Restoring Reason, Beauty, and Trust in Architecture, Part 24: Architecture and the European City

Episode Topic: Architecture and the European City 

Modernist “dissolution” has atomized the urban fabric. Architect Christoph Mäckler proposes a return to the traditional European block. Through his “wing house” research, Mäckler demonstrates how high-density urbanism reduces infrastructure by 40% while creating 10,000-square-meter internal parks, restoring beauty and efficiency to modern living.

Featured Speakers:

• Christoph Mäckler, Mäckler Architekten

Read this episode's recap over on the University of Notre Dame's open online learning community platform, ThinkND: https://go.nd.edu/5e294e.

 This podcast is a part of the ThinkND Series titled Restoring Reason, Beauty, and Trust in Architecture.

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Transcript

Speaker 10 0:01

A warm, a warm, uh, welcome to all of you in this room and to the, uh, 20 or so people following us, uh, on the internet. Uh, it's a special evening today. we are also, uh, beginning, uh, the advisory council meeting, and this lecture is its first official, uh, its first official, event. there are some members of the council here, and I'd like to welcome them. I cannot identify them by, by name. I can see a few as I'm stand- as

Welcome

Speaker 10 0:30

I'm standing here. Thank you all for coming. And, um, most importantly, I want to say a few words of introduction, uh, regarding Christoph Meckler this is a very unusual lecture because Christoph has spoken here once before. So that's his second lecture in three years, I think. But the reason he's back is because, and I just gave a copy of this to John Torti. John, can you lift the book, that, the co-publishing book? the School of Architecture has a co-pub-- a co-publishing vent... It takes a lot to lift it. Has a co-pub-co-publishing venture, uh, and this is the third book that we have cooperated, with, um, with, uh, a, an external source of, of, uh, of intel-intelligence, hard work, and insight, and also a publisher. In this case, in this case, um, materials and, and, uh, and, and insights given to us by, by Christoph. And, uh, it's a book of 150 examples of magnificently illustrated in, uh, i-German precedents in, in drawings and in photographs. you know, this is a moment to celebrate because, because it takes a lot of faith and a lot of interest and a lot of hard work and a lot of very serious commitment to these ideas on both sides of the Atlantic for something like this to actually happen and happen this very well. the members of the council are going to get their individual copies and, and students and, and faculty, faculty will get theirs, and students actually can ask their faculty to bring these books to the, um, to the studio and, and begin to, to actually, uh, use them. Christoph is a very important architect in Germany, and, and so it is unusual that he has taken a week off to come and visit us and, and give, and give this lecture. He took time last summer to fly, to fly from Frankfurt to Berlin to be on the jury of, of our, um, third-year studio, and some students from that studio are, are here this evening. he is, uh, an architect, that has also taught. his, uh, his teaching at the, at the University of, uh, of Dortmund, took, um, he took many years of, of significant insight and work. Uh, he, um, he, uh, also, is the author of many and significant buildings. His office is rather large, I think 50 or 60 people, major office. I noticed, walking through the, the Frankfurt Airport, last summer, that he's the author of a new terminal for the Frankfurt, uh, for, for the Frankfurt Airport, which I, I, I was informed in s-standing there, uh, one, one summer day. And, uh, and the most important reason why he's here, I think beyond all of these amazing, uh, distinctions of his, uh, over time, is that he has also

German Urbanism Institute

Speaker 10 3:15

started an institute, in Frankfurt through the, the university in Dortmund, which specializes in, in German, in German urbanism. And this is important because, you know, architecture in Germany has been stuck into a rather doctrinaire version of m-modernism for a generation at least. And it has been very, very difficult for him and also for Thomas Albrecht, who is sitting next to him, to be able to move out of that world into a practice that is freer and more directly engaged with tradition. So Christoph's way of, of getting there, uh, over a number of decades now is through the lens of, of the city and, and the understanding of architecture in the city and by extension, uh, in nature. So tonight I would, uh, hope that he's going to tell us about, uh, this journey, uh, where it began, how it began, where it has taken him, and hopefully, stay with us and be with us and continue with us for all the, all the decades to come. Because as he and I, uh, discussed the other day, when you reach, uh, eighty or so or seventy something anyway, the greatest wish that one would have is to have another twenty, thirty years to put into real effect what they really know. And we are headed for a shakeup in the world of architecture and urbanism of a kind that we haven't seen, I think maybe for a hundred years. So th-this book, the work of the Institute and, and Christoph's, uh, uh, personal work, I think, is at the forefront of this movement. And we're very, very pleased and proud to have you today, Christoph. Thank you for coming.

