ExhibitionThe rise of the modern city 1925–1933: Frankfurt, Vienna and Hamburg Three models in comparison

Both in Vienna and in the major German cities, housing construction, which had previously been driven by private building speculation, became a priority task for the municipality. Frankfurt soon established itself as a leading city of the avant-garde New Architecture movement. The exhibition marked this anniversary by comparing Frankfurt to two other cities. Between 1925 and 1933, both Vienna and Hamburg also experienced a brief era of rapid reform. In the municipal housing projects of Red Vienna, the housing estates of New Frankfurt, and the blocks of Wohnstadt Hamburg, new typologies of mass housing emerged alongside the vision of the “New Human,” the modernist New Building movement, and solutions that included tradition. Though pursuing similar political strategies, each of the three cities developed its own programs and architectural forms within a few years, with significant differences between them. The comparison offered a chance to critically reassess established narratives. It highlighted the distinctive features of each model, as well as their contrasts.

After the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy in 1918 and the foundation of the first Republic of Austria, Vienna as the capital city of a far smaller nation faced countless problems. It was also a federal state in its own right and was ruled by a Social Democrat majority government from 1919 to 1934. As a metropolis of “Austro-Marxism,” Vienna formed a leftist pocket in a country whose government was run by conservative parties.

Initially, there was great social distress with unemployment, a lack of food, and an extensive shortage of housing. Over 90 percent of all homes did not have running water or an inside toilet, and apartments tended to comprise just a kitchen and one room. The construction of several thousand houses on estates around the city limits in the early days after the end of the war did little to alleviate the issues.

Vienna’s own fiscal sovereignty meant that in 1923 it was able to pass its own housing tax law: The tax was levied on the wealthy section of the population and could only be used for the construction of social housing in metropolitan Vienna. By 1934, the City of Vienna had built 65,000 new municipal apartments, many of them in the form of the characteristic “superblocks” within the city’s borders.

The key factor was rent at a level that was also affordable for the unemployed. This translated into small apartments with relatively low standards (combined kitchen-living room, connecting room, WC, no bath), but these nevertheless far surpassed those of the previously common flats. The small size was offset by exemplary communal facilities in the majority of the shared buildings, such as laundry rooms, public baths, advisory desks for mothers, kindergartens, libraries, and halls for events.

Unlike Frankfurt as a large Prussian city, within the German Reich Hamburg was a state in its own right. After 1918, the main goal was to focus urban strategies, hitherto devoted to the interests of trade, the port, and colonialism, on the plight of the previously disadvantaged majority of the population. This primarily meant actively tackling the lack of housing. City architect Fritz Schumacher, appointed in 1909 and initially only in charge of urban building construction, held overall responsibility for planning and housing. It was some years before he gained control of urban design after a battle with the Municipal Engineering Authority, which had handled it previously. He did not succeed in compiling a contemporary master plan for the entire city and therefore proceeded step by step, presenting a new plan for Dulsberg in 1918–20 that showed how social housing could be realized in Hamburg.

With more than a million inhabitants, the area of this city ran northwards on a narrow corridor that left little space for expansion east- or westwards. It was not possible to build outwards into the countryside, so the new neighborhoods – which Schumacher christened the Wohnstadt and with which he sought to develop the existing city into an urban gesamtkunstwerk – would only be possible if a relatively high density was achieved.

From 1925 onwards, a spirit of permanent new beginnings was associated with the New Frankfurt. Under the leadership of left-liberal Lord Mayor Ludwig Landmann and architect and city councilor Ernst May, plans were laid to redesign Frankfurt as an exemplary Modernist big city – in social, architectural, and cultural terms. After the end of the disastrous bout of hyperinflation in 1923, a house interest tax was introduced, aiming to generate revenue for the government to build new housing. On this basis, in October 1925 a ten-year program was launched in Frankfurt to build 10,000 apartments subject to rent caps, and by 1931 more than 10,500 had been built. The pace at which the program was realized and expanded to 12,000 housing units by 1932 attracted attention. Ernst May used the program as leverage to achieve a change in urban planning and architecture, and as a result the expansion of the compact city was initially halted. Instead, using “satellites”, “greenbelts,” and “housing estates” as its elements, the focus was on restructuring urban space.