Garden City Lauta-Nord

Due to the founding of Vereinigte Aluminiumwerke AG (VAW) and the construction of the largest aluminium smelter in Germany at the time, as well as the construction of a large power plant in 1917/19, many construction workers and later labourers, employees and civil servants had to be housed. Thus a housing estate modelled on the English garden city was created from nothing in the Lusatian Heath. The developers of the Lauta-Nord estate were the Griesheim-Elektron and Metallbank corporations and the Vereinigte Aluminium Werke AG Lautawerk.

Most of the garden city estate was built between 1918 and 1920 on an area of 35 hectares, according to the plans of the architects Clemens and Stephan Simon. Approximately 700 flats were built in 160 buildings (one- and two-storey terraced houses, apartment buildings, semi-detached houses and villas). The flats were equipped with indoor toilets and scullery facilities, which were ultra-modern for the time. They all had a garden. These first massive residential buildings were erected in Lautawerk Nord in the area of Am Ring, Straße der Freundschaft, Karl-Marx-Straße, Parkstraße and Conrad-Blenkle-Straße.

The garden city of Lauta-Nord is the largest self-contained factory housing estate in the region and is still an urban planning and architectural achievement today. It is included in the list of cultural monuments of the Free State of Saxony. A number of individual monuments have also been designated.