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This kind of access creates wide spaces, which, however, require a generous scale as well as room, and hence they are not necessarily the best solution, especially in urban locations. The necessity to provide access to several units on each floor is as old as urban housing itself. The smallest and thus most intimate way of forming groups is to provide access to two units on each floor. The designs of this dual type can vary tremendously, as we will demonstrate here with just a few examples. The multistory apartments of the Onkel Toms Hütte (Uncle Tom’s cabin) forest housing colony by Bruno Taut, Hugo Häring, and Otto R. Salvisberg, dating from the mid-1920s onward, demonstrate the quality of this type of access. It is very economical, without placing too much emphasis on that; it provides a unit opposite on every level, and hence a kind of natural neighbor. The three stories of many of the buildings in this colony thus unite six parts into one group by means of a single entryway. The puritanical severity we find in this housing tract is not, however, inherent to the type. The architects Duinker & van der Torre have interpreted this two-unit-per-floor type in a very different way and thus demonstrated the range of this approach. With their Uithoorn housing complex, they succeeded in conveying a certain sense of spatial luxury — for example, by means of the breathing space in the hall on the third floor. Martin Spühler, David Munz, and Bruno Senn deliberately placed pairs of facing units — that is, the dialogue of neighbors — within the overall architectonic form in a way that creates a tension. This multistory building thus unites an urban dimension with an almost villagelike ensemble of small parts. Because the apartments are accessed via terracelike open spaces, however, this project also introduces a certain distance. Whereas in the housing colony in the Berlin forest the pairs of units are very close together, Spühler & Co. sweep air across the platforms and thus relativize any possible cramped effect within the considerable dimensions of this building. Francis Soler’s urban interpretation of this type takes it a step further. He shows its limits but in doing so also his extraordinary creativity. As in our Zurich example, the units in Soler’s apartment building, located not far from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, are also accessed via a platform. By docking pairs of apartments, he doubles the number of units that can be accessed via these decks. Soler thus creates a “pseudo” four-units-perfloor model, which also has disadvantages. Whereas the Swiss example has units that receive light from two sides, Soler cannot achieve this. Édouard François has demonstrated the possibility of providing access via external platforms that also serve as terraces. Between
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Erschließung ı Wege bewohnen – von Leitern, Spännern und Laubengängen
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three volumes of three floors arranged diagonally to one another, he placed two trapezoidal “frames,” from which three units on each floor are accessed. The spaciousness of these planes provides distance, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, enough room for the residents to make these outdoor areas as their own. More Horses Pulling the Plow The types of access and circulation discussed thus far still offer relatively modest advantages in terms of economic efficiency. The trend to having not just two or three but rather four, five, or more apartments accessed from each level has resulted in its own economy of pleasure of design: the more units that can be accessed from one level, the better the ratio of net to gross floor space in the building. Not infrequently, the result is an almost picturesque aesthetic of the floor plans, as Hans Scharoun’s Romeo and Julia (Juliet) buildings in Stuttgart confirm. In the Romeo high-rise, an L-shaped corridor provides access to no fewer than six units. Because the possibilities for floor plans based on rectangles are quickly exhausted, “organic” forms are often brought into play — cloverleaf buildings like Émile Aillaud’s residential building in La Défense (1975) — or organic, expressive ones like Scharoun’s. Despite this attractive organic aesthetic, such buildings cannot help but offer living conditions that tend to anonymity, such as often poorly lit corridors. The isolation of the residents in a ten-story building may have its charms under certain circumstances. Everything we know about residential architecture today suggests that such forms contribute significantly to making people feel alone. The hotel-like character that such properties have under the best circumstances is, as we have noted, not without its charms, leaving aside the question whether that should be a goal of residential architecture. Such extreme forms, which have emphatically formalist qualities, have hardly been used at all in recent years. Because the pressure to build cost-effectively has not diminished, however, there are interesting examples that seek out acceptable compromises between purely economic considerations and a reasonable neighborliness. For their residential high-rise in Amsterdam in 1998, Duinker and van der Torre created an attractive type featuring a kind of access loggia. It has three units per floor, in a form not unlike Scharoun’s Julia high-rise, and the balconies of the apartments, all of which face south, rise up into the surroundings at acute angles. In his housing complex in Berlin’s Hansaviertel in 1955–57, Aalvar Alto also tackled the issue of providing access to as many apartments as possible by means of a horizontal, plazalike