Tenement

As well as residential tenement barracks; ( in Austria tenement ) refers to a multi-storey inner city apartment building with one or more courtyards from the period of industrialization ( early days ), which was built for the wide demographic of workers and employees. Tenement houses were generally built of large landowners or so-called Terrain companies, the forerunners of today's housing associations, closed design. When building a tenement area of ​​land has been exploited in the best possible under the building regulations.

After many tenement buildings were revalued by the structural renovations in recent years and decades, we now speak rather of older parts or old neighborhoods, or time- based founder of Time quarters.

Structural outline

The tenement is divided into several parts of the building:

• Front building - road-side perimeter block
• Wing - Extension of the front building at a 90 ° angle on one or both side property lines; mostly with private staircase.
• Cross- building (also behind the house or garden shed called ) - rear courtyard development which is parallel to the front house, often following side wings. In several farms there are accordingly several Hinterhäuser.
• Remise - usually one-or two-storey annexe, which is used as a garage or commercial, formerly often called barn for horses or cows.

Construction standard and design

Basis of building codes formed the created in Berlin by James Hobrecht first development plan with 14 departments from 1862. Courtyard of an apartment building, the had to be planned at least as large after police requirement that a horse-drawn fire engine could turn it. According to the Building Control Regulations exactly 5.34 × 5.34 meters were. A sequence of three or four yards was not uncommon. The farms were accessible mostly on passages from the street. Several tenements formed a building block. The incredibly narrow construction of these residential blocks was equivalent to a quartering of the residents, which gave rise to the name.

The front house was ajar with its elaborate design at the community center. The street facades were often decorated with stucco and divided by cornices. The floors of the front building were mostly higher than in wings and rear house, so that the living conditions favored by better days exposure, and these were inhabited by socially higher layers. To the front house was still mostly the left in the corner of the side wing Berlin room as a walk-through room at the offices of the wing. In the back of the houses, the apartments of a kitchen, a bedroom and sometimes even a chamber passed. Heating was only the kitchen, where was going, and family life. On the ground floor and in the basement are mostly settled to companies.

Only a small proportion of the apartments was connected to the sanitary system. Most Wilhelminian were retrofitted only in the 1920s with sanitary facilities. In most cases, multiple tenants shared a toilet in the corridor or on the stairs.

The first tenants moved in already, while the builders still plastered facades on the scaffolding. They spoke, therefore, of the dry Housing the flats. The often poor hygienic conditions, cold, moisture and darkness caused a deleterious living environment that is still worsened in the apartments in the basement and attic. Nevertheless, the residents had to spend 25 to 30 percent of their income for the two-to three -bedroom apartments.

In order to finance the rent, the additional rooms to the cramped apartments were mostly under -rented or leased beds to sleep goers. A sleeping place was shared by several people " in shifts ". Up to 30 people lived together in an apartment. Even in the hallway lived people on a makeshift mattress. In the narrow halos often collected the garbage.

Typical tenements

Tenements existed in Germany, especially in Berlin and Hamburg, where large estates were built over a large area. Otherwise, this building was built in what was then Germany rarer than in the east to the west. In Austria it was built in Vienna in 1880, especially in the 10th, 14th, 15th, 16th and 17th district under the name of the apartment building.

A particularly extreme example was Meyer's Farm in Berlin Ackerstraße, which included six backyards and about 2000 people housed in 300 apartments. The condominium Meyer's Farm was demolished during the restructuring measures in the redevelopment area Fountain Street.

One of the largest enclosed blocks located in Berlin Prenzlauer Berg. He has over 30 backyards of various size and is located between the streets of Prenzlauer Allee, Marie Burger Street, Winsstraße and Immanuelkirchstraße.

The architect Franz Hoffmann, co-owner of the architectural group Taut & Hoffmann gave a public lecture at the following assessment of a tenement:

" [ ... ] Previously, the building block of Berlin were almost exclusively built with front buildings. The large interior surfaces of the building block formed gardens. - Due to the building code of 1858 it was possible to cultivate and low land, and not how to perform only edge development in the main in the beginning. Thus, the horrible tenements arose in all major cities of the world and also in Berlin. It was built on narrow courts with extremely poor floor plans flats that contradicted each hygiene and had to lead to impoverishment of its inhabitants. [ ... ] Furthermore, if we consider that many who had to live in these poor low-light flats, were the day working in ugly and unsanitary factories, [ ... ] so you can imagine that the workers of that time mostly already with 50 years fell into the pit. "

As one of the last completely preserved tenements applies the Loests court in Halle ( Saale). The Loests farm was built by 1884-1890 from the builder Rudolf Loest. With a length of 250 meters, four floors, closed perimeter block and in the form of a profane Backsteinfunktionalismus it has been established as one of the largest of its kind. The average number of occupants per dwelling unit was six persons, a total of 2700 people once lived in Loests yard. The farm was originally densely built with stables, sheds and commercial enterprises. The Loests yard is a prime example of urban planning and hygienically problematic mixed culture of the founders temporal working-class neighborhood.

Formation conditions

Reasons for the emergence of the tenements in the expanding cities was caused by strong influx during industrialization and high population growth in the second half of the 19th century housing, the expulsion of large plots and building regulations, which the builders the exact design of the building largely free allowed. Since the apartment speculators could require only low rents of the workers, they tried to return through dense development and at the expense of quality achieved.

Response to the housing shortage

The municipal administration reacted only slowly to the resulting housing shortage because the workers were poorly represented in the municipal bodies. However, because the bourgeoisie feared a associated with the overcrowding moral decline, people began from the 1890s thought to solve the problem (small housing question ) to make. Local housing was as intervention in the market economy initially rejected. Some could not exceed, as a subsidized supply of building land, reduction of road infrastructure costs, facilitation of credit and more rigorous monitoring by the authorities. In order to curb the sublease, in later buildings for the workers, the kitchens were deliberately kept small so that the family had to use the rest rooms of the apartment, such as so in the settlements Ostheim and Südheim run social housing in Stuttgart (though these are not tenements ).

As a programmatic alternative plans for apartment misery of tenement houses emerged as the socialist Einküchenhaus, the garden city movement and from the 1920s a cooperative housing, the public housing in Vienna.