241 H Heinrich Tessenow is associated, first and foremost, with houses for craftsmen and the middle classes in Hellerau. An often- overlooked fact – with the exception of the garden city’s Festspielhaus – is that he also designed a number of other iconic buildings, and that the very same Tessenow who viewed the small town as his personal urban ideal was perfectly capable of planning buildings for the metropolis. In the 1940s, he devoted increasingly more of his time to larger urban planning projects. Nevertheless, small housing remained an important issue for him throughout his career. Between 1909 and 1919, he wrote and illustrated three major works. He taught architecture in Trier, Vienna, Dresden and Berlin. And, before he permitted his students to attempt anything on a large scale, they all had to have designed a small house. Lost from memory after the Second World War, Tessenow was rediscovered at the end of the 1960s and his works and ideas regained relevance and influence. Before Hellerau: Tessenow’s vocational history Tessenow was just 33 years old when he was invited to come and work on the Hellerau project, starting in September 1909. Prior to that, he had only actually built one small boarding house in Schönberg (1902/03) and three dwellings for municipal tram workers in Trier (1906/07). He did not have an academic diploma. What he did have under his belt, however, was experience: a completed apprenticeship as a carpenter (Rostock, 1894–96); attendance at Baugewerkschulen (practice-oriented schools for building trades) in Neustadt and Leipzig; work as a railway construction assistant in Danzig; studies as a guest student at the Technical University of Munich; and work as an office manager in the Munich bureau of architect and university professor Martin Dülfer (City Theatre Dortmund). He had also taught at Baugewerkschulen in Sternberg and Lüchow, and assisted in workshops given in Saaleck by architect, painter and author Paul Schultze-Naumburg. Furthermore, on the recommendation of architect and diplomat Hermann Muthesius, he had set up an architecture course for the newly renamed Handwerks- und Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Crafts and Applied Arts) in Trier. In the spring of 1909, he had been appointed assistant to Professor Dülfer at the Technical University of Dresden. In the same year, on 1 August, he had applied for a patent for a novel type of wall construction. Tessenow had made quite a name for himself though his publication of building measurements, through his involvement in numerous projects for small housing and, from 1902 on, through his journalistic consultancy work, illustrated with remarkable drawings, as well as through his publication, in 1909, of Der Wohnhausbau (The Construction of Dwellings). This book does not deal with urban planning issues. Instead, in addition to texts, its main contents comprise projects for detached houses, and, with a view to the future, an exploration of the topic of housing for workers and middle classes – “that highly important question of workers’ housing”.1 Tessenow writes: “Small housing, in the way it has become increasingly viewed in the recent history of construction, is still in its infancy; it is – to the degree in which we are increasingly recognising it as a special type of housing – something completely new; it relates to the most pressing concerns of the largest masses of people and, thus, also has extremely powerful momentum and – in all likelihood – one of the ‘greatest futures’ ahead of it.”2 Hermann Muthesius promoted Tessenow’s book in his review for the construction trade periodical Neudeutsche Bauzeitung with the following words: “He has important things to say (...) From his explanations, which extend to the smallest details of the interior furnishings of the small house, it becomes clear how usefulness can be paired with beauty, how an architect who designs with inner conviction can vitalise everything he does with beauty, even the most utilitarian things. The way in which Tessenow’s simplest, cheapest workers’ houses are purposefully and beautifully designed is exemplary. He would seem to be the born designer of the small house, (...).”3 As is evident in the texts and drawings he published, Tessenow had already addressed the most diverse aspects of construction – typological issues and layout organisation; villa and small house building; composition and expression; material and construction; furnishings and interior design; the relative scales of the residential house and the monument; the relationship of the buildings to the terrain, and to vegetation; the memorial and questions of the object in space – but, as yet, with hardly any of the issues involved in urban planning. In short, when he was presented with the opportunity to start working in Hellerau alongside the older and more established architects Richard Riemerschmid and Hermann Muthesius, Tessenow was already well prepared professionally. In September 1913, Tessenow would leave Hellerau for Vienna, where he would take a position as a professor at the Kunstgewerbeschule (University of Applied Arts).
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