Elizabeth Childers profiles Bruno Taut’s Gartenstadt Falkenberg housing estate…

Take the S-Bahn twenty kilometers southeast from the Middle of Berlin to the Grünau stop and you will end up at a small and intriguing housing estate called Gartenstadt Falkenberg (“Falkenberg Garden City”). Clustered around three streets — Akazienhof, Am Falkenberg, and Gartenstadtweg — are 128 dwellings. These simple but colourful buildings sit in what looks like an almost rural landscape.

And, although it is winter it is obvious why the estate is the Garden City; trees will bloom, empty trellises will be covered in climbing greenery, windowsill boxes will sprout, and numerous private gardens will spring to life. There is a sense that you have taken the train much further than twenty kilometres, that you are no longer in Berlin, but in England.

This is no accident. England is the birthplace of the garden city model. The breadth and swiftness of Industrialisation, and its side effects, had caused great currents of social inequality. Born out of late nineteenth century English social reform movements, garden cities were meant to be self-sustaining.

Built on the plan that each community held within it small-scale factories, as well as schools and farms, the English garden cities were an attractive alternative for the low-income working-class that had been relegated to miserable inner-city tenement living.

Too, early designers, such as Sir Ebenezer Howard (1850-1928), envisioned several garden cities fanning out from each other. In this model there would never be an instance of overcrowding or overuse of resources as population grew. Instead a whole new sustainable estate would be provided.

The point of the garden city was proportion, not just spatially but ideologically. That is to say, much like the influential contemporary principals of the Arts and Crafts movement—which sought to abandon mass-production in favour of rekindling balance with nature—garden cities were attempts to bring an economic, social, and domestic equilibrium to the masses via proximity to nature and the faculty for self-sustainability.

Berlin was an industrial city, third in pop…