Działalność Towarzystwa Budowy Osiedli w Gdyni wiatach 1931-1939

Abstrakt

The Social Housing Association (TBO) was established in 1931 by the Gdynia City Council in order to improve the disastrous living conditions of the indigent. The main statuary tasks of the company included designing and erecting housing estates, individual houses, industrial buildings and shops, as well as parcelling out, exploiting and preparing land for various projects. The sole owner of the Associations shares was the City Council, whereas the building activity was financed with loan programmes. TBO initiators were hoping that this newly established institution would help to satisfy, at least partially, the growing housing demand, which resulted in a rapid multiplication of illegal housing estates. These huts, made of random poor-quality materials were inhabited mainly by harbour workers who could not afford renting an expensive fiat in the city centre. In addition to the construction activities, TBO conducted various social projects meant to raise awareness in hygiene and healthy lifestyle.

Although TBO focused on inexpensive social housing, it cooperated with the best architects in Gdynia, such as Tadeusz Jędrzejewski and Włodzimierz Prochaska. Their designs combined pursuit of functionality and longing for economic Solutions. These targets could be achieved through catalogues of typified houses. Typification, however, did not exclude aesthetic and material differentiation: not only did TBO design modern, cubic ‘machines for living’, but also used more traditional forms.

During its interwar activity, the Association parcelled out and developed three districts: Witomino, Działki Leśne, and Redłowo. Witomino, parcelled in 1933, was intended for workers and craftsmen, whereas Działki Leśne and Redłowo mainly for clerks. TBO preferred to build housing estates consisting of small single-family or semi-detached houses surrounded by gardens, rather than blocks of flats: in 1931-39, the Association erected over 200 independent houses and only 4 multi-family buildings.

The majority of the estates designed by TBO is based on the garden-city model. This utopian idea, thoroughly explored by Modernist architects and town-planners, was examined on the example of the TBO estates in Gdynia. The significance of a garden as a private, separate space was proved by the results of a survey conducted among the working class dwellers in 1937 - a vast majority of the respondents acknowledged the superiority of an individual house with a garden over an apartment in a block of flats.