Publication
Settlement Freidorf near Basel was the first global cooperative in Switzerland, in which a group of people organized parts of their lives - such as housing, consumption, and education - collectively instead of privately. It was commissioned by the Union of Swiss Consumer Associations (USC) and completed in 1924 as the first large project of Swiss architect Hannes Meyer (1889-1954).
This thesis aims at a deeper and comprehensive understanding of this work of architecture, as a case study depicting the possibilities and limitations of co-operative housing in general. As a prologue, two historical sources are presented. On the one hand, there is the influential novel The Goldmakers' Village (Das Goldmacherdorf) from 1817, by German writer Heinrich Zschokke, considered as the first co-op novel. This work of fiction is a founding document of the ideas and theories that led to Freidorf. On the other hand, there is the black-and-white film made by Fritz MattmÃŒller between 1920 and 1923, showing the construction of Freidorf. These images are silent witnesses of the material genesis of the Siedlung, but also of the way it was used and inhabited following completion.
The actual thesis consists of five parts. The first part is an overview of the literature on both Freidorf and its architect, to show how both have been historized and interpreted so far. The second part is a minute description of Meyer's biography leading up to 1919, in which he first visited the building site in Muttenz. The third part is a reconstruction of the social history and the theoretical arguments, mainly in Switzerland and in the German-speaking world, concerning the organization of consumers and the planning of co-operative housing. Starting in the late 18th century, theorizations were developed to "crush the vice of capitalism", as Swiss economist Johann Friedrich Schär expressed it, when writing about Freidorf in 1921. In the fourth part, the monographic approach of the second part is mixed with the history of ideas in the third part, by means of a reconstruction of the genesis of Siedlung Freidorf. Archival analysis of the more than hundred board meetings of the cooperative - the first was held on May 20th, 1919 - structures a chronology of the problems that arose and the decisions that were taken, both organizational and architectural, during the construction of Freidorf, up until the official inauguration on June 1st, 1924.
The fifth and final part is an examination of the immediate reception, interpretation, and representation of the project, by means of its presence at the Exposition Internationale de la Cooperation et des Oeuvres Sociales by the International Cooperative Alliance, in the summer of 1924 in Ghent. Here, Meyer installed the Theater Co-op: an auditorium, a series of paintings, a glazed showcase with consumer goods, as well as a puppet theater performing the dream of cooperation and its realization in Freidorf. Architecture became propaganda, but the event