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With six blocks in Berlin being considered for World Heritage status, good social housing is finally getting the recognition it deserves
We're sidling through Berlin from east to west on a red double-decker, raised to grandstand level by the elevated section of railway that slices through the city centre, giving you a guided tour of its highlights even before you've stepped off the train. As the blue Budapest night train draws up next to us, we slip past the Hansaviertel, a bright, lushly landscaped estate of modernist flats that were built after a 1957 competition inviting the world's top architects to design "the city of tomorrow".
Here, Alvar Aalto's tower blocks nestle next to Walter Gropius's forbidding Interbau Apartment House, brightened by mature trees and parasols that poke from the balconies as if deliberately out to obscure their sharp corners. Berlin is bursting with cherishable - or at the very least intriguing - architecture, but, perhaps surprisingly, it is not the Hansaviertel that the city's mayor, Klaus Wowereit, has endorsed for consideration as a Unesco World Heritage Site.
Instead, Berlin regards six of its earliest experiments in social housing - the Berliner Siedlungen, or settlements - as a "special architectural treasure" worthy of conservation and celebration at the highest level. An exhibition showing at the city's Bauhaus Archive/Museum of Design details the political will and the progressive belief in good planning that led to its decade-long investment in modern forms of housing.
The cultural and artistic foment of Berlin in the 1920s was enabled by a sense of lasting renewal offered by the Weimar government. Influenced by reforming planners such as the British garden city pioneer Ebenezer Howard, Berlin offered, for those whose lived experience of the city had for generations been dark, dank and life-shortening, a much-desired escape to the fringes. Encouraged by the government's reform of tax laws relating to construction and planning, Martin Wagner, Berlin's director of municipal building, assembled a crack team of architects led by Bruno Taut, of the recently established Bauhaus school. Taut's belief that "colour is the joy of living" led to a humanist, high-spirited application of modernism on estates that combined mod cons with fresh air, integrated amenities and access to transport - without which the settlements would have become satellites.
Falkenberg, the smallest and oldest of the estates selected for the Unesco bid, took the form of a miniature garden city, connected to the centre by the long tentacles of the S-Bahn (the S stands for schnell, or fast) urban railway. You could mistake it for Hampstead Garden Suburb, were it not for the bright pastel blues and terracottas of Taut's favoured palette, offering terraces and town houses notable for their lack of uniformity. Each had a vast garden that Taut hoped residents would use in part for growing vegetables.
The size of the estate compares favourably with Britz, the first mass-scale project attempted by Taut and Wagner, built to house more than 3,000 former tenement dwellers in the far south of Berlin. The Hufeisensiedlung - the huge, horseshoe-shaped complex at its centre - is breathtaking, if long ago dwarfed by the nearby high-rise Gropiusstadt estate, the setting for Christiane F, the cult film about 1970s Berlin.
An aerial shot of Britz shows how much space was given over to private gardens, with the exception of the horseshoe block, which contained at its centre a vast bathing lake. Taut broke up the potentially brain-dulling uniformity of large-scale, inorganic housebuilding by using a broader palette of exterior colours and placing the terraces that led off the central horseshoe in asymmetrical formations. It couldn't last - such plans usually run out of money before they are fully realised - and later phases of the estate are less heterogeneous and more closely packed.
From later still, the Carl Legien estate, in the east's now fashionable Prenzlauer Berg district, and White City and Siemensstadt in the north-west, initially appear to be fairly standard examples of medium-rise modernist housing. At Carl Legien, Taut was constrained by the existing 19th-century street plan, but made the best of such restrictions by building vast, curvy balconies on to every apartment and painting the whole lot a mood-enhancing primrose yellow. These curves are echoed in the rounded white balconies at Siemensstadt, which, following a restoration programme, gleam brighter than the Bauhaus itself.
It would be glib to say that Berlin has always respected its social housing or, indeed, those who live in it: the peripheral high-rise estates - known to former East Berliners as "workers' lockers" - which encircled both halves of the divided city in the 1970s are never likely to receive such levels of attention. But the 1920s settlements are worth preserving in order to remind a rapidly urbanising world that it is possible to plan well, to design thoughtfully, and to build soundly in order to improve the lives of city dwellers.
Berlin remains a low-rise city, at least at its centre. The only man-made thing that dares to poke the clouds is the Fernsehturm (the television tower), built in the former east at the height of the Cold War. These days, shorn of its passive-aggressive power, it looks no more scary than a speared pea. It twinkles through the windows of the prefabricated flats like the eye of a tall uncle, no longer glowering at those children of Berlin who, like their predecessors in the 1920s, want to leave home for some place greener.
"Berlin Settlements From the 1920s: Unesco World Heritage Nominations" is at the Bauhaus Archive/Museum of Design, Berlin, until 8 October. For more information log on to: http://www.bauhaus.de
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