Future Here Now: Roof Signals?
Two pieces of business before we get to the good stuff.
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OK. Now for the good stuff.
When I enrolled in my Masters in Community Planning program back a million years ago, my intent was to pursue a Masters of Geography, concentrating on cultural geography, at the same time. For a variety of reasons, including this little thing called pregnancy, I dropped the geography degree pretty quickly after I got to Cincinnati. The reason why I wanted to do that was because geography can be another kind of a Signal — in many cases, a signal of the past, like in this article, but those past signals can also help us spot current signals more effectively, as well. The moment in history that this place captures so clearly — and so subtly — is just wild:
Flat roof advocates argued in the 1920s that they were less expensive to build and maintain, in addition to fitting in with Modernist ideas about minimalism and functionality, like using roofs as terraces. But the pitched roof partisans — including many nationalists — argued something entirely different: that flat roofs were a blight on traditional German architecture, or, as the critic Paul Schultze-Naumburg wrote, “immediately recognizable as the child of other skies and other blood…”
The two sides met on Am Fischtal, which today survives as a literal and figurative monument to the Weimar Republic’s increasing political divide. The flat roof residences came first, part of a housing development built by a leftist housing cooperative between 1926 and 1932 known as Onkel Toms Hütte, or Uncle Tom’s Cabin, an unlikely moniker borrowed from a nearby tavern which was named after the Harriet Beecher Stowe novel. Across the street, GAGFAH, a housing cooperative supported by conservative white collar unions, built their response in 1928: a community called Fischtalgrund, which consists of 30 buildings with 120 housing units. The roofs, of course, were pitched.
When you drive through that neighborhood on your way home, or stop by the grocery store in the strip mall, it might be interesting to see what that architecture is telling you. In a lot of cases, it might be much more than you were expecting.