Speaker 2 4:58

Yeah, Stefanos, it's a, it's a big honor for me to, to speak to you even in broken English. and I'm very happy to be, to be here this evening. when I, when I stepped in

Speaker 3 5:14

on Tuesday, I found a poster and I thought, "It cannot be that you take this picture of the building modern-- in a modern style to advertise that-- advertise my lecture this evening." And, um, but you have to know, in Germany, it is not really easy to do historical facades. It's a very, ideological discussion, and it takes a lot of time, if we come into a situation that we can, do what we want, as you do here in America. you see this c- this corner building here, both buildings o- on the right and on the left are, added and, uh, redesigned, in a, in a way of, of the, of the '50s. But-- And this is the-- And this was the poster, which, uh, I found here. And then I thought, "Okay, if this is like that, I show you another thing which we do." And, um, we just, we are going to, renovate this, terrible, building, not only the facade, the whole building. And, I show you this. It will be looked like that. So it will be-- have a roof, and it will be a right facade. It's not really easy because the height of the s- of the floors are, very, uh, are only two, 280 or something like that But the reason why I'm here is this book, and I'm very happy, Stefanos, that, you said we have to translate it, and if you say something like that, you do it. And I, I, I thank you for that very much because, you, you, I think, um, I mean, the German version, um, has th- thousands, books which are already, sold and, I think in this English version, which we did together now, maybe we, um, we go further on. These books and, um, why did I do this, this book? why-- It's, it, it's about urbanism. It's about-- It's, it shows places, streets, courtyards, different kind of block structures. And, when I started, when I was, uh, when I had my professorship in Dortmund, we stepped into the situation, why, why, uh, because we, gave our students, a house which they had to build, which they had to design in an old city. Every year, another city. And so you learned that these cities are different. They have different, different block structures and different house types and so on and so on. And, um, I worked since 40 years as architect, and now this research stuff is, in my opinion, much more interesting than to build houses. And, um, and the, the-- if you look at this, books here, Cornelius Gurlitt or Camillo Sitte and Theodor Fischer, they all speak in their books about public space. They don't care about houses. They show drawings like this here from Josef Stüppen. And what is interesting is he-- this plan shows only the boulevard and, shows the streets and the places and, public buildings like the train station or the museum, and that's it. No architecture And in everything which is gray is the rear. It's the private ground in which the houses are situated. And if you look here to Cornelius Gurlitt, for example, Kamillo Sitte, Theodor Fischer, you see always in the white streets are the public space, and they speak about how to, how to form these places and streets. And it sounds very simple and very normal, but if you see now what we do,

Public Space Lost Today

Speaker 3 10:36

it's an 15-year-old, situation, and you ask, "Where's, where's the public space? And where's the courtyard? Where's the street? Where's the place?" There's n- nothing, nothing to see in it. And, this is what I have from the last week newspaper in Germany. This is how it looks. You c- you have no street. You have no courtyard. You have... Everything is public. The houses are, individual. No, in a way, n- no typical, no types, no house types. So, and this is not the European city. This is something else, and it doesn't work This is European city. Here you see a grid from streets, you see places, parks, and of course, in the middle of these blocks, you see courtyards. And this is... And in these courtyards, you have the functional mix, which is so important for the life of in, in a city. So, and I show you a little bit about what we have in this, book. We have always these block structures and house types, and they are-- th- there are different ways out of, different centuries. And if you look here, you have streets which are 200 meters long, and nobody would design today a 200-meter-long street. And it works only because these house types, and this is Bremen here, what you see, and it's in Neustadt in Bremen, very, a very, popular, living, space, and it works over the house type If you see here, every house, every, every single house has the same floor, has the same, floor plan, but every facade, of the house in the street is different. And you have the public street with the entrances, and you have for each house the garden in the rear Look at this. This is Hamburg, 350 meters long. And the-- it's al-also, um, a very, a very famous and popular, living situation, and it, it comes along again, um, with house types. And, um, you can see them. This-- it's called the Schlitzhaus, in, in English you would say slot house. And, and you c- if you look here, you see this, skylights here on the roof. This is over the staircase. Every house is the same house, and every facade in the street is different If this, if this is for you to, to dance, if you think it's to dance, then you can also take the open development in Dresden Striesen, for example. And here we have also house types called Kaffeemühle, or in English, coffee grinder, because they look like coffee grinders. And, you can see again, you have the public street in front, you have the private garden for each house, and, you have different facades on the street. Each, each house is individual, even if this is, an apartment house which has, every- everything has, uh, every house has, um, the same floor plan. So you find this not only in Germany, of course, you find this in Italy, in, in, in whole Europe. And here we have again the place, the Bremerhaus, the Coffee Grinder House, the Isselhaus in Lübeck, for example. Very interesting situation also. And the Slot haus in, in Hamburg. And all these houses are really very popular, very popular to live there. This is interesting And then in this block structures, you have also city squares. And, the outside such a block or the inside of the square is, of course, very clear ordered. And, uh, if you look here at the Gärtnerplatz in München, a very famous place, and every house here has to have a facade which is round, which is curved. Otherwise, you would have no chance to have a place like that. And every lamp, every tree, every bank is ordered in this, in this, town planning,

