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Title:Kirchsteigfeld: A European Perspective on the Creation of Community [Portfolio]

Journal Issue:Places, 14(1)

Author:James-Chakraborty, Kathleen

Publication Date:2001

Publication Info:Places

Permalink:http://escholarship.org/uc/item/6904w658

Acknowledgements:This article was originally produced in Places Journal. To subscribe, visit www.places-journal.org.For reprint information, contact places@berkeley.edu.

Keywords:places, placemaking, architecture, environment, landscape, urban design, public realm, planning,design, portfolio, European, perspective, community, Kirchsteigfeld, creation, Kathleen James-Chakraborty

Copyright Information:All rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. Contact the author or original publisher for anynecessary permissions. eScholarship is not the copyright owner for deposited works. Learn moreat http://www.escholarship.org/help_copyright.html#reuse

56 P L A C E S 1 4 : 1

American admirers of New Urbanism wouldalmost certainly be delighted by a visit to Kirch-steigfeld. This new district of Potsdam, a suburbof Berlin, features various hallmarks of NewUrbanist planning. Public spaces recreate earlierurban patterns; a well defined network of streetsintertwines with ample greenswards; the housingis relatively dense. It was designed between 1991and 1993 by the architectural firm of Rob Krierand Christoph Kohl, and individual buildingswere executed by several architectural firms fromCentral Europe and the United States.

Kirchsteigfeld’s planners and architects revivedmany traditional features of central Europeantowns and cities, updating them to accommodatecontemporary demands for greenery and parking.At Kirchsteigfeld’s core stands a church; one ofthe first built in eastern Germany since WorldWar II, it was designed by Italian architectAugusto Romano Burelli. This instant landmarkis ringed on three sides by public spaces lined withstorefronts. Beyond those are residential districtsand community facilities, such as schools.

Most streets are lined with three- to five-storyapartment buildings with colorful facades. Neigh-borhood-scale features include a horseshoe-shaped plaza that opens onto a rondelle. A canalbisects the community, its beautifully landscaped

banks bordered with serpentine benches. Com-munal gardens are inside each block, providingfurther green spaces and access to parking tuckeddiscreetly to the side. An excellent streetcar link to the center of Potsdam provides a convenientalternative, however, to the use of private cars.

At Kirchsteigfeld, planning models developedto suture the gashes World War ii opened inBerlin’s urban fabric were applied to an undevel-oped site on the metropolitan periphery. This shiftcreated both opportunities and challenges. Theresults illustrate the close relationship betweeneven the most carefully considered design on theone hand and cultural and market forces on theother. They also tie the community to a series ofoften unacknowledged sources whose successKirchsteigfeld is not always able to match.

Roots in IBA

Since the 1970s, Krier has called for revivingEurope’s nineteenth-century pattern of high-den-sity, low-rise apartment buildings built to thestreet edge, though he proposes to make it morehabitable by creating through-block communalcourtyards. His influence has been enormous inEurope, where the urban forms he seeks to reviveare associated with the good life of an earlier time,just as small towns are in the United States. Most

Kathleen James-Chakraborty

Kirchsteigfeld— A European Perspective on the Construction of Community

The iba exhibition was a collection of frag-ments. On any given block, new constructionmight stand alongside old. The results were punc-tuated by the towers in the park erected in the dis-trict in the interim.

At Kirchsteigfeld iba precepts were applied toa blank slate. Here the tensions were ironed out ofthe iba collage. Kirchsteigfeld’s planners tookadvantage of local landscape and infrastructurefeatures, including an alley of oak trees and ahighway, to establish boundaries between it andits neighbors, which include the remnants of arural village as well as monotonous Plattenbau,prefabricated apartment slabs that were the post-war housing type most favored by EasternEurope’s Communist governments.

Within these intended lines one finds, for themost part, an extremely cogent collection of livelyfacades that frame relatively narrow streets on oneside and generous courtyards on the other. Few ofthe individual buildings are as original as the bestcontributions to iba (by Peter Eisenmann andJaquelin Robertson, Office of Metropolitan Archi-tecture, Aldo Rossi and Moore, Ruble, Yudell,which participated in both developments), butthey share much the same spirit. Stucco facades,into which balconies are cut or from which theyproject, recreate in the proportions of their detailsan earlier urban pattern without imitating its orna-mental decoration. In both cases, architects haverespected precedent while avoiding sentimentality.

Transferability

Americans tempted to reconstruct Kirch-steigfeld at home will be frustrated to find that itis as much the product of specifically Germanpolitical and economic conditions as of the NewUrbanist approach to community design.

Many of Kirchsteigfeld’s most appealing fea-tures were mandated by local regulations, andpublic funding played a large role in the realiza-tion of its ambitious design. The regulatory envi-

P L A C E S 1 4 : 1 57

A relief of Kirchsteigfeld’s

plan, depicted as the pages

of a book, greets visitors

to the town.

notably, his precepts were adopted by the plan-ners of the International Building Exhibition (iba)organized in West Berlin in the early 1980s.Instead of the high-rise apartment towers builtduring the sixties and seventies to replace build-ings damaged during the war, iba planners erectedbuildings that mimicked the scale of pre-warapartment blocks and villas.

