It’s claimed that Cologne built more social housing than any other German city in the 1920s. The city’s housing programme deserves study in own right therefore but it also provides a fascinating case study in the interwar evolution from an arts and crafts-inspired architecture to a more functionalist modernism. In Cologne, we see an explicit shift from the Gartenstadt to Neues Bauen – from the Garden City to a type of ‘New Building’ (sometimes termed New Objectivity) that emphasised...
