A realtor recently presented an overview of the current offer on the housing market in the Rhine-Main area.

The lecture was interesting for two reasons.

Firstly: The purchase prices in the area around Frankfurt have now reached a level that is hardly affordable for normal wage earners.

Second, the houses that you get at this price don't seem like they're worth the money.

It is architecture off the shelf.

The new building projects are mass-produced items from the single-family house catalog, they appear interchangeable.

It is, with all due respect, a white hell.

For example a project in Hünstelden: white facades with yellow color fields, cubic shapes, flat roofs.

17 of these sad double and triple houses stand next to each other as if randomly arranged.

Or the “Emil” project on the outskirts of Rödermark-Urberach.

780,000 euros for a very simply designed, white and gray terraced house with a small garden, the parking space costs another 20,000 euros more.

Pay attention to the aesthetics

Do you really want to live like that? And then also for this price? Apparently, such carelessly designed facades still correspond to what many imagine as “Bauhaus style”. The developers do not invest the high income in the architecture, because the customers run into them like that. In an interview, one property developer even admitted frankly that the architecture is not that important to the customer. They take what they can get.

That's bad, because these houses can no longer be removed. They stand for decades and spoil the landscape. When a lot of mass-produced goods were produced in the post-war decades, it was due to the housing shortage. Design issues were of secondary importance. The housing estates on the outskirts and in the suburbs of Frankfurt appear correspondingly dreary. In the meantime, people bitterly regret that no more emphasis was placed on the design, and they painstakingly try to repair the city.

One should learn from such mistakes! The municipalities in the surrounding area should give a little more thought to how they can promote urban development and architecture. Through guidelines for good building and aesthetic advice in the building authorities. The design quality is essential for the reputation and attractiveness of your own community. Otherwise you will regret it in a few years, for sure.