Speaker 2 16:25

in this clearness of, of city planning Here, Dortmund. Yeah, they celebrate, a soccer game

Speaker 3 16:42

They, they would never go outside the city. They, they-- These places are like the living room for a family is this place, the living room for the, for the, for the people who live in the city. And you find in the book a lot of totally different, places. interesting here is this, the beginning of the 20th century. It's a, it's a town hall, in Wuppertal. It's a city from, uh, in Germany, and the town, town hall creates the place of the town hall So of course we have street spaces in the book, t-totally different street spaces. and, clear is

Streets and City Order

Speaker 3 17:39

always that you have a, a front which gives the possibility to have a space, a clear ordered space. And in the inside of the block, the houses go deep inside and they, they are not ordered. And if you look to such a street as any street in Frankfurt, this is interesting. You've-- I don't know how the type is called, but if you look here, I put four numbers in. This is always the same house. It's m- it's sometimes red and sometimes yellow, and it has a bay window or it had, it has a, a balcony, but it's always the same house, with a different facade into the street. And this is sogenannten Fluchtlinienplan from, Theodor Fischer in Munich. And this is so simple to, to, to draw a city, to draw a, a situation, that Look, you can see here the gardens, which he, he says here, "I wanna have here a garden. I wanna have here on the south side, I wanna have the garden in the street, not on the north side, but on the south side." And then he makes such, they, they m- make such turns, such curves here. And this is the situation. it close the-- this curve here close the street and gives the street, the street comes to an end. Or this situation here, you have this church, and so he, he ordered a, a place in front of the church, and then he designed another, street which comes to the apse, for, um, of the church. Very simple situation. and, Thomas, I'm sure you will, say yes when I say this is, these are the most, um, interesting, um, city places in, in, in

Speaker 2 20:09

Munich. You can make it even easier. Just a row of trees in the middle of a street and that's it. And you have an order and you have a character And then we have focal points, they are always in, mostly in, in, public buildings, of course. And you see here, but Arolsen, this is the main street, and they put the church just in the middle of the street, and this is situation. And also here, house types Another place, the place, the Fürstenberg in, in Paris. Wonderful place No?

Speaker 3 21:11

yeah. And this is a situation in Frankfurt. When they built the, the train station here, there was nothing here. It was field, and the city is here. And so they built, the facade, and, the streets run to these facades and, to this, um, corners of the, of the facade, the vis-a-vis. and, if you see one of the streets, you see how nice this is. This is a public building. Yeah. And if you look to the other side, you look to the tower of the, of the main hall,

Speaker 2 21:55

which is not-- which is destroyed since the last war, and I collected 2 million, euro,

Speaker 3 22:06

so we will start in the end of the year to rebuild this What is interesting is when they, when they, built this town hall, they, they put the tower not on the square of the town hall. Here is the entrance of the town hall. They put it at the end of the whole building, and they did it because it should be seen from the train station You find this in different times. You mustn't go in the Baroque time, um, like here in Dresden. You can go in every time, in every century, and you see always, public buildings in European cities at the end of a street So now again, house type. Look at this here in Munich. This is so clear that this is always the same house, but look here, you can see different, totally different houses. they look, every house is individual, is in its own individuum. And, um, the same here in Lübeck, Engelsgrube. Yeah, you have a very long, I'm sorry, you have, uh, very long houses, these Azel houses, and then you have a facade, and each facade it's on its own, but it's a type, it's a, it's a building type. And here, look at this, uh, picture. You see four houses, and if you look, then you see that this house is the same house than this house. It's absolute the same type. It's an house type, and the same thing you have inside here. So you have-- They had one investor, one plot, but only two house types if, even if they have four facades And then this is what we do One facade. Also one investor, one plot, three entrances, one house type, but only one facade. So you, you will be a number when you, when you live here. So you have to find your hole where you get in And look how nice they, they did this here. The, the, the cornice is, different. Yeah, you have different heights, you have different flo-floor heights, so each house has its own facade because, the roof is not on the same, on the same height, and also here you see the windows are not on the same height. And this is very important, and it's very simple. You must only... You, you take only one, two, or three stairs more in the, in the ground floor, and then the house goes up. And this is what we do here And this is very-- Here it's also one house type, and you can see, every façade is different, and they change also because of the house, uh, of the floor heights. Here again, one investor, one block, five entrances and five façades, but only one house type. It's only one, floor system, one, floor plan. Very simple. Same here Okay, this means look at the facade. Look at this here, the famous, Ackerstraße in Berlin. Each house has a wideness only from 10 meters, and then he has-- they have, different floor heights, and then you've got such a facade in the street. It's fantastic Same here. And if you have an open development, then you can often see here in the facade at the street and stop at the corner. Also here, there's a, it's a piece from Chicago We did a facade, against the old Renaissance, um, town hall here in Leipzig. And this is the original situation. This house is still there. All these other houses were destroyed in the war, and the whole block were destroyed. And, so we are only... There were an architect who had to, to build the whole thing, and we had only to make the facade. And so you see here the department house, the department store, and you see here the, the passage house. Every, every house has another facade, and so you have something which, is not, which doesn't destroy the situation for this nice, Renaissance building If you build beside the Goethe House, which we did in Frankfurt, a museum, look how long this museum is. And so we divided the facade in three units, three entrances. The main entrance here, and there's an entrance to a gallery, and here's an entrance for, school classes who go inside. And so you have three different, kinds of houses, and they fit together in their proportion to this, old house. We do something also here for, just a, a normal, office house. If you look here, this is the Goethe Place in Frankfurt, and you see this, you have five facades but only two houses behind. And I think this is very important to do something like that to, to, to give this, to remain, the proportion of, of our cities. So now urban yards, this is very important. Yeah, the inside, if you have, If you look to this inside, you have all

