Stuttgart in the 1920s was a modern city! Ernst Otto Oßwald's Tagblattturm tower and Erich Mendelsohn's Schocken department store bear witness to an openness to new ideas that is surprising in Stuttgart. Following the success of the Werkbund exhibition ‘Die Form’ (The Form) on the vacant railway site in the city centre in 1924, the idea of a proper building exhibition on the theme of ‘Die Wohnung’ (The Apartment) took shape. Under the direction of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, 17 international architects were able to realise their ideas for new living. Among them were two buildings by Le Corbusier – today they are UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
But there were also architects who felt that the new ideas went too far, were too extreme. And in 1933, just a few hundred metres away, they realised a counter-design: the Kochenhof estate.
On our walk from the Weissenhofsiedlung to the Kochenhof, we will also learn about other ‘modern’ projects, such as the Brenzkirche, the Killesberghöhe, an exclusive residential area planned by architectural firms such as Baumschlager, Eberle and David Chipperfield, as well as the new visitor information centre by Barkow Leibinger, which is being built as part of the IBA 2027.
