A Once-in-a-Century Event
Harald Bodenschatz

In the year 2010, the famous urban design exhibition held in Berlin in 1910 celebrates its 100th anniversary, which, in the discipline of urban design, can be considered a once-in-a-century event. In 1910, Berlin was a center of the international urban design debate. The “Greater Berlin” Competition constituted a core element of the urban design exhibition of 1910. In the following remarks, I would like to point to this important event that still provides us important insights for the urban design discussion today.

Berlin Around 1900: A Center of Urban Design

In the second half of the Imperial era, since the 1890s, Berlin became a center for the new discipline of urban design. Influential representatives of urban design were active in Berlin then, for example, Josef Stübben, the most important author of urban design questions during this period. Other notable early urban designers working in Berlin were Theodore Goecke, who, together with Camillo Sitte, was the editor-in-chief of the urban design journal “Der Städtebau,” first published in 1904, as well as Otto March, Hermann Jansen and Gustav Langen. Last but not least, Werner Hegeman, the urban design propagandist who later became famous for his polemic against so-called “Stone Berlin,” was also active in Berlin in the early twentieth century. Furthermore, Rudolf Eberstadt, perhaps the most influential housing and urban design reformer, taught political economy at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-University in Berlin.

In February 1908, the professors Joseph Brix and Felix Genzmer initiated the famous Städtebauliche Vorträge, the „Lecture Series on Urban Design“ at the Technical University. Felix Genzmer was appointed to the Technical University in 1903, Joseph Brix in 1904. The first two lectures called attention to the following subjects: “Tasks and aims of urban design,” held by Joseph Brix, and “Art within urban design” given by Felix Genzmer. These two lectures set a programmatic framework for the following lectures. The lectures by Brix and Genzmer were of extraordinary importance for the history of urban design in Germany. Not only did they summarize the contemporary knowledge on urban design, they also showed that although urban design comprises far more than just the form of urban structures, and they demonstrated as well as that form is at the core of urban design. The message of the publications was unequivocal: Urban design not only is a discipline of drawings but also and even more a discipline of words – an academic discipline. Finally, the lectures demonstrated that urban design is an international discipline, a result of the exchange of international experience. Looking at the controversy about the character of urban design – urban design as art or as science – Brix and Genzmer’s message was clear: Urban design is both and more – art, science and engineering, too. It had to include, so the words of Brix and Genzmer, “the progressive sciences of technique, health and economy.” A closer analysis of the lectures reveals that urban design includes further disciplines: for example, public transportation, the administrative law, and the law of planning. Urban planning itself was considered to be a part of urban design.

The 1910 Berlin Urban Design Exhibition „Allgemeine Städtebau-Ausstellung“

The lectures on urban design served last but not least in preparation for the International Urban Design Exhibition that took place in Berlin 1910. The secretary general of the exhibition was Werner Hegemann, who remains the most important transatlantic bridge-builder in terms of urban design. At this exhibition, not only did the young discipline “urban design” first present itself to the public, it also was the greatest show on urban design that had so far been held worldwide. Approximately 65,000 visitors saw the exhibition. Accordingly, the international response was broad. Within the same year, parts of the exhibition were shown in Düsseldorf and in London at the Town Planning Conference of the Royal Institute of British Architects. Here you see the documentary account of the exhibition edited by Werner Hegemann.

The exhibition reflected the outstanding importance of Berlin in national international urban design debates. The metropolis Berlin compared itself at that time confidently and with great success with other model cities in terms of urban design – in Germany above all with Munich, Hamburg, Nuremburg, Cologne and Stuttgart; in Europe above all with Vienna, Stockholm, Paris and London; and in the USA above all with Chicago and Boston. Sheafs from the famous Chicago plan presented by Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett in 1909 were shown at the exhibition.

The discipline of urban design was established internationally through the support of the important urban design exhibition in Berlin in 1910. The Berlin exhibition made fundamental contributions to the regulation of the rapid growth of cities and city regions of the industrial age. In this respect, it was a key event for the debate of urban design during the 20th century.

The Greater Berlin competition 1908-1910

Important parts of the exhibition reassembled the results of the urban design competition for Greater Berlin, one of the most important contemporary urban design competitions in the world. The competition was announced in 1908 and the results determined in 1910. Famous urban designers that contributed to the competition included Hermann Jansen, Joseph Brix and Felix Genzmer, Rudolf Eberstadt, Max Berg, Bruno Schmitz, Léon Jaussely and Siegfried Sitte. On March 19, 1910, following a fierce fight within the 21-person jury, no first prize was awarded. Two first-rank prizes were given, on the one hand, to Hermann Jansen and, on the other hand, to Josef Brix and Felix Genzmer.

