Louis van der Swaelmen (1923). Site plan of the garden city Kappelleveld.
Apartments for clerical workers. Vehicular roads cut through the settlement. Houses designed by the architects Hoste, Pompe, Hoeben, and Rubbers.
Brussels–Berchen–Saint Agathe 1922. “Cité moderne”
Victor Bourgeois (1922): floor plans of houses in the “Cité moderne” near Brussels.
Houses for clerical workers; mixed settlement with detached houses and rental apartments. Open site plan. Density 204 persons per hectare. Children’s crèches and playground.
ceilings of minimum dwellings, and de Koenick’s concrete houses with minimum apartments used the same system.
england
Between 1918 and 1927, one million single-family houses were built in England. From the year 1928 until 1939, the building of another 1.5 million new family houses is planned. At the mo-ment, there is strong emphasis on the principle of decentralization, inspired by the ideology of Ebenezer Howard. The number inhabiting garden cities is upward of 80,000 souls. The En-glish single-family home continues to conform to the traditional type: on the average it has three to four rooms in a middle-class small house; masonry wall construction prevails, as do high-pitched roofs with an attic; it is usually built in traditional styles. Municipalities, cooper-atives, and industry develop these cities. The land usually belongs to an endowment, admin-istered by a special trust. It is by such means that land speculation is virtually monopolized:
the companies and institutions that own the land lease out individual parcels, granting the les-see the right to build on them for a period of 99 years. This privilege is actually to the advan-tage of builders, since they can acquire parcels by lease rather than by purchase. However, after the lease expires, the house becomes virtually worthless and is ready to be demolished;
the trust retains the right of ownership to the parcel, which in the meantime has increased in value.
The urban proletariat is settled in old, unhealthy rental barracks around the periphery of large cities. Incidentally, not all garden cities are of high quality: in England, the birthplace of mod-ern capitalism and the proletariat, quite a number of workers’ colonies are on the same low level as the mining settlements in the German coal region of the Ruhr valley, or as company towns in northeastern France, Belgium, and parts of northwestern Bohemia. We will cite only one example: the coal-mining town Tan y Pandy in South Wales is the perfect opposite of the petit bourgeois garden cities of Letchworth and Welwyn.
The layout and style of English cottage–type houses are determined by the relatively high liv-ing standard of the middle classes, the highly cultivated family lifestyle of these strata, and their innate love of nature. These traditional family houses with gardens, in the country or at the periphery of large cities, have a long tradition, reaching back to the time of Shakespeare.
Their basic layout has its origins in rustic Elizabethan farmhouses and has evolved in our time under the aesthetic and romantic influence of William Morris and the works of Voysey and Baillie Scott (who articulated their program in his work Houses and Gardens), as well as the designs of Rennie MacKintosh, who decided not to use the traditional rural farm cottage as his model but has tried instead to create more abstract, purified forms in the massing of his houses, diametrically opposing the southern, classic Renaissance concept of a villa. In its essence and character, the English cottage is a product of the north, with its high-pitched roofs and attics, and its bay windows (an authentic Gothic element) that do not extend the space of the room beyond the confines of its outer walls. It is opposed to the southern, Flemish, or Mediterranean principle, exemplified best by the summer pleasure house with its system of open spaces — balcony, veranda, open courtyard, and loggia — where outside space merges with the interior in a seamless symbiosis.
Up until the present, England has continued to build its garden cities relying on traditional concepts of design and planning, paying little attention to the advances of modern architec-ture in other countries. Nowhere do we find a modern floor plan, or modern construction methods (concrete is out; it has not proven itself, since masonry construction is still 10 to 18 percent cheaper than concrete or steel); nor have many row houses been built in England as
yet. Anything higher than two stories is not allowed in the garden cities. In place of row houses, we find clusters of three to four small houses. The English single-family house is char-acterized by a plan containing a live-in kitchen and three bedrooms; heat is generally provided by a traditional fireplace. Rents are substantial, the highest in Europe.
The most important garden cities are Letchworth; Pixmore Hill, a middle-class settlement with a villagelike site plan (1903); Hampstead (1907, completed in 1926); Welwyn, based on the principles elaborated by Ebenezer Howard, which has ceased to be a garden settlement and has become an independent town with 10,000 inhabitants (1920); and the newer Watling Es-tate (1930), consisting of 4,000 family homes. Other satellite garden cities have sprung up not only around London but around other large cities as well: for example, Norris and Spring-wood, outside of Liverpool.
The English garden city movement, founded in 1898 on the initiative of Ebenezer Howard, was an attempt to deal with the overcrowding of cities. A leading theoretician of this movement is R. Unwin, who formulated his theory as follows: “a city of industry and healthy dwelling, lim-ited in area, which will support modern life to the fullest, surrounded by a continuous belt of rural land, either owned publicly or administered by the company.” Unfortunately, this principle of decentralization will not succeed in solving the problem of overcrowded cities, simply because it fails to address the question of the city center: on the contrary, it compli-cates traffic problems, while the horizontal nature of urban sprawl and the remoteness of the settlements from the business center causes serious collateral loss of time. The historical significance of Howard’s, Unwin’s, and Lethaby’s theories lies in the fact that they insisted steadily but in a substantially one-sided manner on the need to fundamentally distinguish in-dustrial districts and the “city” from districts containing only housing: the English garden city is essentially nothing but a place for dwelling. All the other European colonies, villa districts,
Letchworth, 1903 B. Parker & R. Unwin
A garden settlement for middle-income people. Separation of vehicular from pedestrian traffic. Orientation ignores compass. Return to village-type plan.
Typology of row house floor plans in garden city.