Research and practice at the margins of the normative regulation of the post-war Siedlungen in the Rhine-Main region.

Abstract

The article introduces the research work that, in view of the recent policy of retrofitting social housing built in Germany during the post-war period, primarily centred on improving construction conditions and energy consumption, incorporates a project-based reflection on the inherited domestic space and programme. In spite of the social, architectural and urban values that these neighbourhoods or siedlungen have, almost a third of them present, in addition to construction and energy deficiencies, a programmatic obsolescence and lack of adaptability that makes it difficult to integrate current needs for an alternative habitability. Some minor projects and small interventions could initiate an emancipatory process to generate other forms of inhabiting, which Eleb and Bendimerad, and Avermaete and van den Heuvel call for, against the continuity of the modern project, typologically and urbanistically reified, in this residential legacy. In this context, an experimental project is described and evaluated in some post-war neighbourhoods designed by Ernst May's studio in the Rhine-Main region, as a processual tactic for integrating programmatic renewal measures, in addition to those already regulated by retrofitting policies. Understood as small interventions coordinated by technicians, associations and the administration, it is proposed to initiate, in each case, a project process that could be seen as emancipating: a set of simple spatial tools that, as they are implemented, transcend the domestic and environmental surroundings, and call on the inhabitants to reconfigure the living space together.