NEW NAZI SCHEMES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 17 April 1939, Page 9

NEW NAZI SCHEMES

HOUSING GERMANY’S WORKERS. IMPRESSIONS OF BRITISH VISITOR. Some impressions of the new Nazi schemes for housing the workers of Germany are given by John Gloag in the “Architects’ Journal” (London). "The officials who guided me over the new residential blocks in Berlin, and afterwards showed me the Leegebruch settlement, near Oranieburg. which is some 35 kilometres north of the city, were insistent about the educational function of the new State architecture,” he writes. The State wants a nation of home-lovers; therefore apartment blocks and houses must look like homes; therefore they must have pitched roofs, warm red tiles cosy rooms, and little touches of romantic ornament to provide a picturesque note of subdued individualism. “ "We don’t want experiments in structure or materials.’ I was told. The housing officials know what accommodation a family wants; they prefer to use traditional materials and traditional building methods; they want to create a comfortable setting for traditional family life. (No experiments are wanted in that direction either). “ ‘We must make a difference between the factory and the home,’ said one official; ‘we won't have housemachines.’ The outmoded modern movement was dismissed as something that was without culture, empty, mechanical, and unlovable. Also it was politically undesirable. “There was neatness ,a rather raw tidiness of garden layout, for the settlement is still very new and has not yet acquired a mellow air of comfort; but in spite of the most strenuous efforts to avoid it —efforts carried to the length of devising a different plaster plaque for every house, a squirrel, a Windmill, or Some kihd of bird, for

example—monotony was the predominant characteristic. There was a coriimunity eentre —a large hall used for cinema performances, plays, and political lectures A restaurant was attached to this hall of the canteen type which one associates with good works and charity in England; though here, of course, the food was fit to eat. “Whether he is designing a settlement in the country or an area of apartment blocks in a city, the architect knows just what he has to do; for this district so many windows of srich and such dimensions roof pitched at such and such an angle—home, sweet home, the roses round the dooi" make me love mother (and, of course, Hitler) more. The architect has become a mere technician; he exists to carry out the educational programme of the State in terms of bricks, mortar, coke-breeze, wood, thatch, tiles — but hardly ever concrete. The flight from concrete is interesting, for it is political in character; it is a flight from exciting and revolutionary shapes; it is an expression of reverence for tradition and abhorrence of any form of life that threatens the old, known, and often inconvenient ways of mankind. There are a few features of the modern movement that have been adopted, though not attributed to their originators: this insistence upon sunlight for every house and every apartment in a block is described as the direct and inspired wish of the Fuhrer.”