Germany revives building style with a bleak history – prefab housing
Mass-produced concrete apartment towers once dominated cities in the former East Germany. Can modern ‘slab buildings’ win over new fans with better design and materials?
[MANNHEIM, Germany] On a bustling construction site in Mannheim, a former industrial hub in Germany’s south, builders are putting the finishing touches on pink and creamy-white timber buildings that look like copied-and-pasted toy blocks laid out around a central square.
The apartment complex, which will contain 194 units of much-needed affordable housing, is being constructed from prefabricated elements – factory-built walls and other modular elements that are trucked to the worksite, reducing costs and construction times. It is a technique that Germany’s newly appointed housing minister Verena Hubertz says is the key to fixing the housing crisis plaguing Germany’s cities.
Faced with a shortage of an estimated 1.9 million affordable homes, Hubertz has pushed the standardisation of construction as essential for meeting her pledge to cut average construction costs for new homes by half. “We will focus on serial and modular construction, because that is the future,” Hubertz said after taking office in May.
Prefabrication seems like an obvious fix to cut costs and construction times, and modular construction has been used for various kinds of buildings around the globe, from the US to Japan and from Sweden to South Africa. With building elements made in factories then shipped for assembly, standardisation can be cheaper and faster than building bespoke homes onsite from scratch.
At least, that is the ambition. But the industry is still struggling to deliver on a large scale. Only a few German firms are able to manufacture building parts in the proper quantities, and modular construction requires developing a complex network to source materials and manage logistics, according to Jan Hedding of serial timber building company Nokera, which is developing the Mannheim flats.
Beyond the significant upfront expenses for builders, the idea to standardise homes has also faced backlash from architects and residents concerned about the aesthetics of prefabricated buildings. Factory-built structures have something of an image problem, as the technique is often associated with cheap, utilitarian and temporary buildings.
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Germany’s relationship to prefab housing is perhaps deeper and more complex than elsewhere. In the postwar era, the Communist-led German Democratic Republic (GDR) used prefabricated construction on an enormous scale, leaving behind both many modular buildings and an ambivalent attitude from the public. As the government revives its commitment to this construction type, politicians and construction companies hope that, this time, the new prefabs will leave a happier legacy than their Cold War predecessors.
Slab city
The idea of serial and modular buildings is old, but in Germany it became particularly popular after World War II, as large-scale urban destruction and the arrival of 12 million refugees from former German territories left the partitioned country short an estimated 2.1 million homes in the Eastern Sector and 5.5 million in the larger Western one.
Initially, housing production focused on large apartment blocks, built at high volume. In West Germany, large residential complexes known as Großwohnsiedlungen began rising in the 1950s. But it was in East Germany where Plattenbauten – “slab buildings”, referring to the precast concrete slabs that make up their facades – became fixtures of the built environment. The modular buildings continued to be constructed through the 1970s and ’80s – over three decades, the GDR built nearly two million prefabricated flats.
Initially, they embodied the socialist promise of a better life.
“You can imagine that when you come from an environment where living conditions are very limited and very poor, enthusiasm was very, very high at first,” said Sigrun Kabisch, who for decades studied a Plattenbau neighbourhood in Leipzig as a social scientist. Each apartment came equipped with bathroom, kitchen and central heating – major upgrades at the time. Rents were affordable as the government fixed them at 1930s levels, making the Platten initially welcomed.
By 1989, one in three East Germans lived in a Platte, compared to just one in 60 in West Germany. While the volume differed, they reflected a shared postwar goal – to rationalise housing and address urgent needs.
Decline and backlash
The image of modernity, however, did not last. After German reunification in 1989, modular construction quickly fell out of favour. As the former East German population stagnated – with collapsing birth rates and high unemployment spurring migration westwards – many Plattenbau neighbourhoods deteriorated into pockets of poverty and demand fell sharply. They were poorly insulated and hard to heat, and the uniform design fostered a sense of anonymity and social isolation.
Critics increasingly saw the planning behind these neighbourhoods as anti-urban. Plattenbau estates were often laid out in a typically modernist “Towers in the Park” configuration that separated residential buildings from major highways and other transportation. They lacked vibrant social centres, and the large empty spaces around the towers made residents feel unsafe. As Plattenbau districts sprawled outward in soulless agglomerations, many had little connection to the older city that had grown more organically over the space of several centuries.
New construction after reunification, meanwhile, focused on single-family homes on the urban fringe – a more individualistic form of housing long absent in the East. Many Plattenbau complexes were abandoned or demolished.
“It’s hard to imagine that today, when you hear about the housing shortage in big cities,” said Kabisch about tearing down the Platten. “But that’s how it was back then.”
The Platten comeback
Today, Germany finds itself in another affordable housing crunch. While need is less acute than after World War II, construction output has fallen short of demand. More than 600,000 flats were finished annually between 1950 and 1970. From 2000 to 2020, the average dropped to 245,000. Most recently, rising prices for materials and higher financing costs have added further pressure. The country is turning its attention again to prefabrication – the Platte 2.0.
Politicians and developers are eager to reinvent the concept, swapping the architectural monotony of Cold War-era housing for better design, mixed materials and more individualistic detailing for each building.
The bottom-line advantages can be considerable – pre-manufacturing can reduce on-site construction time by six to nine months and cut material and labour costs from the current 5,000 euros (S$7,512) per square metre to less than 3,000 euros, according to Nokera’s Hedding.
“We deliver almost 80 per cent of the end product to the construction site,” said Hedding, who co-founded the Swiss-based company four years ago. “Everything arrives prefabricated. All that’s left to do here is assembling the walls.”
On-site workers add floors, kitchens and baths; the finished buildings are largely made out of wood, except for central staircases and insulation.
While other prefabricated structures still rely on concrete, modern builders can use a less carbon-intensive form of cement and a smaller amount of concrete than they did in the 1970s, making the houses not only more visually pleasing but better for the environment.
Greater diversity
Beyond more sustainable materials, Germany’s new prefabs also differ in their greater variety of cladding designs and amenities such as electric shutters. Comparing them to their austere Communist-era predecessors, says Hedding, is “a bit like comparing a horse-drawn carriage to a Tesla”.
The modern concepts also allow greater diversity, says Harald Deinsberger-Deinsweger, who co-directs the Institute for Residential and Architectural Psychology in Graz, Austria. “There is a move away from simply stacking five residential units on top of each other, with attempts being made to give individual projects at least different characteristics.”
Yet fears of dull, monotonous aesthetics remain, and 78 per cent of Germany’s new homes in 2024 were still being built the traditional way.
Hedding predicts that modular construction will expand dramatically after 2026, as more construction companies assemble their supply chains and factory capacity ramps up. But whether this boom happens may depend less on how these new developments are assembled – or how attractive they are – and more on how well they fit into the existing urban fabric.
“In my view, the challenges lie primarily in the area of urban planning, rather than in the modular construction of individual residential units themselves,” said Clemens Günther, a researcher at Free University of Berlin’s Eastern Europe Institute.
The real innovation, in other words, will be to reimagine Germans’ relationship to the Platte, embedding prefab housing into vibrant, connected communities that truly reflect the needs of modern residents.
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