Courtyards and Daily Life

Speaker 3 29:26

this kind of courtyards which belongs to the, different, houses, and they are totally different, systems. You have a, a, a commercial courtyard, you have an entrance courtyard here, yeah, then the street, and you, you see a residential, a residential courtyard, or this is a type which I show you later on. This fantastic. It's, it's a school, a schoolyard, a schoolyard. And, from these courtyards, we have a lot, and sometimes when they are very old, uh, they, they are very dense. Of course, this is Regensburg here, and later on, I showed you Traisen. It, it's getting, bigger. But the, the courtyard is the playground, for families, which is very important. It just in our time, both parents wants to work, and they work, and the kids could, play in the, in, in, in the courtyard, and you can work on your table in the kitchen, right? And I mean, this picture is about 70 years old, but look today, we have the same situation, and, you have a courtyard of a rental apartment building, and you have this playground, and you can see how they, they try to own them. They, they put plants here, and I don't know, they just occupied the place because it's a place which is, not public. It's only for the house in which the people

Speaker 2 31:18

live. So the question is back to the nineteenth century? No, we go in the fourteenth century, and

Speaker 3 31:33

you see how nice this is. You can live there. It's would be nice to, to have an house like this. Or you can go to Dresden in the eighteenth century. There you have this, this courtyards, um, with this balconies around. Very, also very popular, buildings.

Speaker 2 31:57

And then you have, of course, the nineteenth century And this is what we do

Speaker 3 32:10

today out of this courtyards, yeah? You have your bicycles, you have everything. I don't know, whatever you do there, it must not old, it must only good So this is Alfred Messel, the reform block. This is how we say reform, because, instead of having courtyards to each house, he built one huge courtyard for 10 houses, yeah, in, in Berlin. And this makes it a little bit more, open, but, it is not the courtyard to the house. You have 100 people, or you have in one house 10 people who live there. And, this is out of the '20s. It's in Hamburg. but you have also a playground, but it's even more a public play-playground. And then you have, of course, the settlements in Frankfurt or in Berlin. Here it's the settlement from Ernst May in, in Frankfurt. And, you see here, these are gardens which belongs to these houses Okay, so if, next is the functional mix. This is just even more important. And you, you find, um, still different, um, situation. This is in, in Cologne. um, look at this, yeah? I mean, you will not build something like that, but it-- the functional mix is there because people work there, and they live, in the same time there, and we could make something out of it, yeah? This is where I had my office in, in Berlin. outside you have, the house where, where you have the apartments, and inside you have three courtyards with huge, here's an elevator behind, and you have, uh, huge, office spaces or working spaces So here you work, have a startup or whatever, or here And this is the, this is what, uh, this is also a functional mix in another way, this schoolyard. And I think this is, just fantastic because you have inside this, the schoolyard, you have this noise. Totally, yeah, it's really noisy in a school, and here you have, and y- and you, you, you have the, the school around the noise, and here you can live. Normal living courtyard. And then you have here, um, if y- I don't know what it, what it's called. uh, here you have, small courtyards which belongs to this house, and here also, and here you have this reform block courtyard. Why we don't build something like that? This is the question

Speaker 2 35:38

There are some architects who start to build something. This is David Chipperfield in Berlin Don't look at the facade But in this

Speaker 3 35:52

also, yeah, we have this huge industrial, areas and, they are mostly outside, the city. But look at this. This is, this is, um, a, a, a bus repair hall. It has 5,000 square meters and around you live. So this is, for the BFG, this is the-- now you have here bu- the buses, they're repaired there. And look how proud they are, of this public building inside. So you could, I don't know how many markets inside here So such things work also today if we, if we do it, but we have in a way a dissolution of our block structure, and this is what I show you now on this little sketch from, Ernst May. And you can see, he showed, how you build cities in future in the '20s. this is the normal courtyard, two court- three courtyards, three houses, and this is only one house. And, um, he divided the block structure and opened up the, the inside of the, block. And then, next step is to have the row. You have still, two rows beside the street, so you have still a street space if you want. and the next situation is here, where you have, the street rectangular to the, to the houses. The houses are east-west rows, and you have to go buy food here to the, to your house. And this means, this drawing means you have no privacy anymore. There's no privacy. There's no difference between a courtyard, a private courtyard, and an open street. And this is how it looks. This is Westhausen, a settlement in, in Frankfurt built in 1929. And after

Speaker 2 38:18

the war, we As a perk Ah, here. After the war, we built this roads again. You see the street, and here you see the footpath And here, and here you see this is the street facade. No window anymore. And the next step is this.

