Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/463

 THE FIRST GERMAN MUNICIPAL EXPOSITION 445

defined sections of the city. Factories, and the houses of their workmen, are scattered pretty well through the city. In Stutt- gart the courts, and the windows as well, must be of such size that direct light shall enter the windows at an angle of 45. The intricacies of some of these arrangements are graphically pre- sented in certain building plans exhibited by Dresden. Take a tenement row, for example: the main building must not be so high as the street is wide, with sixteen meters as maximum ; the maximum height of the wing building is fifteen meters; a rear building must leave a distance between itself and the front and wing equal to the respective heights of the latter, and must not approach the line of the building lot nearer than four and one- half meters ; six meters back of this may be another rear building, which may touch the line of the lot on the second side, but on the other two sides must leave, respectively, four and one-half and six meters. This seems fairly complicated ; and one wonders if all the calculations are upon so scientific a basis as the speci- fications would suggest. A detached house in Dresden must not cover over one-third of the building lot. The depth of the house equals the width, and the maximum dimension is twenty meters. The back garden must be at least as deep as the height of the building, and the side gardens must be at least as wide as one- half the height of the building; the front garden may vary between a minimum of four and one-half meters and a maximum of twenty meters.

It almost seems as though the very arithmetic of it all would make one house dangerously like all others. One may well question whether such strict supervision in seeming details would not be weakening in more than one respect, in spite of the very evident excellence of the centralized planning which makes for coherence, symmetry, and harmony.

The suburban movement. The walled city, constantly growing in numbers, but rigidly restricted as to area, became more cramped and crowded when the industrial influx set in. Expan- sion was necessary. Small villages grew outside of the walls, but they had no organic connection with each other or with the city. With the razing of the encircling walls, however,