Johannes Otzen

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Johannes Otzen

Johannes Otzen (born October 8, 1839 in Sieseby ( Duchy of Schleswig ); † June 8, 1911 in Grunewald , now part of Berlin ) was a German architect (with a focus on Protestant sacred buildings ), urban planner , architectural theorist and university professor . He worked mainly in Berlin and northern Germany . Otzen carried out the overall urban planning for the Berlin villa colonies of Lichterfelde and Friedenau .

Life

Johannes Otzen was born the son of a village school teacher who also played the church organ. Otzen learned a classic building trade for three years and became a carpenter. This was followed by the building trade school and studies at the Hanover Polytechnic . Here he joined the Slesvico-Holsatia country team, later the Slesvico-Holsatia Corps . He was a student of Conrad Wilhelm Hase , in whose studio he became a site manager after completing his studies. After passing the state examination, he was appointed Prussian government master builder ( assessor in the public building administration), which he served in Schleswig-Holstein from 1866 . During this time the decision for Otzen's design was made in a competition for the construction of St. John's Church in Altona , which he also carried out. By the end of his life he built 22 churches, of which the Ringkirche in Wiesbaden is one of the most important.

Holy Cross Church in Berlin-Kreuzberg ; Drawing by Johannes Otzen
Grave site in the Wannsee cemetery on Lindenstrasse
Detail of his grave: angel with church
Detail of his grave: relief by Johannes Otzen by the sculptor Curt Stoeving

Another highlight of his work was the creation of representative villa colonies. Otzen had early first orders for the Hamburg building contractors and real estate - speculators Johann Anton Wilhelm von Carstenn executed and in 1869 chief representative of the company. In this collaboration, Otzen planned the overall urban development of the model villa colony of Lichterfelde , which Carstenn had begun in Berlin in 1863 , and which quickly developed into a great success and shaped the style of other facilities. Otzen was then entrusted by Carstenn with the planning of large-scale facilities in other suburbs in Berlin at the time, such as Friedenau , for which he also prepared the development plan from 1871. In 1874 Otzen went into business for himself, and a small fortune enabled him to build the Jakobikirche in Kiel without a fee.

For the painting of the churches, Johannes Otzen mainly used Hermann Schmidt from Hamburg and Otto Berg from Berlin, both occasionally for figurative paintings, which he preferred to have done by the two Düsseldorf painters Wilhelm Döringer and Bruno Ehrich .

As the winner of numerous competitions, Otzen was appointed professor at the newly founded Technical University of Charlottenburg in 1878 . His students there included B. Fernando Lorenzen . In 1885 Otzen moved to the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin, where he continued to train architecture students in a master's studio. The architect Jürgen Kröger , whom he brought into his office in 1882, was directly involved in the training as an employee of his private office. In 1888 Otzen was appointed a secret councilor.

The construction of the first church, which was designed according to the Wiesbaden program of the Wiesbaden priest Emil Veesenmeyer , gained epoch-making importance . With the third evangelical church in Wiesbaden, built from 1889 to 1894, which was later called the “Ringkirche”, the “Eisenach regulation” that had been in effect until then was de facto suspended. This marked the beginning of a new era in Protestant church construction, in which one broke away from narrow style regulations and questioned the function of church construction anew. On the one hand, the room concept is uncompromisingly developed from the optical and acoustic requirements of a Protestant preaching church. On the other hand, Otzen remained connected to the medieval church building tradition and used (according to his origins as a student of Conrad Wilhelm Hase) architectural elements of the Gothic, but went back even further historically and combined them with elements of the Romanesque to his typical "transition style" from Neo-Romanesque and Neo-Gothic .

With his church buildings, Otzen broke away from traditional models in the following period and followed a functional architecture, but remained committed to the medieval design language. Although his spatial concepts were closer to the baroque tradition than he himself would have admitted, he rejected a return of the baroque style and criticized (at a congress for Protestant church building in Berlin in 1894) the “exaggerated admiration of the Dresden Frauenkirche as the ideal of the Protestant Church building ". This polemic at the height of his career was directed against his more progressive colleagues such as the art historian Cornelius Gurlitt . These propagated a reorientation away from the medieval to the neo-baroque style, for general artistic considerations, i.e. not just related to worship spaces. After all, Gurlitt also demanded that the church should be used primarily for church services: “Protestant church construction is first and foremost interior design.” The author of the Wiesbaden program, Emil Veesenmeyer, followed Gurlitt on this question and was one of the admirers of the Dresden Frauenkirche.

