Hochhausstadt (High-Rise City)
Core idea
Unbuilt vertical city stacking commerce in a plinth beneath residential slabs.
Why it matters
Pushed functionalist zoning to its severest, most diagrammatic extreme.
Description
Hochhausstadt is an unbuilt theoretical city designed by Ludwig Hilberseimer in 1924 and published in his 1927 book Großstadtarchitektur. It proposes a single repeated hybrid type, the block-slab: a five-storey courtyard block containing mainly commercial and work uses forms a plinth, from which a fifteen-storey residential slab rises directly above. The arrangement vertically separates labour from dwelling so that inhabitants descend to workplaces and ascend to homes, with traffic layered across pedestrian decks and lower roadways. Rendered in austere, near-monochrome perspectives, the project reduces the metropolis to an endlessly extensible grid of identical superblocks, deliberately stripped of ornament and individuality.
Significance
Hochhausstadt represents the most uncompromising statement of functionalist vertical zoning, carrying the separation of urban functions to a diagrammatic extreme that Hilberseimer himself later criticised as inhuman. Conceived as a deliberate foil to Le Corbusier's contemporaneous schemes, it influenced subsequent thinking on high-density urban form and, through Hilberseimer's later teaching in the United States, on mid-century planning debates.
What shaped it
- Ville Contemporaine / Plan Voisin / Ville Radieuse (1922–1933)
- The skyscraper (1885)
- Une Cité Industrielle (1904 / 1917)
Sources
- https://www.artic.edu/artworks/101043/highrise-city-hochhausstadt-perspective-view
- https://quod.lib.umich.edu/u/ummu/x-00-12922/00_12922