This emphasis on typology (fostered as well bythe popularity in Germany of Aldo Rossi’s Archi-tecture of the City), however, was seldom accompa-nied by overtly historicist designs for buildingfacades or interior plans. Although punchedwindow openings predominated, the character ofindividual buildings recreated the proportions oftheir predecessors in terms that were indisputablyof their own time.

The iba exhibition also established a precedentfor the way in which high-profile architects couldbe lured into designing everyday housing. Orga-nizers invited firms to compete for the design ofthe master plan, promising them the opportunityto build some of its constituent pieces. Lavishgovernment subsidies for middle-class housing,combined with strict German construction stan-dards, all but guaranteed the quality of the results,which quickly attracted international attention as a showpiece of postmodern architecture andurbanism.

Groth + Graalfs, a firm that acts both as devel-oper and building contractor, executed one ofiba’s best-known projects, the Rauchstrasse quar-ter, which Krier had laid out. In 1991, when thefirm acquired sixty hectares of open land on thesouth edge of formerly Communist Potsdam, itreturned voluntarily to the iba formula, adding aworkshop among the competing designers toencourage collaborative thinking about the plan.The workshop resulted in Krier and Kohl beingchosen to create Kirchsteigfeld’s plan and ensuredthat talented architects from Europe and the u.s.would contribute to its execution.

58 P L A C E S 1 4 : 1

Aerial photo, showing central

axis and Hirtengraben Park

Photo: Werner Huthmacher

Early plan sketch by

Rob Krier and Christoph Kohl

Graphic: Krier and Kohl

Kirchsteigfeld

P L A C E S 1 4 : 1 59K I R C H S T E I G F E L D : J A M E S - C H A K R A B O R T Y

The Rondelle, lined with

buildings designed by

Krier and Kohl, opens

onto Horseshoe Square.

Photo: Kathleen

James-Chakraborty

Corner tower type

Photo: Werner Huthmacher

Hirtengraben Park, detail

Photo: Werner Huthmacher

Mid-block apartment building

Photo: Werner Huthmacher

ronment that demanded high-quality construc-tion, pedestrian and bicycle paths, and a sensitiveapproach to the local ecology does not exist in theUnited States. Moreover, the combination of pub-lic and private funding that built Kirchsteigfeld(though considered in Germany to be a signi-ficant example of privatization) would be unthink-able in the u.s., where no public agency wouldlavish so much money on middle-class housing.Nor would a local American government be likelyto contribute a streetcar, as happened here.

Kirchsteigfeld’s location in a formerly Com-munist suburb on Berlin’s edge places it in a hous-ing market very different from that of Americansuburbs. Potsdam’s Communist-era housing crisiswas exacerbated, following the fall of the BerlinWall, by its proximity to the city. But Potsdam’spre-war buildings were in poor repair; conditionsin the newer Plattenbau were often little better.Thus there were many people eager to occupyKirchsteigfeld’s apartments, despite a density thatensured that the standards of privacy and spa-ciousness demanded by most middle-class Ameri-cans would be absent. Finally, the degree of in-volvement that Groth + Graalfs continue to havein Kirchsteigfeld as property managers is unusualeven in Germany, as was their responsibility forerecting most of the community’s infrastructure.

Compromises

Krier and Kohl, along with the developers forwhom they worked and the other architects whoassisted them, created an extraordinarily attractivesuburban environment. They were able to takeadvantage of a Communist-era housing crisis,general German agreement about planning prin-ciples similar to those of New Urbanism (albeitoften within the aesthetics of International Mod-ernism), generous government subsidies and theorganizational legacy of Berlin’s recent iba toachieve this impressive result. Yet even these con-ditions, so essential to the construction of a well-

defined, well-designed, well-maintained, amenity-rich community of this density and configuration,have not proved sufficient to ensure an ideal mixof uses or to protect the integrity of the designfrom market imposed revisions.

Half of the community was built according tothe original plans. But in the southern sections theapartment blocks Krier called for have given wayto single-family row houses. These have littlerelationship to the street or to the central publicspace they abut, which consequently now lacksthe strong spatial definition that makes its coun-terpart to the north so attractive.

This is not the only compromise with Krierand Kohl’s vision that one finds upon visiting thecommunity. For example, Krier and Kohl weredetermined that the development not becomemerely a bedroom community. But with the con-tinued absence of the workplaces their plan pro-posed, this nonetheless has happened.

Kirchsteigfeld’s relatively low population andthe small size of the individual shops have con-spired against the evolution of a lively commercialcenter. Perhaps a third of the few shopfrontsremain empty, and one can buy little more thanbasic groceries without traveling outside the com-munity’s well-defined boundaries. Although mostGermans continue to shop in downtowns, villagecenters or the neighborhood shopping districtsthat line streetcar routes, Kirchsteigfeld’s inhabi-tants overwhelmingly favor the new American-style shopping centers just to the north.

