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Henry and Emma Budge Foundation Retirement House

Frankfurt-Westend, Germany
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depicted item: Henry and Emma Budge-altersheim.Image credit: © Matthias Matzak / VG BildkunstURL: http://neues-frankfurt.matzak.de/budgeheim/content/_9069869966_large.html

By the foundation of the Jewish banking family of Emma and Henry Budge, in 1928 Das Neue Frankfurt, led by Ernst May, announced a competition for a new building: A retirement home for Jewish and Christian residents of the “educated mid¬dle classes” was to be built. The architects Mart Stam, Werner Moser and Ferdinand Kramer won the competition. Mart Stam’s participation meant that the project was also incorporat¬ed into the lessons of the Build¬ing Department at the Bauhaus in 1928/29.

Mart Stam elaborates on their design approach:

“We started from the impression that the rooms of a specific preliminary project were listed in the competition program, but that there was no specific idea of what a retirement home should actually look like. As a result, we have endeavored, firstly, to grasp the essence of a nursing home, a home for old people, secondly, to meet the reasonable program requirements, and finally also to meet the conditions not listed but recognized by us. So if on the one hand this project is a fundamental solution to the task, on the other hand we are aware that we have to propose a reorganization of various operational details during implementation.

The guiding principles that arose from our conception of a retirement home were as follows:

  1. Give every pensioner as much space as possible, do not lock them in a room or a box, but let them consider their terrace and garden as their own as long as their strength allows,That means: bring the rooms in open connection with the garden and the terrace as much as possible,that means: make the building as low as possible.
  2. Management is a technical and organizational issue. It should be as simple and smooth as possible, that is, take the shortest possible route. We therefore projected the economic areas in the middle, we recognized the necessity of this arrangement and found it incorrect to avoid the resulting symmetrical grouping for formal considerations. It would be just as incorrect and ridiculous to intentionally build an airplane asymmetrical.”
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