Thoughts and Critiques on Migge and Siedlung

 

      Leberecht Migge was a landscape architect who evoked both praise and criticism in his designs and ideas. In creating Siedlung in the late 1920's, his focus was on creating metabolic cycles of life within people's residences. Instead of segregating the garden from the house, Migge proposed an integration of the two, designed even down to the smallest details. 

    Though Migge was largely opposed to the ideas that had formed city life at the time, Siedlung is proposed as an urban-outskirts alternative and instead of alienating workers from the city life, liberating them to have self-sufficient lives and homes. 

    At the time, Migge had designed the adjacent kitchen as a women's space, and the gardening as the mans. This was a commonly held concept at the time and has received criticism in more modern times. Despite many of Migge's concepts being considered "progressive" he also received backlash for not thinking outside of the nuclear family when designing this space. 

    The concept of creating "collective dwellings" is a very interesting concept. In my opinion, I am a big fan of the idea of crafting a residence to be a self-sufficient and a full functional dwelling, while still allowing community engagement. Some of my critique would be that this is not a reasonable or viable option for many people. I do think Siedlung could work in a small context, but as a large entity, probably not. The likelihood that everyone would want to do their part and stick to these small confined roles of "women in the kitchen" and "men in the garden" doesn't seem very high.

    In concept, I like this idea a lot, but it is forcing a box onto something as big vast as people's differing lives. What happens to older people who need to be taken care of and can no longer tend to a garden? What happens to the single man or woman who can't upkeep these multiple roles? Similar to the criticism Migge received after designing Siedlung are still applicable to this day, even more so. Migge's idea has a lot of good ideas, but other housing typologies would be needed in order to make this reasonable for the greater population.

    Overall, I found this topic to be very interesting. While I would personally really enjoy living in a space like this, I think this concept is outdated and would need to be reworked in order to work in our modern and ever-changing world.