The results of the competition encompassed recommendations for the three large sections of the metropolitan region:

• Firstly, proposals for a further reconfiguration of the city center in the direction of a monumental city.
• Secondly, proposals for urban alternatives to the hitherto existing highly dense construction of tenements and apartment blocks.
• Thirdly, proposals for new garden cities and small settlements in the suburban area.

These three sections of the city region – the city center, the inner city and the suburban periphery – were to be structured through reorganizing and upgrading the long-distance and commuter train system. A new transportation infrastructure alongside wide radial arterial roads and green spaces were to serve the needs of ordering the continually growing metropolitan region.

In the suburban area, low-story residential areas were to be constructed. Of greater importance was the idea of the garden suburb – like for a so-called “garden suburb of knowledge” in Dahlem by Hermann Jansen, a project that was to provide space for numerous academic and scientific institutions. Many reformers oriented themselves furthermore explicitly towards the so-called small residential settlements with small land parcels and small cottages, which were to provide the opportunity for the less-well-off middle classes to also live within nature.

The results of the competition were, however, under no circumstances a plea against the metropolis and for its disbandment, but rather they were oriented towards improving and rationalizing the city, towards a better metropolis with reformed urban blocks of building in the city center and with garden suburbs arranged around smaller centers in the suburban area. In light of the state of competition within private urban design, however, the realization of most of the proposals was not about to happen. One political prerequisite for the implementation of such visions would have been the consolidation of all of the involved communities. Berlin would have to wait another decade for this to happen – until 1920.

The Struggle between the Anglo-Saxon and the French Path in Urban Design

Until the First World War – and also in the urban design exhibition – Paris and London competed as models in terms of the development of urban design: Paris, and to a certain extent Vienna as well, were considered models of dense urban design; London served as a model of suburban urban design. For the majority of land, housing and urban design reformers, London “the open, spatially unrestricted metropolis” represented heaven, and Paris, the “mass of multi-storied buildings,” was more like hell. Already most housing and urban design reformers were no longer concerned with improving the living conditions of the urban proletariat, but with a fundamental and critical urban reorientation of life in the metropolitan region. All forms of compact, urban residential areas were attacked in order to implement a generalized suburban residential design.

For many reformers, the small residential settlement, the plainer version of the bourgeois garden suburb, was ultimately the only acceptable alternative to the so-called “tenement city.” Through this lens the desirable city seemed to be disbanded into small residential settlements and bourgeois garden suburbs, which were to be loosely grouped around a compact city center, and, in the course of expanding and upgrading the transportation network, was to expand further and further into the metropolitan hinterlands – entirely following the Anglo-American model.

Until the First World War, the great project of decentralizing the metropolis was still an oppositional program. Only after the war did that change fundamentally: It became a state-led action program, a program of challenging the compact, urban city. The conception of urban design of reform and progress founded at that time influenced the German expert and political urban design program for a long time – in part, it continues to be influential to this day. The fruitful competition between a reformed urban design on the one hand and a suburban design oriented towards garden suburbs on the other hand was abandoned after 1918 in favor of a one-sided orientation towards decentralizing the metropolis.

Summary

Now I would like to summarize the previous depiction of urban design: Before the First World War there was an extraordinary heyday of the new discipline of urban design, which was always and remains internationally oriented. Urban design was a complex issue and urban planning was understood as part of urban design. The challenges of that era provide the background to this debate: very bad housing conditions, social polarisation, strong traffic problems and a fragmentation of communal authorities. Furthermore, a special balance between the public and the private sector existed: The public sector had to provide the framework within which the private sector could work. The aim was the rationalisation of the chaotically growing urban region of an industrial society. The new discipline of urban design felt obliged to meet these challenges.

Today, Urban Design is often reduced to the aspect of form. Such a view is misleading. The term “Urban Design” quite obviously illustrates its two different facets: on the one hand, the actual construction of cities, including its conceptual and political preparation, and on the other hand, the reflection on this construction. Urban Design is not a mono-causal development, which just happens in some random way or by itself, but that it is contingent; there are many different contributors who, with their decisions, influence the building of cities. Put in another way, the concept of Urban Design in the end is “Form,” but it is also the conditions leading to form, and the consequences of these forms for the value and beauty of the city. As Brix and Genzmer pointed out already at the beginning of the twentieth century, Urban Design is far more than form, but form is the core of Urban Design.