Studio: international art (59.1913)

The Workmens Colonies

development which has necessarily brought in its
train all the drawbacks which ensue from the
segregation of a vast human population within a
restricted area. The dearth of dwelling accommo-
dation became all the more acutely felt when there
began to spring up in the near vicinity of Essen
a whole series of densely populated manufacturing
towns where but a few years before only small
country villages existed, such as Gelsenkirchen,
Miilheim, Bochum, Oberhausen, &c. With the
numerous iron- and coal-mines, rolling-mills, and
steel foundries, which, with the increasing exploita-
tion of the earth’s treasures, grew to prodigious
dimensions, a great stream of humanity flowed
thither without any land and housing policy being
brought forward to cope with this new industrial
development and provide good and cheap dwellings
for the workers. With the transformation of the
villages into great manufacturing towns, they were
the chief sufferers from the excessive price of land,
artificially enhanced as it was by
unprincipled speculation.

Friedrich Krupp, a far-seeing
man of broad and liberal ideas, was
among the first in Germany to
recognize that with the growing in-
dustrialization of the country and
the concentration of hundreds of
thousands in big towns the housing
question had become a social
problem, and as he saw no hope of
any measures being taken by the
State or the communes concerned
towards a satisfactory solution of
this question—one of paramount
importance in the development of
his undertaking—he resolved to use
his own private means for the im-
provement of the dwellings of his
employees. In this way—fully fifty
years ago—were founded the first
Krupp colonies, modest but syste-
matic undertakings which can hardly
be said to have been much more
than a carefully contrived solution
of the pressing exigencies that then
presented themselves on the basis
of securing a return on the capital
laid out. But a foundation was laid
on which his son and successor,

Friedrich Alfred Krupp, could con-
tinue to build, and so during the
’nineties of the past century arose
under his guidance the settlements

of the Kr upp Company

or colonies known as the older Alfredshof, the
Altenhof, Friedrichshof, and the Hanover Mining
Settlement.

It is, however, only in the more recent of the
Krupp colonies—those which have been formed
during the past ten years under the supervision and
according to the plans of Baurat Schmohl as chief
architect—that the requirements which the present
age imposes on planning schemes even of small pro-
portions have been fulfilled. An irregular and more
or less arbitrary method of building has given place
to a coherent, organic configuration in which regard
is paid to those principles of construction and plan-
ning and those requirements—technical, economic,
and hygienic—which with us are nowadays the
foundation of all building above the standard of the
bricklayer.

The Alfredshof colony is an extension of an
older settlement which was founded in the ’nineties,
and like this is composed in the main of the

THE ALFREDSHOF COLONY AT ESSEN

BAURAT R. SCHMOHL, ARCHITECT IN CHIEF

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