Review: Guerre du toit et modernité architecturale: loger l'employé sous la république de Weimar by Christine Mengin

Abstract

Christine Mengin. Guerre du toit et modernite architecturale: loger l'employe sous la republique de Weimar . Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2007, 540 pp., 32 color and 158 b/w illus. €45, ISBN 9782859445676 The introduction of a new style of architecture is often accompanied by conflicts, a sense of unease, even mistrust and disorientation. Conflicts about style appear to have arisen since antiquity. Vitruvius recounts that the ancient Greeks clashed over the use of different formal vocabularies. Vasari's writings reveal how Renaissance architects despised the Gothic style, and at the opposite end of the spectrum, Augustus W. N. Pugin produced drawings depicting the Gothic as the equivalent of heaven and classical architecture as the embodiment of hell at the beginning of the nineteenth century. One of the most impassioned style conflicts in twentieth-century architecture is the so-called Dacherkrieg (roof war), arising in response to the flat and pitched roofs lining the opposing sides of Am Fischtal, a long street in Berlin-Zehlendorf in 1928. The modernist, flat-roofed Onkel-Tom-Siedlung (Uncle Tom's Housing Estate), designed by a team led by Bruno Taut, occupied the eastern side of the street. An opposing team led by Heinrich Tessenow used more traditional, regional precedents—and sloping roofs—to design Am Fischtalgrund (on the Fischtal site) on the western side of Am Fischtal, touching off the notorious roof war. The research surrounding this incident is the subject of Christine Mengin's sprawling 540-page Guerre du toit et modernite architecturale: loger l'employe sous la republique de Weimar . A paperback with low-resolution black-and-white images integrated into the text, the book also includes 16 color plates that offer original views of the housing estates, reconstruction drawings made in the 1980s, and present-day impressions of the buildings. The book started out as a dissertation and was revised and published in the exclusive series Histoire de l'art–16 of the Universite Paris I Pantheon–Sorbonne. Mengin introduces her topic by explaining the stylistic development of architecture in Germany in the early twentieth century. She describes how architects who had …