour is the Kornhaus Pavilion on the Elbe. This recreational pavilion on the dyke along the river was commissioned by the city and the Schultheiss-Patzenhofer Brauerei AG (a brewery). Carl Fieger a long-time assistant of Gropius was responsible for the design. It is still in use as a café.