I The 'Maison Mixte' and the Great Cities of the 19th Century The 'Maison Mixte' and the Great Cities of the 19th Century The Apartment House Building as a Constituent for the Emergence of the West- ern Metropolis by Karsten Ley communicated by Prof. Dr. Michael Jansen, RWTH Aachen, LFG Stadtbaugeschichte; presented at the uia 2005 Istanbul Congress: cities – grand bazaar of architectureS, July 5th 2005 Until nowadays the Great City of the mid and late 19th century plays an impor- tant role in the discussion of contemporary urban planning and design – not only in terms of dealing with the huge amount of buildings and whole urban areas produced at that time. Apparently the 'Compact European City', its mere form and its supposed 'urbanity' serves as an ideal or an image, which is often em- ployed within actual urban design projects and competitions and favored by a lot of lay people. We encounter her in form of the multi-functional street block as well as in standardized building heights, traditional stone facades, re-introduction of streetcars, etc. Of course, we do trace back all these individual features to the times of the dramatic urban change within the industrial and bourgeois époque, however, are they constitutive elements to the Great City of that time or 'just' features amongst others. Looking into the historic development of the 19th cen- tury metropolis and after all into the mechanisms of how this metropolis was produced we soon disclose a somewhat ubiquitous urban element, which hardly existed before: the 'Apartment House Building'. This very new approach towards urban housing consisted not only in the fact that one building accommodated numerous users, but that these users belonged to different social classes and, eventually, that there were new types of ownership: rent and condominium. Pur- pose of this short paper is to initiate a new reflection of the phenomenon apartment house building, its origin, its impact on the city's form and socio- economical structure and, after all, the reasons for its success. Once talking about the 'Leitbild' of the 'Compact European City' and the re-construction of it, one ought to discuss the apartment house building as one of the definite con- stituents of the 19th century metropolis. Housing in the pre-industrial age was hardly an autonomous urban function. It was thoroughly connected to the work the residents were involved in, disregard- ing profession as well as class and dependence: craftsmen lived in or at their workshops as merchants lived with their storage; employees were part of the household they were working for, consequently the masters were sharing their domiciles with their servants. Within this somewhat symbiotic living there was, if there was, only a rough distinction between functions and hardly privacy for most of the inhabitants. This predominant concept produced socially interwoven groups in locales that were possessed by the head of the group. Apart from this and hostels for aliens one finds small cabins for daytaller, which were not part of any dense labor relationships. They neither had enough financial means to pos- sess an accommodation on their own nor were they taken into their employer's house being hired only for some days or hours. They had to rent their shelter, often resulting in existential troubles by insolvency or arbitrariness through the landlord, who was not subject to specific regulations or laws but to his particular ethics, beliefs, or simply gluttony. The fundamental change from small-size craftsmanship to industrial production in factories in the mid 1800 not only destroyed the old social structuring of soci- ety by creating 'bourgeoisie' and 'working class', but made obsolete the former housing models. The functions of working and housing were separated sharply,