Where it began

The Metzleinstaler Hof is smaller and quieter than its neighbour, and yet it's the more important of the two, because this was the city's first real municipal housing block, built in two phases between 1916 and 1925, which means the first half still dates back to the days of the empire.

 

You can read that shift straight off the building itself. The oldest part is still ordinary rental housing, the kind a private owner would put up, while the later part has the wide gateways, the green courtyard and the shared spaces that became the signature of the fifteen years that followed.

 

Those courtyards held more than grass and a few trees. The blocks got laundries, so you no longer had to dry your washing over the stove, and alongside them came kindergartens, health clinics, libraries and bathhouses, because a private bathroom was far from standard in every flat.

 

That was the whole idea behind it. Four walls lift nobody out of poverty, so the rest had to come with them.

 

A few steps further along stands a block named after a poet who called for a strike.