Törten (1926)

Part of the housing estate are also the Konsumgebäude with the address Am Dreiech 1, the houses at Südstraße 5 (Steel house) and 6 and the apartment blocks in the streets Mittelbreite and Peterholzstraße. We have decided to present these houses individually, as they differ significantly.

All terraced houses and semi-detached houses in the Törten housing estate are designed as single-family houses with three different types. They all consist of a reinforced concrete skeleton and masonry concrete bricks. All 314 houses on plots of 350-400 square metres have a garden, used for growing one's own vegetables and for keeping small farm animals.The first type was built in 1926, called sietö I. The Anton house in the street Doppelreihe 35 has been preserved almost in its original condition and is now open to the public on guided tours, to see how those houses looked like. They were always designed as a kind of semi-detached house. A firewall divides the two buildings. This wall only started at the level of the window sill on the ground floor.Inside, the living room faced the street and the kitchen faced the garden. Behind the kitchen was located a stable with a toilet in it. The design of the kitchen and the combination of the toilet within the stable raise the question whether Gropius was indeed a great architect? Maybe he was it for public buildings, but probably less for residential buildings. A staircase leads to the upper floor with another room facing the street and two rooms facing the garden. The terrace is situated above the stable. In total, the flats have 75 square metres of living space and a cellar, which makes them very generously designed.Due to criticism of the sietö I type, especially that it was too narrow, the sietö II type was built in 1927. It is about two metres wider and has a living space of 70 square metres. By changing the room arrangement, however, it was even possible to gain one more room on the ground floor. The characteristic feature of this type is the zigzag course. The entrance doors with the hallway, staircase and vertical ribbon windows are located at the deeper cuts. The living rooms are located at the more protruding sections. Otherwise, these houses correspond very closely to the sietö I type.The last construction phase took place in 1928 and brought with it the sietö IV building type. Due to cost-cutting constraints, the living space was reduced to 57 square metres and Gropius avoided to complete a full stairway. Instead, two short stairs lead from the ground floor level either the suterrain or to the first floor. These houses do not have cellars.

One house of each type corresponds to the original state: sietö I at the street Doppelreihe 35, sietö II at the street Kleinring 42 and sietö IV at tghe street Mittelring 38.

This housing estate was an attempt to solve the housing problem of the 1920s. The Dessau city council wanted that the director of the Bauhaus school, Walter Gropius, could demonstrate his skills as an architect. The decision to build was made on 25 June 1926, and the first phase of construction began in mid-September 1926 with the houses of the type sietö I. Gropius associated this with a serial construction method, emerging a possible standardisation. One of those solutions was expressed by the use of a crane, which was used along the current streets, so that houses were built to the left and right of the crane's track in a cost-saving manner. The housing estate consists of two more areas with house types called sietö II and sietö IV, built in 1927 and 1928. The project was financed by a state house tax (Hauszinssteuer), which exclusively benefited housing construction. Although the houses were built for low-income earners, each of the 314 houses were sold to the residents. Since many of them did not like some of the features of the houses, especially the steel-framed windows through which the wind blew and which had a very high sill/windowsill on the first floor, the houses were extensively rebuilt and adapted to the needs of the residents. Especially after the political turnaround in 1989, thermal insulation was added to the facades, so that the houses are almost unrecognisable as architectural milestones of modernism.Three different types of houses were built in the settlement. Of the first type, sietö I, the Anton House, named after the former owners, has been preserved almost in its original form and can be visited today on guided tours. The two other types of houses are called sietö II and sietö IV.

• Bauhaus-Siedlung Dessau-Törten
• Allerheiligen, Wendland: Mehr als das Bauhaus: Modernes Bauen in Sachsen-Anhalt 1915-1935 / More than the Bauhaus: Modernist architecture in Saxony-Anhalt 1915-1935., 2019