Myco magic: more mushrooms

Autumn is the time to see fungi. Although these organisms (fungi are not plants!) are present year round they become more noticeable as they produce reproductive structures especially in late summer and autumn. These reproductive structures we know as mushrooms, toadstools and bracket polypores.

Many mushrooms [op up in grassland. These are of the hooded variety that burst from the ground as a rounded ball (left). Other fungi grow on wood. On the right the white buds thus burst from the bark to produce a delicate gilled fans where the spores develop (middle).

As the reproductive organs of a fungus some mushrooms seem to emphasise this by their shape as the first egg or ball burst from the ground the stalk starts to grow to raise the hood. At sufficient height the hood expands and opens up revealing the gills underneath so that the spores can be released into the air. These ageric mushrooms are widespread in parks, especially around oak trees.

Some mushrooms work with plants, others serve as the clean-up crew. These saprophytes live on dead or decaying organic matter. As wood is difficult to digest mushrooms have specialised with species growing on a specific species of tree. The sulphur hooded mushrooms are omnipresent in parks, gardens and woodland. I was also taken by the cluster of ink black mushrooms at the foot of a tree.

Gartenstadt Welheim, Bottrop: vernacular ensemble architecture

The village-like suburb of Bottrop at Welheim is a good example of a garden village, although it was built as factory housing for the neighbouring mine Vereinigte Welheim. Gartenstadt Welheim has been lovingly restored and the post-war replacement buildings blend in well to the overall ensemble that was created here between 1914 and 1923. There is a great sense of place here!

The street Am Kämpchen (at the little field) is typical for this garden village. The curved street is lined with terraced housing in long blocks with a variable roof treatment. The block in the middle is much simpler in execution and design, but stull retains the overall design with rendered walls and red clay tiles on the roof: this is an example of a post-war replacement block.

The Flöttestrasse is an old lane that connected the hamlet of Welheim with the floating watermill (a Flötte Muhl) on the Boye Brook. It has been completely incorporated into the garden village and this leafy residential street is lined by large semidetached houses and short terraced of row houses.

The Ulmenplatz (Elm Square) is one of the typical “places” that feature heavily in Sitte-esque design. Here the place has been designed as a garden square surrounded by asymmetrical long blocks of terraced housing. The trees on the square are actually elm trees, a nice detail!

Each house was given a small glass awning above the front door. The entrances are often grouped in pairs with the floor plan of each dwelling mirrored. The original doors in green with the small window have been restored or reinstated where they had been replaced as part of the restoration in 1993. The houses are set back a little from the street with a typical street profile with a narrow green verge planted with trees. The front gardens are laid to grass and have no hedges or fences.

The streetscape is typical of a garden village. The housing on the streets is a mix of semidetached houses and row housing in long blocks. These terraces typically have protruding sections at the ends and dormers that create a certain rhythm. In the middle of the picture a high grey concrete structure can be seen from this street Streuwiese. This is the bunker that stands on the central Mathias Stinnes Platz that was named after an important coal shipping mogul.

 

The Apselstrasse is another typical street wth vernacular architecture lining a long slightly curved street with a green verge planted with trees on one side of the road. The corner plots often do have a hedge (visible on the right) to provide more privacy for the residents.

The street Im Holzgrund show the typical treatment of corners which are kept open. Angled blocks are seldom used in this garden village. This supports the idea that it is more German than English in character with a focus more on places and informal arrangement of blocks combined with the symmetrical ensemble of asymmetrical buildings in an overarching vernacular style.

That vernacular staple of half timbered panels are not often used in this garden village. Here such non-structural detail is used to differentiate blocks and create more visual variety using a limited number of basic floorplans and designs. Here two blocks of up-down apartments that are identical internally but differ greatly in external appearance. The low annex with two coal sheds are part of the total design. In some blocks they connected at a different point or are built detached from the main building.

These double villas on the Welheimer Strasse have been connected by a low annex that again contains the coal sheds. The individual houses are emphasised by the treatment of the roofs. These larger buildings are situated on the edge of the garden village near the underpass of the railway that gave access to the colliery site beyond.

The Lindenstrasse (Lime Street) is a clos-like narrow street with a symmetrical layout of asymmetrical blocks of terraces housing at either side. By creating a set-back in the middle of the street a place is created. The lime trees would have been cut back regularly, but have now grown very high. There are no true closes in this garden village. This staple of the English garden city movement was less used in continental Europe for safety concerns, as dead end streets were seen as undesirable.

The Hugo Stinnes Strasse (named after an industrialist, who owned the United Welheim Mining company) was bayonetted with a small place at the shift in street alignment. This is again typical for Sitte-esque urban design. The houses are of a basis type similar to the rest of the garden village, but feature many porches with rounded arches, a sand-coloured render and a low plinth.

The dormers above the walls in sandy yellow render are clad in wood shingles. The entrances are again paired. The arched entrance porch reappears in other places. But only as a corner feature. The reuse of such a feature gives the whole garden village a great sense of consistency of design.

