Download (640Kb) - University of Kent

GRIDS AND FRAMES
Fig. 5 Heinrich Tessenow, Festspielhaus,
Hellerau, Site Plan. Courtesy of Fabian
Zimmermann, Berlin.
It is here that the theme of the grid is encountered for the first time. The south side of the
square is enclosed by a white-painted timber pergola structure, punctuated on each side
by two squat, compact, square-plan houses. (Fig. 6) These have attic storeys set into
their hipped, tiled roofs, with a gabled dormer window on each of the four sides. The
ground floor fronts of the houses have rendered walls which are co-planar with the rear,
enclosing walls of the pergola structure, while the three bays of the entrance porch
provide spatial rhythm within the matrix of the pergola. The pergola motif would have
been familiar to the bourgeois German at the turn of the century. Die Gartenlaube
(pergola) was the title of one of the most successful magazines read by the middle class;
its cover featured an iconic pergola - frequently decked out in Semperian festive mood -
and it communicated bourgeois comfort before it suggested, at the start of the twentieth
century, more overtly political, Reformist aims. Indeed, at mid-century the pergola motif
was so popular that it was used as frontispiece decoration to many books. Tessenow’s
gridded frame does not attempt to mimic natural, arboreal form; instead it is an aesthetic
reduction of a trabeated structure, united with a simple ‘unconscious’ or vernacular
empathy that the workman would feel with his tools and his materials. His writings, like
his buildings, are themselves always simply phrased and seem never to touch on the
4