Garden at the semi-detached house by Le Corbusier Weißenhofsiedlung Stuttgart

The garden at Le Corbusier's semi-detached house was created in 1927 in a very short construction period as a joint complex with the garden of the neighbouring detached house. Research revealed that the gardens were not entirely constructed according to the principles of Le Corbusier and his representative in Stuttgart, the Swiss architect Alfred Roth. This was probably due to the difficult terrain situation, which Le Corbusier was unable to assess accurately, as he had only visited Stuttgart once before planning began - at the invitation of the overall artistic director of the Werkbund exhibition, Mies van der Rohe.

In the course of the reconstruction and the new layout of the semi-detached house and its garden, the aim was to create a sustainable compromise between the original state of the garden at the beginning of the exhibition and the principles of Le Corbusier, as expressed in his 5 theses on new architecture. The project was initiated by the Wüstenrot Foundation, which was preparing the house and garden for the installation of a museum by the city of Stuttgart. The concept was based on drawings by Alfred Roth and Le Corbusier. Contradictions in the floor plans and in the isometric drawings were checked against photographs from the construction period. The planting at the time was also reconstructed as far as possible through photographs. The only woody plants thought to date from the construction period - an old black pine to the south and a lilac bush on the embankment - were preserved. Le Corbusier's principle of placing his residential buildings in the largely unchanged landscape and arranging the actual garden on top of the building was taken into account by modelling the terrain without technical fixtures. Where dry stone walls made of Cannstatt travertine (planted with heather and mountain pines) were built during the construction period, we have created simple lawn and meadow slopes to situate the house appropriately in the terrain.