Résumé
One of the leading figures in architecture in interwar Germany was the Alsacian-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.
