Published by Deutscher Kunstverlag (DKV)

Volume 48 Issue 1-2

January 2018

Issue of architectura

Contents
Journal Overview

Publicly Available April 7, 2021

Frontmatter

Page range: i-i

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April 7, 2021

Wie kam das Bauhaus zu seinem Namen?

Dietrich Neumann

Page range: 2-8

Abstract

It has always been assumed that the name Bauhaus was invented in 1919 by Walter Gropius, the institution’s founder and first director. However, the name had been in use since 1915 by the conservative Berlin architect Albert Gessner for his practice. Gessner had become famous for large, ingeniously designed apartment house complexes. Gropius and Gessner knew each other from the German Werkbund and Gropius probably saw the name in this context and adopted it. Gessner’s private practice had little success at the time, he closed his Bauhaus in 1920 and the competing use of the name in Weimar probably did little damage. But Gessner was fiercely opposed to the modern movement in architecture and enthusiastically joined the Nazi party in 1932, which ultimately determined its demise.

April 7, 2021

Zwischen Bauhauskritik und Bauforschung: Konrad Nonn

Peter I. Schneider

Page range: 10-31

Abstract

As a committed publicist, the architect and ministerial official Konrad Nonn is known as one of the most prominent right-wing critics of the Bauhaus. Both the extremely polemical and inflammatory style of his texts and his incessant agitations against the school and its director Walter Gropius have contributed to seeing him as an oddity driven by a peculiar, almost pathological hatred. However, the perception of Nonn as a mere eccentric obscures the fact that he was by no means a loner. In fact, during the Weimar Republic, Nonn was a recognized member and functionary of a number of professional associations in the field of architecture. One such association was the Koldewey Society of architects working in the field of archaeology, whose members can be found in the elitist educated middle-class spectrum of the Weimar period. Within this educated bourgeois, humanistic elite with its special moral based attitude towards modernism in Germany, Nonn represented a cultural-conservative-national position. Although not equally shared, this position was widely understood and accepted by Nonn’s peers. Not least the moral support from these associations, in which he was also active as an official, allowed him to continue his agitation against the Bauhaus even after setbacks and to regain status from 1933. Nonn’s criticism of the Bauhaus can therefore be seen as an extreme reaction of the German humanistically very well-educated academic elite against the challenges of modernization, but not just as an isolated nerd’s extremist activism.

April 7, 2021

Bauen für das wirkliche Leben

Architekturhistorische und archäologische Untersuchungen der Laubenganghäuser in Dessau-Törten

Felix Rösch, Andreas Buss

Page range: 32-54

Abstract

In Summer 1930 the tenement houses with galley access, the so-called Laubenganghäuser, were completed in Dessau-Törten. The project reflects the radical rationalism of Bauhaus director Hannes Meyer as well as his sensitivity to the needs of everyday life. The buildings can be considered like organisms with their own specific metabolism. Appreciated a UNESCO World Heritage Site, they have recently been examined in highest detail by an interdisciplinary team ranging from architects to archaeologists. By excavations and the review of rediscovered archival sources, it became possible to reconstruct the state at which the Laubenganghäuser were created. Furthermore, conclusions about the lives of the first residents could be drawn. Aspects of everyday life in a Bauhaus building as well as historical events appear as if under a magnifying glass.

April 7, 2021

Eine »schulbildende« Wirkung des Unterrichts?

Architekturstudierende am Bauhaus unter Ludwig Mies van der Rohe 1930–1933. Eine quantitativ-qualitative Untersuchung

Anke Blümm, Patrick Rössler

Page range: 56-74

Abstract

From 1930 to 1933, the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe shaped the fate of the Bauhaus; in particular, he tailored the avant-garde institution to the study of architecture. While research has so far concentrated on the content of his teaching, the group of students he specifically trained remained in the dark. With the help of statistical analysis and evaluation, the present essay takes a new methodical approach to describe Mies’ 169 architecture students in more detail; the focus is particularly on the 78 diploma students. It becomes clear that the ›pure Mies influence‹ was hardly present in these 5 semesters at the Bauhaus. Instead, the very heterogeneous group was characterized until the end by political trench warfare that had already arisen under the previous director Hannes Meyer.

April 7, 2021

Die Bauhäusler Franz Ehrlich und Fritz Ertl

Zwei (unterschiedliche) Lebensläufe

Klaus Tragbar

Page range: 76-118

Abstract

The Bauhaus not only had the period of its existence in common with the Weimar Republic, but also many of its internal social, cultural and political contradictions. These contradictions become clear through the biographies of two Bauhaus graduates, Franz Ehrlich (1907 –1984) and Fritz Ertl (1908 –1982), who both studied with Hannes Meyer at the Bauhaus Dessau. After graduating, Ehrlich joined the KPD and worked with Walter Gropius and Hans Poelzig. In 1934, he was arrested as a resistance fighter and imprisoned in the Buchenwald concentration camp. After the Second World War, he became one of the most distinguished architects and furniture designers in the GDR and worked for the State Security. He died in 1984. Ertl returned to his father’s construction company in Linz after receiving his diploma. In 1938 he joined the NSDAP and the SS and was involved in the planning of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp from 1940 onwards. After the end of the war, he worked again as an architect and building contractor in Linz. In 1972 he was charged and acquitted in the Vienna Auschwitz Trial. He died in 1982.