Speaker 3 38:52

Notre Stadt Frankfurt, Walter Wagenstein. So you have the, the houses sitting in, in, in the, in the green situation. And this is what we have today. We took over the whole situation, with this dissolution, which I showed you, in our time. And this is the plan of the city, and it's interesting to see, here you don't see any street. You don't see where is in front and where is, is the, where is the back, where is the rear. And here it starts. You have a, if you want a functional development of, of streets. So they, they, they build streets and, then they have this things which looks like a block, and they write block in here. But there's only this line which says you cannot, you cannot, build further over this line, and it says how many things you can build, and this is how it looks like

Speaker 2 40:08

And this is how it looks, how, how you see, uh, you, you have a place by Stippen, and this is the place here in Riedberg in Frankfurt

Speaker 3 40:24

it doesn't really... Oh, here. And now the block structure and house type. I, I, I showed you some, of these house types, and we are working on this because I think it's very important not to give architects the possibility to do whatever they want, but, we need housing for people, housing for our society. And, it could look like this, or it could look like Barcelona, or it could look like, Rome or, wherever you go in, in, in Europe, you have, uh block structures with house types. And it's interesting to see that in Germany, they start to, to, to build blocks. But as you see, these are reform blocks with one huge courtyard. This is the same size than this. And this, you can see how th- these are the old courtyards here out of the 19th century, and, these are the new courtyards. And I will show you now one of these, what they, what they do today. But before I told you, we, we think about, house types. And, and the first, um, research which we did

Corner House Research

Speaker 3 42:01

is about the house at the corner, because nobody know-- I didn't learn it at, at the university, and nobody learned it. So, my students asked me how, how does it work? And I didn't know. So I made research about that, and then, um, we make this book. And you see it's the third time that it c- it came out. And, um, You can see on this that it's very important, to show what, what it means to have an, a type of, of living, uh, of house. And, this is on what we built now, what we have now. I call it the wing house, and I will show you, but first of all, I show you the corner. Here, these are different, uh, types, olds, old houses and also new houses, 40 samples of, architects and young colleagues who built in the last 10 years, corner houses. And this is the wing house. And what is, is the, the wing house? The-- Okay. The-- You see this is type one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and each has another wide. This is 10 meters, 12 meters, 18 meters, 4, 24, and so on. And, uh, you have a middle house, the garden house if you want, and you have the wing house. And why wing? Because, the house, goes in the deep of the, of the property, and this is very important. if you look here, this, um, sketch again from Hans May, you see his reform block, and you see all these yellow streets. How many streets he need to, to, um, develop this, four blocks, and here you have only one street going around. And this means something. And, I show you now, this block here, this, 10 blocks, which are just built in the last, two years, and we won a competition for one of these blocks. This is why I know the situation very good. And this is, uh, this is the situation of this, 10 blocks. All the gray, pieces here, all the gray, um, streets are the, are sealing coast by, by roads. And there's, even 50,000 square meters. And if you-- And this comes because these houses are parallel to the street. They stay parallel to the street, and these houses are always about 35 or 40 meters. And, uh, we put our wing house on it, and you have 40% less road And you have a park about 40 square meter. When they gave me this, research, I, I told them, "No, you, you made a mistake. It cannot be." But-- And I, I showed this to, to different, uh, cities, and they say, "It, it's incredible why, why we didn't do something like that, and now we think about that, to build something like that." Now, again, here, this situation which I showed you, here I showed you this sample, and now we look at this. Look how aren't they nice, these houses? There's no back and no front. E-everything is public here. It's a whole huge, area here where you can go through forests and, and so on. And so we put there our housing again, and you see again 40% less, on gray roads. And, um, uh, you have a park in the middle, 10,000 square meter. You have even 25% more, living space, and you have here the, the, the, there and here the entrances to, to the park, which you can, close at night. It's only because this type of this hou... this wing

Speaker 2 46:46

house Okay, here again, this is what you have on-- if you have the house parallel to the street, and here you go in the deep of the, um of the property, and you have the same, um, the same square meter. That's it. Thank you

Speaker 4 47:26

great lecture. Thank you for being here. I'm curious if you go back maybe like four slides. Could you talk us through your strategy on parking, uh, and just how the automobiles function? And go back one more.

Parking and Fire Access

Speaker 4 47:39

Keep going.

