Qualla: Staaken Garden City

Staaken Garden City: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ingolf from Berlin , Deutschland, CC BY-SA 2.0. By 1915 the German building trade had more or less stopped. Mobilisation had taken the men, materials were going to the front, and across the country the scaffolding came down. Four kilometres west of the state armaments works in Spandau, one site kept going, because the Ministry of the Interior had decided that the people making the shells needed somewhere decent to sleep. What rose between 1914 and 1917 looks nothing like a war project. It looks like a small town that has been standing for two centuries — gabled terraces, plastered walls, a market square, streets that bend just enough that you cannot see to the end of them. Almost all of it went up in four years, to the original drawings, which for a scheme of this size is close to unheard of.

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Image: Ingolf from Berlin , Deutschland | CC BY-SA 2.0

Staaken Garden City: Built Because of the Shells

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Karl Kiem, CC BY 3.0. The client was the Ministry of the Interior, and it wanted to reform German workers' housing by example. The intended tenants were employees of the state-owned armaments factories in Spandau, whose housing had traditionally been wretched. The ministry bought 35 hectares of pine-e...

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Image: Karl Kiem | CC BY 3.0

Staaken Garden City: A Kit of Five Houses

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Karl Kiem, CC BY-SA 4.0. The design behaves like a kit. Five house types combine into groups, then vary through a set of façade options, window and door fittings, and different entrance stairs, while walls, fences and outbuildings shape everything in between. Types 1 to 3 are four-family houses with a ce...

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Image: Karl Kiem | CC BY-SA 4.0

Staaken Garden City: Decent and True

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mehman Ibragimov, CC BY-SA 4.0. Schmitthenner furnished a model apartment so tenants could see what he had in mind — simple, sturdy, well-proportioned, affordable, modelled on the Dresdner Werkstätten. His rule for it was blunt. 'Everything should only be decent and true. Don't make yourself look more than you ...

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Image: Mehman Ibragimov | CC BY-SA 4.0

Staaken Garden City: Dollhouse Cottages

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Karl Kiem, CC BY-SA 4.0. Critics have never quite settled on what they are looking at. In 1917 Fritz Stahl admired the 'certain mobility and warmth' the estate achieved without imitating old villages. In 1979 Julius Posener was cooler: 'The illusion of the medieval small town is completely successful,' h...

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Image: Karl Kiem | CC BY-SA 4.0

Staaken Garden City: The Line Down Finkenkruger Weg

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Abenteurer Morane, CC BY 3.0. The estate's western boundary is a road called Finkenkruger Weg, and for four decades that road was an international frontier. On 30 August 1945 Britain and the Soviet Union traded ground in Berlin — the British took the airfield at Gatow, the Soviets took the old village of Staa...

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Image: Abenteurer Morane | CC BY 3.0