April 7, 2021

›Momento Mori‹ or New Beginning

Notes on »Bauhaus 1919–1928« at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1938

Barry Bergdoll

Page range: 118-133

April 7, 2021

Einblicke in die Dessauer Bauhausbauten als materielles Erbe

Monika Markgraf

Page range: 134-153

Abstract

In Dessau, the Bauhaus experienced an extremely productive phase in 1925 –1932. In this period a number of buildings were constructed in the city, which are summarised under the name Bauhaus Buildings. The materiality of these buildings, from which important impulses for the development of architecture in the 20th century emanated, is just as important for a comprehensive understanding of the buildings as it is for their long-term preservation. The Bauhaus Dessau Foundation has had a building research archive since 1998, in which building materials and components of the Bauhaus buildings are preserved. Using selected materials such as concrete, Torfoleum or stonewood screed as examples, aspects of researching and preserving these buildings are discussed using the Bauhaus building, the Masters’ Houses and the Dessau-Törten housing estate as examples.

April 7, 2021

Bauen nach dem Bauhaus

Zu drei Projekten des Architekten Hermann Blomeier (1907–1982)

Andreas Schwarting

Page range: 154-183

Abstract

Hermann Blomeier is one of around 80 graduates from the Bau- und Ausbauabteilung, a comparatively small group among the more than 1200 students at the Bauhaus who have only recently come under the spotlight of research. The biographies of several graduates are known, such as Franz Ehrlich, Erich Consemüller, Howard Dearstyne, Selman Selmanagić, Herbert Hirche or Arieh Sharon; many more are lost, however. Although the Bauhaus was not a ›school‹ in the sense of a unified design approach and a binding canon of forms, it is instructive on an individual level to study the work of Blomeier, one of the Bauhaus graduates and students of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe who has so far received little attention. On the basis of three projects from the 1950s, the viability of the design approaches conveyed at the Bauhaus for the construction tasks of the post-war period are examined. First, the ferry ports connecting Konstanz and Meersburg will be considered as the first major project by Blomeier after the Second World War. The buildings for the Bodensee-Wasserversorgung – at times the largest construction site in West Germany of the 1950s – represent an outstanding example of industrial architecture and technical infrastructure in their fusion of art, technology and landscape. The smallest of the three projects, the building for the rowing club Neptun, located directly opposite the old town of Konstanz on the Seerhein, points with its innovative modular primary structure well beyond contemporary architecture and anticipates developments of the late 1960s, such as the Japanese Metabolists or the Plug-In-City of Archigram.

April 7, 2021

Zwischen Museum und Zukunft

Bauhaus-Museen in Weimar, Dessau und Berlin

Jürgen Tietz

Page range: 184-195

April 7, 2021

Weniger ist mehr

Ungewohnter Durchblick im Barcelona-Pavillon

Anke Blümm

Page range: 197-199

April 7, 2021

Buchbesprechungen

Petra Mayrhofer

Page range: 200-202

April 7, 2021

Der Architekt, die Macht und die Baukunst. Hermann Henselmann in seiner Berliner Zeit

Elmar Kossel

Page range: 203-207

About this journal

architectura, Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Baukunst (Journal of the History of Architecture), ist eine internationale Zeitschrift mit Aufsätzen – teils in englischer Sprache – zu Themen der Bau- und Architekturgeschichte sowie mit einem regelmäßigen Rezensionsteil.

Neben der Historischen Bauforschung widmet sich die Zeitschrift Themen der Bau- und Stadtbaugeschichte sowie der Architekturgeschichte von der Antike bis in die Gegenwart. Die Aufsätze werden durch die Herausgeber und durch unabhängige Berichterstatter (peers) geprüft.

Die architectura ist im Arts and Humanities Citation Index und im European Reference Index for the Humanities and the Social Sciences gelistet.

Die Zeitschrift erscheint zweimal jährlich – seit 2018 bei De Gruyter, zuvor im Deutschen Kunstverlag.

Volume 48 Issue 1-2

Issue of architectura

Frontmatter

Editorial

Wie kam das Bauhaus zu seinem Namen?

Abstract

Zwischen Bauhauskritik und Bauforschung: Konrad Nonn

Abstract

Bauen für das wirkliche Leben

Architekturhistorische und archäologische Untersuchungen der Laubenganghäuser in Dessau-Törten

Abstract

Eine »schulbildende« Wirkung des Unterrichts?

Architekturstudierende am Bauhaus unter Ludwig Mies van der Rohe 1930–1933. Eine quantitativ-qualitative Untersuchung

Abstract

Die Bauhäusler Franz Ehrlich und Fritz Ertl

Zwei (unterschiedliche) Lebensläufe

Abstract

›Momento Mori‹ or New Beginning

Notes on »Bauhaus 1919–1928« at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1938

Einblicke in die Dessauer Bauhausbauten als materielles Erbe

Abstract

Bauen nach dem Bauhaus

Zu drei Projekten des Architekten Hermann Blomeier (1907–1982)

Abstract

Zwischen Museum und Zukunft

Bauhaus-Museen in Weimar, Dessau und Berlin

Weniger ist mehr

Ungewohnter Durchblick im Barcelona-Pavillon

Buchbesprechungen

Der Architekt, die Macht und die Baukunst. Hermann Henselmann in seiner Berliner Zeit