Speaker 3 47:40

We, we, we didn't look like to that. Underneath this ground here or there are, parking garages, but we didn't think about that. Otherwise, it's too complicated. It's only a very simple, You compare only the houses and not the garage.

Speaker 2 48:02

Got it.

Speaker 5 48:03

Thank you.

Speaker 6 48:22

So in the German court type, you have garbage and, and fire access into the same court through, through an entrance. And because it's Germany and not the United States, the, the garbage centers are very carefully tended. So The typology that we need currently and for the next 30 or 40 years in the society requires a parking court or a back court somewhere in the, between the outside.

Speaker 2 49:01

Yes.

Speaker 6 49:02

You know, it can be a private court, then a back court, and then a common reform court.

Speaker 3 49:09

Yes.

Speaker 6 49:10

Do you have any-- Have, have-- You don't have any examples of that, do you?

Speaker 3 49:14

It's the next book. No, it's really, um, we have, we have already one type which, a, a housing type which covers, the parking garage. This, in Germany, I don't know how, how you do it here in, in, in USA, but, we built parking garages for such an old situation. One garage. It's mostly from steel and not really-- it looks not really nice in a, in an area like this. And so we, we covered it with, with housings, housing types. And I will, the third book I, I show you here, the, this one, it needs, it, it, it needs, um, Gewerbehaus. What is, what is it? Um- Retail. Retail. Retail and parking and whatever you will, and what you, whatever you want to, to put inside the city. It's very important. Yeah. But this is the next step, and then it's, hopefully enough for me

Speaker 2 50:45

Ja. Ja No, it's okay Yeah, I know Da?

Speaker 7 50:58

Just, just to help Christoph, he's so modest. Uh, the parking is organized. I would-- Uh, uh, it will be done, the parking, in a linear parking here, which will be less expensive than what you can do here. So the parking is ideal. This is ideal for parking, not only for urban design.

Speaker 5 51:18

Yeah.

Speaker 7 51:19

And the other question about the fire, yes, you can have a system where the fire brigade has to go into the courtyard, but you can also do it without the fire brigade getting into the courtyard, then the staircase gets a little bit more costly. Christoph is not talking about because he's so modest, but this is even much better than he's showing it to us.

Speaker 3 51:39

It's my broken English. No, these houses in the middle are on- only, uh, three, floors high because, the law says that if you have only three, uh, floors, then you must not go by a fire department inside with a car, and it makes, it makes it much easier, right? And, if we, if, if we build something like this, of course we, we put the garage underneath the houses and not underneath the, the courtyard because we wanna have a tree in the courtyard

Speaker 8 52:27

No, it's, it's a wonderful presentation, really, and a wonderful book. I wonder this, um, all of these projects are to be done by, by the public municipalities or private developers, and

Selling to Cities Investors

Speaker 8 52:40

how is it received by the municipalities when you show what you can do?

Speaker 3 52:47

Yeah, we will build this. We will start in the next five years. They are-- This is not published. The book is not out. It's, uh, but wherever I show it, um, they say it's-- They ask me, "There must be something wrong We don't understand this. Why, why didn't we do it? But the, the investors say it's the same by the, by the corner house. I had a, I had one client, uh, I had a competition, I won a competition, and the client came to me and said, "This house I don't build. Do something else, but I don't build." And I ask him, "Why not?" Yeah, why, um, I, I told him, "Just give me what you wanna have in your house, one, one page." And, um, then we made him a floor plan from this corner house, and he looked on this, and he couldn't believe it. I said, "Why? Why?" I worked since so long a time, and I don't understand why I didn't do it. And this has something to do that we, at universities, we don't learn this anymore. I didn't, I didn't learn this. I, this is, it, it's a lot of reading old books and, thinking and, practicing and so on and so on, right? But, these things here with the corner house, we will start in, in Düsseldorf, in Heidelberg, and maybe in München, and also in Hamburg, because the cities are interested, and the investors too, of course. Because if you, if you, have 40% at... The investors have always to pay for the road. They have to pay it. So if you have a, a house which is, I don't know, all these roads here are paid from the owner of these houses. And as less roads you have, as cheaper you can build. And so they are very interested. And the cities are also invested becau- uh, interested because it's not an economical, thing. It's also an ecological thing, yeah? If I, if can, if I can have a park with 10,000 square meters in our time where we have this, this, climate change, um, it's important to have something like that for the rain

Speaker 5 55:33

Deal with the bike. Is, is there a metric either imposed by the cities or by the developers in terms of the number of automobiles per dwelling unit that you have to be able to park?

Speaker 3 55:43

Yes. Some... It's different. In d- different cities it's different. Some ci- cities say you have to have per unit, I don't know, three, cars and some, say five, and it's different. I understood per, one and half per unit means one apartment It's d- but it's totally different. It's, um, if you build in Munich, it's something else. If you build in Hamburg, it's something else. It's always different

Speaker 9 56:28

I think I have three questions. two of them are different, uh, two of them are different scales, and one is a totally unfair question. the- Start

Speaker 3 56:36

with the unfair

Speaker 9 56:37

question I'll start with simple ones. So the, the, the work that you show in general, your work, all beautiful, is infill of different densities. These are not greenfield projects. These are infill in existing urban or suburban places, correct?

