Till Behrens

Till Behrens (born October 2, 1931 in Berlin-Wannsee ) is a German architect , urban planner and industrial designer . He is the son of the engineer and inventor Josef Behrens and a grandson of the architect Peter Behrens .

architecture

Till Behrens planned and built industrial, administrative, residential and sacred buildings . Behrens contrasted social housing with a maisonette system for flexible living, in which, depending on requirements, apartments can be cut out in several sizes that are necessary for the respective stages of life, which should enable different generations of a family to live next to each other or together. The apartments can be divided, expanded, changed and later reassembled differently as required without the need for access through living spaces (such as with Le Corbusier's floor plans for the Unité d'Habitation ).

Till Behrens' ecological wooden skeleton buildings with integrated glazing were widely published in the daily and specialist press and praised as generous.

The church and community center he designed in Villa General Belgrano near Córdoba (Argentina) has a kind of green inner courtyard . It became a pilgrimage center for Buenos Aires, about 500 km away .

Urban and landscape planning

Behrens said in the 1960s that mistakes had been made in the post-war reconstruction of many cities. He developed an allocation of urban development to open space; this should act as a " catalyst ". With the help of Frankfurt citizens, who resisted the incoherent destruction of existing, grown resources through building projects in the city, he transferred his idea of a post-industrial cultural area to his urban development concept from 1970/71 Green belt with Main Crossing, Museum Embankment , peripheral buildings and traffic bundles , known as Frankfurt Green Belt- Riverside conception. Behrens did his doctorate as a professor with the conception under Lucius Burckhardt to become Dr.-Ing. According to Ebenezer Howard's garden city planning, it is the first urban development concept that is based on green space and the first green belt in history that subsequently led through a city not around, but on remaining green areas and connected with a riverside concept and also in terms of agriculture, forestry and water management is created and maintained in order to save taxpayers costs and to secure agricultural livelihoods. The city of Frankfurt took over both the Museumsufer part and the green belt part, but, as Behrens accuses the city, plagiarism in both cases.

In the case of museum bank conception, Frankfurt's former head of the cultural department, Hilmar Hoffmann, confirmed in his report Das Frankfurter Museumsufer in the volume Museumsarchitektur in Frankfurt 1980–1990 :

" Heinrich Klotz [...] Peter Iden [...] and myself were able to convince Walter Wallmann relatively quickly and easily and beyond considerations of party tactics to make this concept of a Frankfurt museum bank into his own."

Goswin wrote about this in Bauwelt 29/1982:

"Till Behrens thinks loudly and publicly and if the magistrate considers his thoughts to be their own, Speerplan makes a bomb design out of it."

In the case of the green belt conception, the Hessian state government awarded Behrens' urban development conception based on the judgment of a 14-member jury in 1991:

"Overall framework concept and convincing synthesis between the issues of living, transport, recreation / leisure, protection of nature and landscape."

In her laudation for the award of Behrens as state winner, she officially pointed out:

"The green space concept is [...] obviously suitable for deriving a work program with short, medium and long-term measures, which the City of Frankfurt is now doing."

Behrens' conception for a "rehabilitation of the city", which was published in 1970/71 by the Frankfurt Forum for Urban Development and the daily and specialist press from 1973, also used the results of air-hygienic and meteorological model studies in the Untermain region, which were carried out on behalf of NATO for the Rhein-Main-Region (as well as for Ankara and St. Louis ) had been carried out. Behrens' conception contained fresh air corridors, green radials and "fresh air regeneration rooms". The city did not realize this; she reduced Behrens' conception to a park planning planting concept. Where Behrens had planned a southern part of the green belt and residential areas, a northwest runway for Frankfurt Airport was built between 2006 and 2011 .

Urban planning theory

Behrens wants to give Frankfurt a high climatic living quality again. His goal is to create living situations that are not only comparable to those in the surrounding area, but also, in his opinion, are superior thanks to better communal transport connections. He wants to end commuting and increasing segregation . According to his theory, the return and resettlement of well-educated and well-paid citizens should end the outflow of income from Frankfurt and stabilize the tax budget of the highly indebted city again. One of Till Behrens' re-inhabitable city is his suggestion “bundling the relocatable departure routes with the non-relocatable motorway noise bands”. This concept reduces two noise bands to one and relocates this to where living space is anyway uninhabitable, on the motorway.

An inventory of Frankfurt presented by the AS + P office in February 2009 for all repeats, in large parts, Till Behrens' 40-year-old proposals. In contrast to Behrens, who worked out his concepts on a voluntary basis with citizens from bottom to top in the 1970s, Albert Speer jun. it from top to bottom and demanded public participation.

Industrial design

Cross oscillator

In the early 1960s, Till Behrens developed the first safe to use spray caps for aerosol bottles. He also developed the Kreuzschwinger , a piece of seating and reclining furniture that can swing evenly forwards and backwards without mechanics and adapt to any change in posture. The cantilever chairs of the 1920s could not swing because they are rigid on one side and cannot lower. Cross-oscillators, on the other hand, drop back and forth depending on the load. They have received numerous awards, have been accepted into numerous domestic and foreign museums and were the first seating furniture in history to be awarded the extensive copyright protection "applied art" by a court. The Kreuzschwinger is shown on the back of the Compendium 1000 Chairs by Taschen-Verlag .

Teaching, expert and juror activities

Till Behrens taught design, building construction, architectural theory, urban and landscape planning, product design and design at the University of Stuttgart , the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Offenbach am Main , the University of Kassel and the University of Applied Sciences Wiesbaden . The Hessian Minister of the Interior appointed Behrens to the expert committee of the Hessen Chamber of Architects, which he served for 10 years. For around 45 years, Behrens has been a juror (specialist judge) in competitions in the fields of architecture, urban and landscape planning and product design.

Literature and Sources

Aktion Plagiarius (ed.): Frankfurter Grüngürtel-Flussufer-Konzeption 1969-2014 - falsification of history - plagiarism - patronizing citizens. Gebrüder Mann Verlag, Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-7861-2679-9 .
Aktion Plagiarius (Ed.): Kreuzschwinger - Dynamic Seating / Dynamic Seating. Gebrüder Mann Verlag, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-7861-2570-9 .
Till Behrens: Green Belt . Verlag Dieter Fricke, Frankfurt am Main 1988, ISBN 3-88184-099-0 .
Till Behrens: Green Belt. Frankfurt am Main. Make the city habitable again. Verlag Jochen Rahe, 1992, ISBN 3-9803080-1-4 .
Jörg Engelmann: Till Behrens, invention and construction. Verlag Das Example, Darmstadt 1996, ISBN 3-923974-39-6 .
Charlotte J. Fiell, Peter M. Fiell: 1000 chairs. Taschen-Verlag Cologne, 2000, ISBN 3-8228-5760-2 .
Jochen Rahe (Red.), DWB Werk-und-Zeit-Perspektiven (Ed.): City and Region. DWB, Frankfurt am Main 1994, ISBN 3-9803590-0-X .
Till Behrens: An innovation is plundered - Green belt river bank conception 1969–1994 - In the mirror of the press and from contemporary documents , Wiesbaden 1994, ISBN 3-923068-22-0 .

Web links

personal data
SURNAME	Behrens, Till
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	German architect, urban planner and industrial designer
DATE OF BIRTH	October 2, 1931
PLACE OF BIRTH	Berlin-Wannsee