50 House no. 2, kindergarten, designed by Paul Heim and Albert Kempter. Fig. Łukasz Magdziarz
49 House no. 2, kindergarten, designed by Paul Heim and Albert Kempter, a postcard view from the playground (south), 1929. The Wrocław Museum of Architecture, City of Wrocław Construction Archive
Paul Heim and Albert Kempter also designed the new kindergarten based on the ”Fröbel” and ”Montessori” methods (no. 2) and could accommodate sixty children86. It was a ground-floor building with a wooden façade, its main room was located centrally and had extra skylights located in the part of the roof protruding upwards from a flat roof. The main room was surrounded by smaller rooms for groups of children. The layout of the kindergarten was strongly influenced by the new pedagogical methods, widely applied in Germany at the time. The next option for tenement housing is a terraced block of flats (no. 9–22) with small flats of 45 m2 to 90 m2 which was divided into segments designed by many different architects. These are solutions that can be treated as ”Existenzminimum” flats: so much popularised in the interwar period in Germany. The corner segment by Emil Lange has a staircase leading to four flats upstairs, which allowed him to make a saving of 40% of the surface area allotted for communication uses. The living room and kitchen were located on the east-west axis. Common ancillary rooms were also designed.
80 WuWA
5. The 1929 WuWA housing estate
86
Guido HARBERS, Wohnung und Werkraum. Werkbund – Ausstellung Breslau 1929, ”Der Baumeister”, vol. 27, no. 9, 1929, p. 298. It was a ”Fröbel” and ”Montessori” type of kindergarten applying modern teaching methods. The ”Fröbel” method (devised by German educator Friedricha Wilhelma Augusta Fröbel (1782–1852) who was a student of Heinrich Pestalozzie and spread his methodological concepts in Germany) is a method of pre-primary education based on the assumption that school is a garden, the child is a plant and the teacher is a gardener nurturing the plant-child and is facilitating its growth accordingly to its needs. Fröbel put a lot of emphasis on the harmonious physical, mental and moral development of the child. He created so-called ”children's gardens” where children could become occupied with activities that were not practiced by their parents, such as active participation in tasks, self-reliance or coexistence with their peers. The main tools applied in this method were activities involving