243 2 u Gartenstadt Hellerau. »Einfachstes Dauerhaus«. Modell 1:50. u Hellerau Garden City: The “humblest small house”. Model scale: 1:50. Excursus 1: objective, essential Essential is a word that Tessenow frequently uses in his writings. The apparent frugality of his buildings – both inside and out – is an expression of an essentiality he persistently strives for: not the result of omission, but rather the result of the most careful coordination of just a few design elements, the most essential ones. ‘Abstraction’, ‘reduction’ and ‘minimalism’ are popular buzzwords in recent architectural discourse, but their application to Tessenow’s architecture is more likely to mislead than to enlighten with regard to gaining an understanding of his particular approach. The writer Werner Mahrholz, like other contemporaries of Tessenow, speaks of “objective and objectivity” and calls it the “attempt, with constructional specifications derived from the spheres of utility and expediency, to form a harmonious, beautiful whole”. And, as he states more precisely: “In this marriage of economy of means with achievement of the highest possible degree of beauty lies the idiosyncratic objectivity and beauty of Tessenow’s architecture – as far removed from bleak utility as it is from sentimental poetry.”4 To achieve this, mastery of the rules of proportion was as much a matter of course as it was a requirement – as was the liberty to take a profile whose intended function was to protect the top of an outward-opening door from rain, and shape it into a fine cornice: functional and decorative. Comparison of solutions to analogous architectural problems in Germany and abroad makes Tessenow’s creative leeway – i.e., the ability to come up with such radically simple and yet highly appropriate ideas, and to work with radically simple spatial organisation – all the more impressive. It is this unique set of skills and talents – finding precise answers to a multitude of issues, cleverly combining them, optimally relating a minimum of elements to each other, and weaving in a ‘poetic moment’ – that makes his buildings complex, architecturally rich and, for their inhabitants, a pleasure to live in. And, in this way, even the humble small house, created with the most modest of means, maintains its own small measure of dignity. Tessenow’s buildings and projects for Hellerau Hellerau as a laboratory Nietzsche told us not to exalt ideas but to “embody” them. Hellerau attracts visitors because of an idea – an idea that is ‘embodied’ here in architecture. Of course, an embodiment can only ever be an attempt at the realisation of an idea. All the more important, then, that the body in question is handled with care. And the prerequisite for doing so is to know that body well. The four years that Tessenow spent availing himself of the opportunities that Hellerau, as a laboratory, presented would be decisive for his career. Through his contributions to the garden city – his small house building and his Festspielhaus – he garnered widespread acclaim and established an enduring reputation for himself. The numerous construction tasks in Hellerau allowed him to explore his ideas and solutions in a laboratory-like setting with real-world test runs on concrete building assignments, to further develop them and to bring them to maturity. Here, in the garden city, he created prototypes that would be applied in the planning of Kriegerheimstätten (settlements for returning war veterans) in the immediate post-war period, and in the construction of housing estates in the 1920s. During his time in Berlin from the mid-1920s onwards, Tessenow would translate the design and compositional principles he established on a small scale during his years in Hellerau to the far larger scale of big-city projects. In what now follows, I invite the reader to join me in taking a closer look at some of Tessenow’s Hellerau buildings and their significance in his oeuvre. To do this, we will need to attune our senses to subtleties5 – patiently describing what we see, and exercising patience while reading. The houses in the villa quarter In close to four years, from 1909 to 1913, Tessenow built 47 residential units (not counting his apartments in the Dalcroze Institute ensemble), of which the nine detached houses in the villa quarter (or ten, if we include the Salzmann villa near the Dalcroze Institute) will only be briefly touched upon. Each of these villas represents a unique case. In their exteriors, they reflect the following ‘types’: the simple, single or double side-gabled craftsman’s house; the street-facing, front-gabled house; the house on a slope; compositions with main and secondary volumes; and an interpretation of Goethe’s garden house, created on “Heideweg”, as twin main structures connected by a secondary volume. The villa floor plans are as varied as the exteriors. These houses all deserve a detailed study of their own.
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