Am Fischtal

Follow in the footsteps of famous architects of the 1920s like Hans Gerlach, Heinrich Tessenow and Hans Poelzig on a visit to the Zehlendorf housing estate of Am Fischtal. The architects of GAGFAH (Gemeinnützige Aktien-Gesellschaft für Angestellten-Heimstätten) unveiled the experimental housing estate of multi-storey houses, detached houses and apartments under the name “Exhibition of Building and Living” in 1928. Opposing them was GEHAG (Gemeinnützige Heimstätten-, Spar- und Bau-Aktiengesellschaft), which is what triggered the famous “Zehlendorf Roof Dispute” that same year. It was a conflict between tradition and modernity.

Solutions for the housing shortage

The housing estate was built on the site between Onkel Toms Hütte – a housing estate named after a popular tourist café in Grunewald – and the Fischtalpark in the north of Zehlendorf. Ideas for solving the prevailing housing shortage were to be presented to a broad population. The architects had to adhere to cost requirements as well as maximum building and housing sizes, while keeping in view a financeable interest burden and rent load on middle and lower income earners. The result was single-family homes interspersed with terraced houses, building complexes arranged in groups and solitary residential buildings, as well as apartment buildings with flats and apartments for single persons.

Zehlendorf Roof Dispute

The exhibition site extends in a green strip at the Fischtalpark. The groups of houses built by GAGFAH stand in a long row, dominated by conventional materials and traditional symmetrical construction with saddle roofs. Folding shutters, espaliers and pergolas adorn the façades. GEHAG, under the direction of Bruno Taut, Hugo Häring and Otto Rudolf Salvisberg, relied however on the serial construction method with colour-intensive façades and flat roofs. This type of housing estate is referred to in common parlance as a “parrot estate” due to its colourful appearance. Owing to the different building styles, visitors in the Am Fischtal street are met with a striking image: on the left pitched roofs and on the right flat roofs. The differing architectural approaches and the ideologies associated with them triggered the legendary “Zehlendorf Roof Dispute” at the end of the 1920s: Tradition stood against modernity, spacious building against solutions to combat the housing shortage, the longing for warmth and security against progress. Between the two opposites the lush greenery of the residential area stands as a mediator. Nevertheless, there wasn’t a single architecture magazine at the time not publishing detailed and regular reports on the roof dispute. As a consequence, this broadened the fundamental debate: Traditionalists faced representatives of Neues Bauen.

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