Gartenstadt Dahlhauserheide: a vernacular garden city satellite

The first garden city in Germany, Hellerau, was built after the Dahlhauserheide Colony was built as a garden city satellite by the Krupp Housing Department. As such this settlement isn’t a garden city as the German Garden City Society wasn’t involved in its inception. Also Dahlhauserheide in Hordel near Bochum was designed prior to Raymond Unwins book Town Planning in Practice (1909), the German version of this book was published in 1922, based on Sitte-esque spatial design principles. The whole garden city presents itself as a built-up example of typical Unwinesque garden city design, but in actual fact shows the deep influence of the German tradition of artistic urban planning.

A typical street with semidetached houses and small front gardens gives Dahlhauserheide a village-like feel. The straight streets are always short in length, longer streets all have a gentle curve. The houses are simple with high gable roofs , rendered walls and wooden window shutters on the ground floor.

Some of the houses have sections of the facade half-timbered in several patterns. Most of the timber-framing is used on the upper storey and the gable end. This curved street shows how visual interest is created with the same basic house repeated several times, but with different details (placement, shape and size of windows, colour of render and use of timber frame panels).

Visual interest is also created by positioning the blocks at a 45 degree angle at corners. Here the angled house is also given extra emphasis by the use of half-timbering on the front facade.

In some places at tactical junctions green verges and a set-back of the building line is used to widen the street space. The very low gutter line of the semidetached block at the end of this widened space emphasises this special point.

 

One of the long lightly curved streets. The end of the street can’t be viewed from the beginning of it. The houses are all fairly similar again with variations in the details. In some places the orientation of a building is changed or the building line is set back or pushed forward.

The past of this garden city as a colony for miners can be seen in some places. A wrought iron miner on the wall and an old, restored coal cart on display in the front garden, or the hammer and pick underneath the house number are evidence of this.

In some places a large green is created by a setback of a long section of street. The semidetached houses are all linked by additions. These used to be outbuildings like stables and sheds, now they are part of the building. These houses show gable ends with weatherboarding in wood.

This weatherboarding can take several shapes. It can be classic weatherboarding of slightly overlapping horizontal planks, as shown above, but the planks can also be used vertically. Vertical weatherboarding is used to great effect in some buildings, especially where horizontal trim ledges are used (on the right) instead of the plane plank surface (left).

The park is a large green space that was included to provide the residence with a communal green space and bring nature closer. This was of great importance for people in the Reform Movement. The park isn’t flat and therefore not really usable for outdoor sports; a separate sporting ground with football pitches was built on the northern edge of Dahlhauserheide.

The architect Schmohl designed the houses in a restrained vernacular style . He used few materials and found expressing in the detailing, the different use of materials and scarce ornament like for instance the horizontal trim ledges, small awnings over the front door and wooden shutters on the ground floor.

Within the sea of semidetached and detached properties with high roofs, the two storey blocks around the Beamtenplatz . This name translates as Clerks Square and here at the heart of the garden city an informal ensemble was built to house the Krupp Company clerks that worked in the nearby collieries Hannibal and Hannover.

Arched gateways demarcate the entrances to the square. The buildings are higher and therefore more imposing than the regular housing for miners with lower roofs, that can be seen in the front framing the view.

Some buildings on the square are even higher with three storeys and living space under the roof making four storeys and an attic. These blocks were not intended for clerks or foreman -most of the foremen lived in detached houses spread around the settlement so they could keep an eye on the workers- but for the widows of miners that had perished in the pits.

The architecture is very expressive with sgrafito panels, small roofs over the entrances, standing gale ends and protruding sections creating visual interest and the idea of several buildings organically grown around the small square with trees, lawns and a fountain.

These large semidetached houses are based on Mulhouse-Quadragles. They had extra space for older parents to live in with their relatives or rooms to let to a young man with no family of his own. The mines attracted many immigrants and this meant an influx of mainly young men.