Finally, for all the glamour it has acquiredthrough its association with Krier and its status asa showpiece for New Urbanism, Kirchsteigfeldstill feels like a set piece, a stage set in which it isnot yet obvious that the quality of community willmatch the thoughtful design of most of its con-stituent pieces. Some of the beautifully-landscapedcommunal areas seem to have been designed morefor display than use. On a stunning autumn morn-ing not a single toddler was to be found playing in

60 P L A C E S 1 4 : 1

Plattenbau, housing built under

the former German Democratic

Republic near Kirchsteigfeld

Photo: Kathleen

James-Chakraborty

P L A C E S 1 4 : 1 61K I R C H S T E I G F E L D : J A M E S - C H A K R A B O R T Y

any of the courtyards, where prominent signs for-bade dogs, soccer balls and bicycles—three staplesof German recreational activities.

Precedents

Through most of the twentieth century, Ger-many has proven fertile territory for experimentsin escaping what the German sociologist GeorgSimmel identified as the alienating character ofmodern metropolitan life. Germans have a proudrecent history of providing thoughtful urbanplanners and architects with the opportunity to re-inject a sense of community into the urbanforms that the society as a whole continues tovalue as a repository of its cultural traditions.

In their published accounts of their intentionsat Kirchsteigfeld, Krier and Kohl ignore theseimportant precedents, many of them located inneighboring Berlin, and distort the character oftheir design’s relationship to earlier patterns ofEuropean urbanism. Their point of departure isnot as timeless as they would like to think. Theapartment building, whose organization around acourtyard they explode to the scale of an entireblock, became the prototype for housing in north-ern Europe only during the nineteenth century;before that time the townhouse with a smallgarden in the rear predominated. In truth, theyhave made no attempt to replicate the density ofeither model, both of which supported an activecommercial life at street level.

At Kirchsteigfeld, Krier and Kohl insteadplaced apartment blocks in a landscaped settingthat recalls early twentieth century garden citydevelopments, such as the Margaretenhohe inEssen and Staaken on Berlin’s western edge.While the architecture of these settlements wasovertly nostalgic in its recall of pre-industrial vil-lage life, something that is entirely absent at themore urbane Kirchsteigfeld, these communitieshave had more success than Kirchsteigfeld in cre-ating viable centers that replicate the commercial

and institutional mix of village life because themodest scale of their public spaces are more inkeeping with the size of their populations.

Nor is Kirchsteigfeld entirely independent ofModernist models. Both the planning apparatusand the community’s scale and density have morein common with the workers’ housing erectedaround Berlin’s periphery during the 1920s thanwith any earlier German architecture. In particu-lar, the combination of the way in which theblocks are split open to reveal the courtyards andthe brilliant coloring of individual facades recallthe Britz and Onkel Tom’s Hutte (Uncle Tom’sCabin), two of the developments laid out byBruno Taut, although, of course, Krier and Kohleschew Taut’s standardized plans and flat roofs.

Ironically, developments like Bochum’s Uni-center, a 1970s megastructure with little aestheticappeal, recreate the active pedestrian life charac-teristic of successful cities much better thanKirchsteigfeld does. In Bochum, where an irregu-larly shaped plaza sits atop two levels of parkingand is ringed by shops and apartment towers, ahuge student population ensures that the rela-tively banal space, which doubles as a protectedplay space for children, is occupied virtuallyaround the clock. Without such a high number ofworkers and residents, Kirchsteigfeld is not yetand may never become the viable, free standingcommunity its planners envisioned.

Nonetheless, Kirchsteigfeld is a welcome addi-tion to Germany’s rich legacy of planned commu-nities. It offers hope that Germans will, through acombination of thoughtful public and privateplanning, continue to avoid the worst ramifica-tions of the suburbanization brought on by theirenormous prosperity. If Kirchsteigfeld provesalmost impossible to replicate in the u.s., wheregovernment policies and market demands are dif-ferent, this only demonstrates the degree to whichKrier and Kohl’s design is rightly embedded in theculture whose aspirations it so effectively mirrors.

The rowhouses the developer

has recently substituted for the

apartment blocks called for by

Krier and Kohl have an awk-

ward relationship to the street,

with small front gardens that

correspond more to the usual

backyard, complete with sliding

glass doors and gardening shed.

Photo: Kathleen

James-Chakraborty

62 P L A C E S 1 4 : 1

Retail street

Aerial view of Karow Nord

shows various housing types,

including courtyard buildings

in the foreground, villas

along the lake and perimeter

blocks behind.

Photos: Werner Huthmacher

Karow Nord

P L A C E S 1 4 : 1 63K I R C H S T E I G F E L D : J A M E S - C H A K R A B O R T Y

Day care center

Midblock pedestrian walk

Karow Nord’s plan

includes a street system

integrated with its context,

axial streets and vistas like

in Berlin, a hierarchy of streets

and open spaces, long bands

of park in an “agri-grid,”

a mix of housing types and

scales, and a tapering down

of scale from the center

to the edge.

Graphic: Moore Ruble Yudell

Vista over the water park