Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
at all costs, another reminder of the authoritarian subtext of Nazi organi-
cism and holism.
The town's residential areas operated on the same hierarchical principal
whereby the whole ruled the parts. The apartment buildings and single-
family dwellings constituted the cells of the organism, and the roads wind-
ing around among them (as opposed to rectilinear major arteries) formed
its capillaries.
57
Green gardens and commons around and among the houses
and apartments kept the system well sunned and oxygenated.The cells were
arranged in subsystems of small communities, each with its own schools,
groceries, and other facilities.
58
At every level of organization, multi-story
buildings were gathered at the center to preserve the sense of order and
control from the center and above.
59
The main transportation routes were
strictly separated from the residential areas, embedded in a greenbelt sepa-
rating the town from other population centers and defining the city's skin.
The body politic of Salzgitter, however, never matured fully. Because pri-
ority had been given to the industrial sites and to workers' housing, Rimpl's
grand scheme lay uncompleted at the end of the Second World War, real-
ized only in the form of visionary architectural renderings and models.
With Germany's defeat, the
Werke
shut down, ceding their role back to the
revived Ruhr and other iron districts. Salzgitter lived on, however. During
the Cold War, West Germany maintained Salzgitter and, to a small extent,
its industries; in competition with nearby East Germany, it did not want to
show an increase in unemployment. However, the experiment—the envi-
ronmental dream that was Salzgitter—was over.
CONCLUSION
Both Norris and Salzgitter offer insight into perceptions of the urban con-
dition as we enter the twenty-first century. Both were interesting early
attempts to come to grips with problems left by the worst excesses of the
Industrial Revolution and unplanned urban sprawl. Both displayed enor-
mous confidence in planning for the future. Moreover, planners in both the
United States and Germany tended to see those problems in regional and
ultimately in national terms, foreshadowing later attempts, in the 1980s and
the 1990s, to take up these issues.
In the end, of course, both Norris and Salzgitter were failures, whether
judged by their own initial goals or by today's standards. Each failed owing
to contingencies. Germany lost the war and was disarmed.The Hermann-
