PLATFORM: Plattenland

Nov 21

Nov 21 Plattenland

Housing blocks in the countryside feel odd. Like foreigners from far-off cities plopped onto the horizon, they sit there entrenched, solitary, naked. In their stoic rigidity, they chafe against the ever-changing landscape they are placed in and recall anonymous city life. In the photo series Plattenland, from which the images in this essay are drawn, I visually investigate the countryside of the former East Germany as a stage for utopic ideals of betterment through standardization and mass-production of housing in the mid-twentieth century. The images explore the jarring rift between two divergent modes of living and what happens when they find themselves in the same place: when the spatial language of top-down urban development, in which volume, speed and technology trump all, is simply transplanted to a rural context.

The title of the series comes from Plattenbau, the German word for mass-produced, reinforced-concrete slab construction. These solitary Plattenbau buildings at the edges of small villages, lining large swaths of agricultural land, or tucked away in the middle of forests, are typical of the former East Germany.

The pressing need for housing after World War II prompted many countries, on both sides of the iron curtain, to use similar physical forms and construction techniques as the Plattenbau, but in each sphere things proceeded differently. In the West, for the most part, architects and planners emphasized variety. New building systems and methods were added to the mixture of possibilities. In the top-down, centralized administrative states of the East, however, where every aspect of life was dictated, including how and what kind of housing would be built, Plattenbauten replaced nearly all modes of construction that came before them. The main impetus was direct mandate from the Kremlin.

In 1954, two years after Stalin's death, in a speech to the national Conference of Builders, Architects, and Construction Workers, Nikita Khrushchev formally directed the state away from traditional, site-based construction to the cutting edge of building technology: prefabricated, reinforced-concrete slabs craned in and assembled on site. This embrace of prefab was quickly replicated throughout the Soviet sphere of influence. Today, it is evident as one approaches many former Eastern Bloc cities, whose peripheries are still ringed by concrete residential towers.

In the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the state architectural bureau produced a catalogue of building and unit “types,” which architects pulled from to design. The types, highly influenced by the Bauhaus, were given technical names based on construction features, year of design, designers, or location. They included the Q3A (Querwandtyp 3 Varinate A, or transverse wall type 3, version A), WBS70 (Wohnungsbauserie 70, or housing series 1970), P2 (named after the design collective P2), or the M10 (Magdeburg, ten-story). Regular updates and redesigns addressed shortcomings—especially cost overruns—and incorporated new technologies.

In East Germany, the socialist housing system with its centralized construction program was able to build over two million apartments between its advent, in the mid-1950s, and demise, in the early 1990s. Blocks were erected where one would expect to see them as well as in the most unlikely of places, rendering uniform nearly all the new housing in urban, suburban, and rural areas. By the time the Berlin Wall fell, in 1990, one out of every three citizens in the former East lived in a “Platte,” while in the former West, by contrast, it was one in sixty.

As out of place as the rural Plattenbau may seem, the program was, in many respects, a success. Older residents whom I met while photographing, all original tenants, told me that they would never dream of moving out. When they arrived, it had felt like nothing short of a miracle to have hot water, a flush toilet, and central heating, and they were grateful. Together with covered parking and allotment gardens, housing-block life in the country became more “country-like.” In other respects, however, the program has outlived its usefulness. Many buildings are only partially inhabited or used as transient housing for seasonal agricultural workers. Others have been razed, shortened, or repartitioned to resemble blocks of townhouses. Those who remain year-round tend to be elderly or poor, often both. As in cities, Plattenbau life is stigmatized as standardized, compartmentalized, and anonymous.

Exploring the Plattenbau has made me reflect on my experiences living in different types of housing. When I was a child, I spent a lot of time in my grandmother's house, in Romania. She and my grandfather were working class and had grown up in poverty. In the 1950s, she insisted on a house rather than an apartment, and was able to secure one: standardized, semidetached, of concrete-slab construction. Its conveniences weren’t quite as modern as in the Plattenbauten. It had two ceramic-tile stoves for heating and a wood-burning water heater. Hot showers were infrequent, and everyone wore layers. But it had running water and a flush toilet. More importantly, it had its own private garden. It was in that garden that many of my mother's, my uncle's, and my own childhood memories were made. We had direct access to the outdoors, neighbors coming and going, passing things to one another over the fence, fetching warm eggs from the hen house and pears off the tree, playing board games and running up and down the street, well into the night. It was, in this respect, the inverse of the rural Plattenbau, affording a “country” life in the city.

We still have that house, and today it provides fertile ground for fond memories for my own children. I can't say the same, however, about my other childhood home: an apartment on the eighth floor of a middle-income housing project in New York City. There, that sense of connectedness never had the chance to flourish.

After several years of visiting rural Plattenbauten, the shock of them has waned. They no longer seem quite so jarring and learning about the context in which they emerged further rounds out the edges of sharp critique. What begins instead to emerge as out of place is the entire picture. These images are a reminder that virtually no corner of Germany, and indeed Europe, remains untouched. The blocks, together with a landscape that is just as fabricated and vulnerable, form living relics of an era in which society attempted to find its humanity by rejecting it.

Citation

Mireille Moga, “Plattenland,” PLATFORM, November 21, 2022.