Tuinwijk-Zuid in Haarlem is 'a garden city according to the English idea', as can be read on the brown ANWB sign that is screwed to a wall in the 1922 residential area near the Spaarne. More than a century ago, Han van Loghem, the architect of Tuinwijk-Zuid, indeed had high expectations of the garden city that was promoted by the influential Garden City Movement. With Ebenezer Howard, author of the book Garden Cities of Tomorrow (1902) and founder of the garden city movement, Van Loghem believed that families should live in ground-level homes with gardens. He called storey houses, which filled the new residential areas in major Dutch cities in the decades before and after 1900, “one of the most inhumane forms of housing ever devised.” He thought that houses stacked on top of each other were only suitable for “the unmarried and the elderly.” “In the new cities the entire house will be sufficient for a family, because only then can the children grow up in nature,” Van Loghem predicted in 1920 in articles about the 'housing issue'. “The heath, the dunes and the forests, they are ready to create the new garden cities.”
Yet Tuinwijk-Zuid does not resemble Letchworth in the English county of Hertfordshire, the first garden city in the world from 1904 where city and countryside had to be reconciled. In Letchworth, which now has more than 30,000 inhabitants, there are mostly detached houses, semi-detached houses and terraces of three or four houses in traditional cottage style. Tuinwijk-Zuid, on the other hand, consists of only 86 terraced houses with their own front and back gardens surrounding two large, collective courtyards. This makes Tuinwijk-Zuid not so much an English garden city as a variation on the ancient Dutch courtyard with terraced houses around a courtyard, hundreds of which were built from the Middle Ages until well into the 20th century.
Cubic terraced houses
Van Loghem designed Tuinwijk-Zuid on behalf of Tuinwijk, one of the hundreds of housing associations and housing associations that were created after the introduction of the 1901 Housing Act. The aim of Tuinwijk, founded in 1918, was to use subsidies from the national government and the municipality of Haarlem to build spacious, affordable homes for teachers, lawyers, doctors and other 'middle class people', in the middle of a residential area in what was then Heemstede and now Haarlem. is.
Photos: Lebrina Latupeirissa
When Van Loghem started his design, he was an architect looking for a new style that suited the new era that had begun after the First World War. First Berlage was his idol, then he looked closely at the architecture of the Amsterdam School and finally he felt something for the 'faith of the square' of the art movement De Stijl, founded in 1917. The terraced houses of Tuinwijk-Zuid therefore became 'cubic' brick houses with flat roofs and protruding rectangular building parts on the ground floor. But Van Loghem was not a dogmatic believer in the square: not everything became rectangular in Tuinwijk-Zuid. For example, the dividing walls on the balconies facing the street are sloping and the three gates to the courtyard gardens have barrel vaults.
The layout of the houses was also new. Unlike usual in the Dutch terraced houses of the time, the kitchens in the homes of Tuinwijk-Zuid are not at the back but on the street side, so that not only the dining rooms but also the living rooms border the gardens. With this, the socialist Van Loghem, who had turned his office into a cooperative, wanted to promote the community spirit of the Tuinwijkers. The roof terrace with pergola on the street side, which was provided by a large number of the homes, was also a novelty.
A ruin in the long term
When Tuinwijk-Zuid was completed in 1922, the chairman of Tuinwijk expressed the expectation that the residents would transform their roof terraces into roof gardens and that the pergolas would soon be overgrown by “the Virginia creeper, the climbing rose or honeysuckle”. But the pergolas were only used as a laundry rack, writes the art historian Wim de Wagt Van Loghem. Image of attitude to life (1995). Tuinwijk-Zuid was also disappointing in other respects. Due to inadequate foundations, the walls of many homes started to crack shortly after completion. Many extensions on the street side even became detached. The homes were also plagued by leaks and moisture penetration because they had no cavity walls. “A ruin in the long term,” De Wagt calls Van Loghem's “collectivist experiment.”
Yet Tuinwijk-Zuid did not end in failure. Despite its shortcomings, the middle-class district, with a relatively large number of writers, architects and artists among its residents, became the 'Latin Quarter' of Haarlem. The most famous Tuinwijker is the writer Godfried Bomans (1913-1971), who lived at Zonnelaan 17 from 1943 to 1961. Bomans now has the statement written on a wall in one of the gates that 'anyone who travels a lot will experience that he could once have noticed the truly interesting things about the people in his own street.'
Tuinwijk-Zuid is not a ruin more than a century after its completion. In 1991, the neighborhood was restored and the houses were given good foundations. And although more than thirty years later the pergolas are still not overgrown with climbing plants, the neighborhood looks flourishing. With their wooden structures and balconies with balustrades painted burgundy red and egg yolk, the houses of Tuinwijk-Zuid are among the most beautiful terraced houses in the Netherlands. And with a selection of mature trees, the courtyard gardens look like an English landscape park. Tuinwijk-Zuid is still not an English garden city, but it is one of the largest and most beautiful courtyards in the Netherlands.
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