Amphithéâtre Marguerite de Navarre, Site Marcelin Berthelot
Open to all
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Abstract

One of the leading figures in architecture in interwar Germany was the Alsatian-born Paul Schmitthenner (1884-1972), who belonged to same generation of Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe, but was a charismatic teacher in the opposite camp of the new tradition. At the Polytechnic School in Stuttgart, he established together with Paul Bonatz a reformed faculty of architecture, which became for two decades the most popular German educational institution -strictly anti-academic, stimulated by the morals of craftsmanship and based on experience, regionalism and tradition.
In contrast, his Staaken garden-city near Berlin had been a pioneering project in standardization. Schmitthenner outmatched with his prefabricated timberwork the modernist projects for low-cost housing. In opposition to the modernist New Objectivity he developed a theory of "Built Form", based on the intrinsic correlation of material, detail and architectural expression.
Schmitthenner aspired in 1933 at becoming a leading architect of the regime and the supervisor of architectural education. But, while his disciples made careers within the Nazi administration, his expectations were frustrated. He kept his position in Stuttgart, but turned to a cyphered rhetoric of inner emigration, hostile to the bombastic architecture of Albert Speer.

Wolfgang Voigt

Wolfgang Voigt studied architecture at the University of Hanover, where he received his doctorate and habilitation. He was a researcher at the University of Bremen and at the Hamburg Municipal Archives, then at the Hamburg School of Fine Arts, where he taught. He was deputy director of the Deutsches Architekturmuseum (DAM) in Frankfurt/Main. His research has focused on the new German traditionalists, the Atlantropa project, German architecture in occupied Alsace between 1940 and 1944, and the architecture of exile. For the DAM, he has designed exhibitions and catalogs on Heinz Bienefeld, Helmut Jacoby, Paul Schmitthenner, Dominikus Böhm, Gottfried Böhm, Paul Bonatz, Ernst May and Ferdinand Kramer.

Speaker(s)

Wolfgang Voigt

University of Bremen, Germany