Swabians are conservative folk and they got themselves a bit worked up eighty years ago when a whole settlement of super-modern houses was built in their beautiful Stuttgart. Today the Weissenhofsiedlung on the Killesberg ranks as a seminal architectural monument to the Bauhaus movement.

An “Arab village”, a “Little Jerusalem” and a “city eyesore” – that’s how the newspapers of the time reacted. The white concrete cubes didn’t really fit into the self-conscious Stuttgart of the Nazi period. Houses should be made of wood, with a proper gable, and if possible a nice wooden fence round the garden. Anything else was considered decadent by the brown-shirted rulers of the city. And so the Weissenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart was very nearly demolished only a little more than ten years after its creation in 1927. Paradoxically, it was the beginning of WWII which saved the settlement – even if only temporarily.

Today it ranks as a groundbreaking architectural monument. As you stroll through the settlement, it’s difficult to imagine how old the houses really are, so great was their influence on the post-war building style to which we have all become so accustomed. It was only during the ‘Golden Twenties’ that clean, angular shapes and flat roofs were a provocation for a tradition-bound approach to architecture; today such a style is quite normal, and perhaps even already a little outmoded.

But the list of those who planned the Weissenhofsiedlung reads like a Who’s Who of the pioneering architects of the time. The Killesberg settlement included designs by Walter Gropius, by the outstanding French-Swiss architect Le Corbusier, and by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who invented the slogan: “Less is more”.  Throwing out pretty much everything traditional, the new designs for living created by 17 internationally celebrated Bauhaus architects produced a settlement of 21 formally clean-lined buildings containing a total of 63 apartments on a prime site on the Killesberg hill. Everything was to be as plain and simple as possible. Using flexible floor-plans, the attempt was made to create tailor-made apartments in a space flooded with light and air. The idea was to give modern humans a maximum of freedom through a minimum of form. The designers experimented with new methods of building – such as frame construction – and with new materials.

So much experimentation was a step too far for their more traditionally-minded colleagues in the world of architecture. With Paul Bonatz, the designer of Stuttgart’s Central Station, leading the charge, they were not sparing in their criticism of the Weissenhof settlement. It was no surprise, therefore, that under the Nazis the settlement was condemned as “decadent art”. Of course the Nazis never carried out their plans to demolish the settlement, but the Weissenhof did ultimately become a victim of National Socialism. Because of its exposed position the government had set up anti-aircraft batteries on the Killesberg to protect Stuttgart from aerial attack. And so it was to be Allied bombs rather than Nazi demolition charges which led to the destruction of almost half the settlement. What the war had spared of the “Arab village” became in the new postwar German democracy a monument to progressive architecture.

July 2006 will see the opening of the Weissenhof Museum in the original Le Corbusier house, restored in the 1980’s to its original floor-plan and color design. It is intended that the building – actually two semi-detached houses - should in future serve a dual function: as a space for an exhibition on the history of the Weissenhof settlement, and as an exhibit in its own right which the public will be able to walk through. This summer, Le Corbusier’s vision of variable floor-plans and flexible living spaces will come alive once more in the Weissenhof settlement.