Jan Engelke

Die Eigenen Vier Wände – Beautiful Living in the Economic Miracle 1960-’74

The four walls of one’s own home were the declared goal of life in the years of the economic miracle in the Federal Republic of Germany – currently, the model of living in one’s own home is more popular than ever. To this day, it continues to shape lifestyles, the everyday image of many places and the architectural mode of production of living space, and it has deeply inscribed the residential culture of the single-family home in society. It is the most popular, the most numerous and at the same time the most controversial type of building.

The home is an essential architectural protagonist of post-war history: In it, hopes and desires, role models and ideologies of that time materialized, which continue to have an effect into the present and are currently receiving new explosiveness. Despite its formative cultural and architectural significance, there has been little architectural-historical interest in the subject. Yet the question of how to deal with the existing stock of this period and the future viability of this housing model is pressing-especially for an architectural discipline that is in the process of abandoning the field of everyday living altogether.

Therefore, the aim of Jan Engelke’s work is to explore the architecture of the home in its genesis context of the economic miracle in order to create the basis for valorizing this stock in public debate and to make everyday living space the subject of critical architectural discussion and practice again. The magazine “Schöner Wohnen” reflects popular architectural discourses and the everyday context of architectural production of the time – a perspective Jan Engelke uses to place the ordinary at the center of his research.

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Publications

• Engelke, Jan: Schöner wohnen? Das Eigenheim in populären Architekturdiskursen der westdeutschen Nachkriegszeit, in: WohnSeiten – Visuelle Konstruktionen des Wohnens in Zeitschriften, hg. von Irene Nierhaus, Kathrin Heinz und Rosanna Umbach, S. 430-455, transcript-Verlag 2021.
• Engelke, Jan: Vom Behelf zum Heim. Über die Gestaltung einer stets unfertigen Zeit, in: Behelfsheim, hg. Von Philipp Meuser und Enver Hirsch, Eigenverlag 2020.
• Engelke, Jan, Lukas Fink: Der Fehler als Projekt, in: Protocol Magazine für Architektur im Kontext, H. 9, Jg. 2017.
• Engelke, Jan, Lukas Fink: Kritik als Methode, in: trans magazin, H. 31, Jg. 2017.
• Engelke, Jan, Lukas Fink: The Beauty of the Cadastral Map, in: House Us, OCDI Press, Chicago 2017.