Im Sundern is one of the streets that feature a wide expanse of grass as a linear green along the street. This creates space in the street layout and also emphasises the anti-urban character of this Gartenstadt. The trees follow the street and thus focus the view.

At the corner of the Gungstrasse and Im Gungfeld a defacto entrance to the garden village was created by two angled blocks and pushing the corners back to have a rounded green that connects to the linear green along Im Gungfeld. This is one of the few places where angled blocks were used.

On the other side of the Gungstrasse the Horstbruch (a name indicating marshland with a thicket) shows replacement blocks on either side of the street. A bomb destroyed the original terraced housing here; it was replaced by apartments. Two original blocks can be seen at the entrance to the street (at the back). These blocks are typical of the 1950s but blend in well.   

Gartenstadt Welheim, Bottrop: a German garden city

The Manor of Welheim (meaning: home by a natural spring) was given to the Order of the Teutonic Knights by Everhard von Welheim in 1230. They expanded the manor into a Commandry (Kommende). The old manorial chapel remained the head church of the surrounding villages of Welheim, Boy and Batenbrock and the knights held patronage of the Salvatator Mundi Church in Duisburg until the reformation of 1572. In 1369 the knight were gifted the Emscherbruch, a large swamp wood, with the hunting rights. Here they bred sturdy ponies that centuries later would be used as working animals in the mines. With the dissolution of the Order by Napoleon the commandry with its moated castle, grain stores, farms and mills, was given to the Duke of Arenberg in exchange for the loss of their ancestral property that was annexed by France.

The Duke granted several mining concession in the middle of the 19^th century as mining spread across the Ruhr Revier. The Colliery Prosper, sunk in 1856, was named in honour of the 7^th Duke. Other collieries around Bottrop were Maximilian, Konstantinopel, Gottfried and Arenberg-Fortsetzung. In the neighbouring County Mark the Zeche Mathias Stinnes was started in 1863 near Karnapp, just beyond the Boye Brook that formed the edge of the Manor of Welheim. In 1910 The Zeche Vereinigte Welheim was founded to exploit a coalfield below the Welheimer Mark. Two pit were sunk for this colliery that started production in 1914. A small colony (Kolonie Werkstrasse) of a single street with large semidetached houses on either side was first built around 1910 directly east of the colliery site.

Behind the moated castle, near the Prosper Colliery and directly south of the United Welheim, a large workers colony was built between 1914 and 1923 for the miners and other personnel employed by the United Welheim Colliery. Some 650 buildings were erected in what was conceived from the start as a garden village (hence the name Gartenstadt). For this garden village the Gungfeld behind the tiny village of Welheim was developed. Older routes -Welheimer Strasse, Gungstrasse and Flöttestrasse- were incorporated into the new layout and the mill stream (Mühl Flötte) of the Boye Brook was redirected away from the planned housing to better prevent flooding.

The garden village at Welheim was designed with curved streets that terminate in T-junctions or small ‘places’. Two squares are part of the layout, as well as two close-like features. The houses where mostly built in terraces with rows of 4 to 8 dwellings. There are few detached properties. These are mostly located in the section for engineers near the goods rail way along the northern side of the development. Semidetached houses are included throughout the garden village. All buildings face the street, but the building line is varied according to Unwinesque principles; the corners are treated in line with those principles: angled blocks, set-backs and protruding sections. On several basic floor plans no less than 40 house types were designed for this housing development, making is one of the most varied and decorative in the Ruhr Area.

The garden village at Welheim was built on a more or less triangular site. It has many features of a typical garden city development. The open spaces are an important feature here, closes and angled corners are seldom used. The original buildings are shown in dark grey. The later additions (replacement buildings) have a lighter grey tone, whilst the older or private buildings have a darker tone. The context of Gartenstadt Welheim consisted of the moated House Welheim (H) with the hamlets of Welheim (W) and Boy (B), the mines Prosper (P) with the Kokerei (K), Mathias Stinnes (MS) each with a large colony (C) and the mines Vereinigte Welheim (VW) with a small street colony, and Arenberg Vortsetzung (AV). Each mine had a spoil heap nearby and was accessible by railway which formed a tangle on this side of Bottrop.

The colliery was located directly north of the colony on the other side of the railway. In 1931 the exploitation of the mine ended and the buildings were converted to a Hydrierwerk (a coal liquification plant) for the manufacture of synthetic oils and fuels. In the 1980s the plant was decommissioned and all the buildings were taken down. Now a furniture factory dominates the site that has been turned into an industrial park. WW2 brought some destruction, with about 25% of the houses destroyed by bombs. Because of the central location between many industrial site a large anti air raid bunker was constructed on the central square. After the war the bombed-out houses were rebuilt. The Kokerei (Cokes Plant) was enlarged in the 1950 and the ruins of the former Commandry were completely removed and built over.

The garden village was renovated as part of the IBA Emscherpark. This International Architecture Exhibition ran from 1989 until 1999. In 1993 the work on Welheim was finished and the garden village was given protected status as a listed monument. It is also part of the industrial heritage trail of the Route der Industriekultur.