White City Estate is Designed Along the Zeilenbau Pattern
The design of White City Estate is in no way accidental. The estate plan is
partly influenced by Zeilenbau ideas, with blocks aligned along a north-south
axis for maximum sunshine, with green spaces in between, and an east-west axis,
with spaces for public buildings.
In the 1930s, a team from the London County Council toured Europe to find the
best examples of Housing Estates that incorporated communal open spaces where
private gardens would not be viable. They recognised the importance of open
space for the well-being of those living in these densely populated areas. The
LCC instructed their chief architect, Edwin Paul Wheeler, to incorporate several
grassed areas in between blocks and a larger communal area was to be reserved in
the centre of the estate for the benefit of residents. The estate was not
completed on schedule and the blocks to the South West were not built until
several years later.
ZEILENBAU PLANNING: German cities—particularly Frankfurt and
Berlin—embarked on major housing initiatives in the mid-1920s, they generally
adopted bold new ideas about architecture and planning. The broader movement was
encapsulated by the term Neues Bauen (“New Building”). Frankfurt, for example,
has been called “one of the most remarkable city planning experiments of the
twentieth century.” Between 1924-30 over 1,650,000 housing units were built in
the country. Most of those housing projects—dozens of them—were built in the
linear Zeilenbau pattern with a north-south row direction (or nearly so). Walter
Schwagenscheidt, beginning in 1928, conducted studies to determine the
“scientific optimum” orientation for the housing blocks. He called them
“Comparative Sunlight Studies.” He concluded that the best orientation was to
align the building with its long axis 22-½˚ west of north.
There is an overarching theme of the architecture of the 1930s: using scientific
methods to shape architecture in relation to access to the sun. The larger
effort to give sun-responsive architecture a basis in scientific rationality is
illustrated by several research projects in the United States and England.
