A trip to Dreieich-Buchschlag in southern Hesse slows things down.

Anyone who walks in the villa colony can see for themselves the effect that the garden city movement was aiming for.

Buchschlag was one of the first garden cities in this country, its roots go back to 1904, when the Frankfurt merchant and social reformer Jakob Latscha acquired a cooperative that he founded in a forest area south of Frankfurt in order to create a settlement in the country based on the English model.

It should actually be reserved for the working class, but the large plots of land and the high aesthetic standards drive the building and purchase prices so high that the educated middle class finally settles here.

Rainer Schulz

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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Numerous villas and country houses were built, most of which are still preserved today.

Most are variations on a basic type and reflect the architectural influences of their time, from Art Nouveau to Country Style.

The architects follow a canon of strict design rules.

From the brick or sandstone base to the elaborate, playful gabled, mansard and hipped roofs with their bay windows, dormers and dormers, diversity was sought in unity.

The builders of the villa colony combine a sense of style with restraint.

Idyllic forest settlement

So you walk, only a few minutes by S-Bahn from Frankfurt, through a harmoniously laid out forest settlement, past fine artists' houses with magnificent gables, enchanted witches' cottages with impressive roof landscapes and isolated Art Nouveau pearls.

The atmosphere is vaguely English, many gardens appear slightly overgrown.

Today's residents of the villa colony are mostly well-heeled and friendly, they also greet strangers.

Posters are hanging on a fence inviting people to house concerts.

The living room is then cleared out several times a year for a music evening.

But this idyll is endangered.

In the recent past, more and more new buildings have been spreading in the garden city, which do not want to fit in with this ensemble at all.

Tasteless houses, clunky and ostentatious.

One of these villas has spread out on Ernst-Ludwig-Allee like a white plastered bunker with a slightly pitched roof.

The black slats of the sun protection hang in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows, there is gravel in the front yard, and the extra-wide garage extends to the property line.

Towards the street, the house presents itself as unfriendly, giving passers-by the cold shoulder – a gesture that doesn't fit Buchschlag, where the historical buildings are designed to be inviting by allowing an unobstructed view of the facades and the decorative gables.

Like a sin

Another squat block has smuggled itself between the graceful country houses on the Bogenweg.

Here too: floor-to-ceiling windows without the otherwise typical folding shutters, the roof is only moderately inclined.

The curved sidewalk was simply straightened for the fence.

This average product would hardly attract attention in any new development area, but in this environment it seems like a fall from grace.

How could this happen?

Who approves this?

The villa colony is one of the first so-called entire complexes to be recognized as a monument in Hesse.

In 1979, 93 houses were placed under protection.

That was also urgently needed.

Buchschlag survived the war relatively unscathed, only seven houses were destroyed.

However, as elsewhere, greater damage was done in the post-war period.

At that time, the creation of living space was also in the foreground in the villa colony, some plots were divided and the additional plots of land were built on.

The strict design rules of the founding period were not applied.

Even the house designed by the architect Friedrich Pützer, who drew up the development plan for the garden city, was demolished in 1970 and replaced by a banal residential building.