Speaker 7 56:59

It's

Speaker 3 57:02

new. This, what I show you here, this is, this is already built, but this is only a plan. There's nothing else.

Speaker 9 57:12

I see. I see.

Speaker 3 57:14

It's only an idea. It's only to show how ridiculous this is.

Speaker 9 57:21

So in, in, in Germany, your ideas, you are the salesman of the genius of the idea. How's it going? And I'm serious. We-- This is, this is a universal problem. The ideas are wonderful. The work that you build is wonderful. There's a anxiety about creating a larger amount of the good work.

Speaker 3 57:54

Yeah. The, the question is also, it's always the money. If you have an investor who earns money, it's good. If you have an invest-- if you have any day where the investor earns more money, it's perfect. So I have the feeling it's a win-win situation for the investor and for the city, and for the, for us, where we have to live there. Who we have to live there.

Speaker 9 58:28

Okay, my unfair question-

Speaker 3 58:30

Yes, please

Speaker 9 58:31

is, uh, the-- what is your thinking about the corner houses? They are the most amount of square meters for the building and the smallest amount of square meters for the courtyard in ratio. Yeah. It's a difficult issue. Can you talk about this?

Speaker 3 58:55

Not really. I didn't understand. Can someone

Speaker 2 58:57

explain?

Speaker 7 59:09

Yeah. Uh,

Speaker 3 59:09

th- it's unfair, yeah. Um, the corner house, uh, has no courtyard in a way. It-- but the house beside has a lot of courtyards. And, I have the feeling I have to send you the book

Speaker 2 59:25

I'm happy I'm the only one that doesn't suffer That's it

Speaker 11 59:42

Thank you for your presentation. The graphics, as other people said, are so incredibly elegant. Thank you. Would it be fair to say that the building on the left, the, the houses-- the buildings on the left are more costly to build and costlier to heat and cool, uh, whereas the buildings on the right, the, the apartments probably have more windows, they're more, more efficiently passively lit and heat, and heated and cooled, and simpler to build?

Speaker 3 1:00:11

Yeah, it's true. That's it. It's, um, I show... This is, uh, done by a, a, a an apartment, a housing, housing, a, um, housing, an, an city housing group who bu- who builds, uh, for the city housing. I sh- I showed him-- And they built this here, and I showed him this. He, he said, "It would be good if I would have i Have it earlier

Speaker 7 1:00:59

Another very big advantage of the right structure Christoph didn't speak about is the length of the pipes, which is much more costly than the street, is I would say 50%. So the, the, the, the costs are incredibly low there, and this is how the Roman built

Speaker 2 1:01:26

Okay. Some unfair questioning

Speaker 5 1:01:37

So I'm, I'm gonna try and respond to what John asked before about the, uh, the, uh, what do you call it? The, the corner lot. Do you, yeah, did you call it the corner building? Look, I'm an English major with a law degree, so I, I don't belong here anyway. But, on the corner building that you had overlooking the, the big circular drive, the views out that window of the people going by all the time are gonna be pretty amazing. You may not have a big park in it, but it's a trade-off. It's an urban, it's an urban location. Right? Wrong? just my thought

Speaker 2 1:02:12

Yeah, you're right.

Speaker 3 1:02:15

That's it If maybe I didn't understand you right. Well, can you translate me as-

Speaker 2 1:02:24

It's a big personality

Speaker 3 1:02:25

Yeah, of course. And you have sunlight from different, uh, sides, sides and you have also, and you look in different ways, in different streets. And yeah, it's of course, it's, this is, uh, why this... If you have, if you have in an old city, an apartment in such a house, it's the best thing you can have, and it's the expensive rent you can have because it's so nice Of course.

Speaker 2 1:03:01

Yeah, it's more. Yeah

Speaker 10 1:03:05

an urban block and housing type that I'm more familiar with is the ones that are very popular in early 20th century Rome, where, a lot of the social

Courtyard Community Debate

Speaker 10 1:03:15

housing was built with perimeter blocks, where the street frontage on the ground floor is continuous retail shops, and then there are beautifully decorated archways, and you have a passage into a courtyard, and the entrances to the apartments are from the courtyard, and they can gate it off at night and so forth. I was curious to know in, what you are calling a reform block, are the residential buildings entered from the street or from the courtyard? Or what is the, what is the difference between the, the two types?

Speaker 3 1:03:53

Yeah. I, the reform block, this, you have the entrances always from the street. some houses, in some houses you could go through the house into the courtyard, but if you have this reform block, there's-- it's not a real courtyard. It's a huge, a huge area which is very anon-anon-- Wie sagt

Speaker 9 1:04:17

man anonym?