As President of the Academy of the Arts, Otzen gave a lecture at the International Architects' Congress on August 1, 1900 at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris, which was particularly well received in France , in which he strongly opposed the style mixture, which was not uncommon in the early days and thus opened the door to an art movement that he himself did not appreciate:

"A healthy, logical construction, based on a clear understanding of all static processes, must not only be the basis of a good building, but also appear as such."

He promoted - without actually wanting to - the Art Nouveau in which most of the churches were built according to the Wiesbaden program .

On June 8, 1911, Johannes Otzen died in Berlin in his villa in Grunewald . He was buried in the New Wannsee Cemetery on Lindenstrasse. The entire tomb is 5.60 meters wide. The magnificent, neo-Gothic wall grave was designed by the architect and sculptor Curt Stoeving (1863–1939), an artist who belonged to the Berlin artist association “ Werkring ”. The grave bears the signature C S 1912 . In the center there is a high gable with Gothic ornaments, which is flanked on the left and right by two 1.40 meter high angels. The one on the right is holding a model of a church in his hands. The one meter high relief portrait of Johannes Otzen can be seen on a pillar . The burial place is in the department AT-22. Until 2009 it was dedicated to the city of Berlin as an honorary grave .

Otzen had four daughters and a son, Robert Otzen .

Honors

In Hamburg-St. Pauli was the road that at he designed Peace Church , passes Otzenstraße named. There is also an Otzenstraße in Berlin , which is on the periphery of the Friedenau district he is planning .

buildings

Protestant main church Rheydt
Friedenskirche in Hamburg-St. Pauli

literature

Web links

Commons : Johannes Otzen  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ 100 years of Weinheim Senior Citizens' Convention , p. 142.Bochum, 1963
  2. ↑ Erika Müller-Lauter: Berlin Forum 9/85: Tombs in Berlin IV - The cemeteries in the Zehlendorf district . Press and Information Office of the State of Berlin, 1985.
  3. ↑ Official notices . In: Zentralblatt der Bauverwaltung , Volume 14, No. 4 (January 27, 1894), p. 37
  4. ↑ Official notices. In: Zentralblatt der Bauverwaltung , Volume 14, No. 46 (November 17, 1894), p. 477
  5. ↑ Official notices . In: Zentralblatt der Bauverwaltung , Volume 18, No. 15 (April 9, 1898), p. 169
  6. ↑ Official notices . In: Zentralblatt der Bauverwaltung , Volume 24, No. 59 (July 23, 1904), p. 369
  7. ↑ Official notices . In: Zentralblatt der Bauverwaltung , Volume 27, No. 15 (February 16, 1907), p. 101
  8. ↑ Misc . In: Zentralblatt der Bauverwaltung , Volume 25, No. 45 (June 3, 1905), p. 288
  9. ↑ a b c d e archive of the Hamburg regional church (ed.), Brigitte Rohrbeck, Helga-Maria Kühn: The churches of the Hamburg regional church. Hamburg 1970.
  10. ↑ a b Joanna Kucharzewska: Architektura i urbanistyka Torunia w latach 1871–1920 . Warsaw 2004.
  11. ↑ Jochen Hermann Vennebusch / Ulrike Winkel: Ev.-luth. Peace Church and Easter Church Hamburg-Eilbek (Small Art Guide No. 2812). Regensburg 2012.
  12. ^ City of Hamburg: Friedenskirche - City of Hamburg
  13. ↑ Dieter Ullmann: Churches in and around Apolda. Weimar 1991, ISBN 3-86160-015-3 .
  14. ↑ Ralf-Andreas Gmelin: The cathedral of the little people. (Church guide to the Ringkirche Wiesbaden)
  15. ^ Peter Seyfried: Johannes Otzens opus ultimum. In: Main Evangelical Church in Rheydt 1902–2002. ISBN 3-00-010531-X .
  16. ↑ Holger Brülls: The modernity of backward-looking building. In: Main Evangelical Church in Rheydt 1902–2002. ISBN 3-00-010531-X .
personal data
SURNAME Otzen, Johannes
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German architect and university professor
DATE OF BIRTH October 8, 1839
PLACE OF BIRTH You by
DATE OF DEATH June 8, 1911
Place of death Berlin