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Abstract

This study examines the architecture and culture of metropolitan dwelling in Europe and North America in the early 20th century as a model for the future sustainable compact city. While architectural historians usually focus on anti-urban housing models, such as the Garden City and the Siedlung, and thus re-emphasise the avantgardist claim of the housing development ‘from the block to the row’, this study focuses on the supposed intermediary step of the urban perimeter block. By examining contemporary sources, such as architectural journals, reports and conference proceedings, a culture of metropolitan dwelling can be reconstructed. Not only were an extensive number of inner-urban block developments, of high architectural quality, realised during that period, but there was also a controversial discourse, which criticised anti-urban models and propagated a metropolitan way of dwelling. This study aims to emphasise the role of metropolitan dwelling within modern housing, and proposes urbanity as a criterion for reconsidering the development of modern architecture.There was a broad international movement to reform urban blocks and to develop a metropolis which had the advantages of a real city as well as improved conditions for housing. The reformed perimeter block was seen as the appropriate model for the metropolis: an urban block, built up at its edges and thus fronting the street with an urban façade, but also delivering green spaces and light, with a large planted inner courtyard. A huge variety of forms was invented, including spacious courtyards, internal streets, courts oriented towards the surrounding streets, and lower internal buildings, to mention the most obvious examples.First attempts were undertaken in Berlin, with the famous houses by Alfred Messel in the 1890s, in London, with the early inner-urban housing estates by the London County Council around 1900, and in Paris, with the Rothschild Foundation competition for a social housing block at the Rue de Prague in 1905. Soon the model spread out internationally: the 1910 Greater Berlin competition developed several original solutions, Eliel Saarinen designed entire cities according to the new model (1910–18) and in 1917 Hendrik Petrus Berlage built his Amsterdam-South extension based on this idea. The reformed urban block was also widespread and successful in the 1920s and 1930s (perhaps more influential than Siedlungen's rows or skyscrapers): examples from Berlin (Gutkind), Hamburg (Schumacher), Copenhagen (Boumann, Fisker), Vienna (the Höfe), Paris (the Boulevard Périphérique), Milan (Muzio, de Finetti) and even New York (McKim, Stein) may illustrate its importance.The two main objectives of this paper are to deliver a valuable and successful model for sustainable housing in the metropolis today, by presenting well-tested examples, and to reconsider modern urban design history in the 20th century—placing less emphasis on avantgardist breaks than on continuous development.