Speaker 3 1:04:17

Anonym. Anonym. Anonym, yeah

Speaker 10 1:04:22

It seems to me that one of the advantages of the Roman model is the courtyards aren't too big, and because everyone has to go into them to get to their staircase, to their apartment, it creates a, a sense of community and it's a place where the neighbors meet each other. Yeah, of course.

Speaker 3 1:04:38

Yeah. It's

Speaker 10 1:04:39

very- It's semi-public. It's not-

Speaker 3 1:04:41

Yeah. It's very-

Speaker 10 1:04:41

Everyone's going there.

Speaker 3 1:04:42

Yeah. It's very important. And also the situ-- You have to see, in, in Germany, the courtyard is not allowed.

Speaker 10 1:04:51

Ah.

Speaker 3 1:04:53

Intellectually.

Speaker 10 1:04:54

Ah.

Speaker 3 1:04:55

Yeah. You can build this, but nobody, till today, nobody really realized this, that it has a nice situation also, for the people who live in this, uh, in these houses. But I think, um, this will change because, um, and what I don't understand is nobody wants to live outside in such a situ- in such a situation, but they want, they wanna live in the old city, and the apartments are more expensive in the old city than outside. So the quality is better in the city. So why we don't build the same quality? This is the question.

Speaker 10 1:05:43

You could say that the, um, the, the, the reason why housing is unaffordable today is that modern architecture didn't make the housing that people want, and therefore the housing people want is expensive.

Speaker 3 1:05:56

In, in a way, yeah. Look at these forms here. This is expensive.

Speaker 6 1:06:06

So this is a little bit of a technical question that I face. The, the privacy parameters have become huge, and this is a cultural question. And, um, when I was in... So we came up with ideas that it's 15 meters with a tree. Then I lived two months in the Borgo, a traditional area of the Borgo, and the apartment buildings 20 meters in front of me were lived in because they had laundry, and I documented this, and were shuttered. And then behind me was a very big reform block that was more like 30 meters, and it was largely shuttered. Then I went to Berlin, and it was okay living seven-- whatever the Berlin traditional meter width is. Do you find that people in German culture don't mind living window to window a shorter distance? This is a very successful privacy block for me. Do you have any numbers in your head? Is it different in Berlin than in Dortmund, privacy?

Speaker 2 1:07:24

No.

Speaker 3 1:07:26

but the question is very interesting because, The modern architecture builded houses which have huge windows to get lighting and, the floor height is very niedrig, low. And, um, if you have-- if you live in a-- if you live in an apartment with, with the height of, uh, three-fifty, you don't look out of the window really. You are, you are inside. You are more-- You, you live more inside than, than looking out of the window. I think it's a real-- it's a, it's a point which we don't really realize, how i-how important these heights are. I

Speaker 6 1:08:17

didn't see that. It's brilliant. Thank you so much for

Speaker 10 1:08:21

that

Speaker 6 1:08:22

little comment.

Speaker 10 1:08:22

We've come to the end of this presentation. I, I think that also that, that the subject matter we discussed tonight is extraordinarily relevant to our country,

Closing Reflections

Speaker 10 1:08:32

and it is very important to continue our research into the-- and, and with Christoph beyond the, the, the production of this book. In my mind, this lecture was about returning to the idea of housing understood at the scale of a block and not the building.

Speaker 2 1:08:49

Mm-hmm.

Speaker 10 1:08:49

Of housing in blocks understood as a generative streets. Of streets generating neighborhoods. Of neighborhoods generating movement systems and, and, and, and, uh, park systems and all the other ingredients that makes it possible. So I think in, in this school, we're beginning to, to, to think about the, the idea that we don't have a housing problem in this country, but we have an urban growth problem

Speaker 2 1:09:15

in this country.

Speaker 10 1:09:16

Mm-hmm. Yes. Of how we extend cities and infill cities in densities that make livability, not only livability, but also permanence possible, because the other thing you did not speak about, or you showed it, but didn't speak about it, is many of these buildings are two and three and four and five and six and seven and eight hundred years old because they're beautiful, livable, and desirable.

Speaker 2 1:09:36

Mm-hmm.

Speaker 10 1:09:37

And when you build well, you build forever.

Speaker 2 1:09:39

It's

Speaker 10 1:09:39

a fact, right? So, and, and w-we're in the business of now beginning to destroy things that are thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years old because they're terrible. This

Speaker 2 1:09:48

project

Speaker 10 1:09:48

is going to come down once this way of building gets prevailed. And this way of building is a new architecture and a new urbanism, which is really about a completely different way of thinking about wh-how one makes a city, and by extension, how one safeguards nature. And it's not a German issue, and it's really a city and world issue, and it is very much an American issue. And so we need to advocate on this together to make sure that things

Speaker 2 1:10:15

go in the

Speaker 10 1:10:16

future. Thank you.

Speaker 11 1:10:17

Would

Speaker 2 1:10:17

be nice. And good night.