Alexander Baerwald

Alexander Baerwald

Alexander Baerwald (born March 3, 1877 in Berlin , † October 25, 1930 in Jerusalem , also Alex Baerwald ) was a German-Jewish architect , painter and musician . From the 1910s onwards he emerged as a school-educator through buildings and settlement designs in Palestine , in which he combined Western European construction technology with oriental forms.

life and work

Technion in Haifa

Alexander ("Alex") Baerwald grew up in an assimilated Jewish merchant family in Berlin. He studied from 1897 to 1901 a. a. at the Technical University (Berlin-) Charlottenburg . In 1906 he married Lotte Eisenberg , who later emerged as a painter and illustrator. In the years up to 1914, the young architect under Ernst von Ihne reworked the building of the Royal Library ( Berlin State Library ) on Unter den Linden. As a cellist he played in a quartet with Albert Einstein as a violinist. During the First World War, Alexander Baerwald served as an artillery lieutenant at sea, making him the first ever German-Jewish officer of this rank. Until his leave of absence in 1927, he was a civil servant in the Prussian building administration, most recently a ministerial building officer.

Starting in 1909, Alexander Baerwald from the Aid Association of German Jews took on the order for a "technical center", which later became the Technion in Haifa , which can be considered his main work. The “Institute for Technical Education in Palestine” was the country's first modern university building. The sandstone building with the oriental-looking main facade was designed as part of an ensemble oriented towards the coast, which also includes the Hebrew Secondary School , which was headed by the Berlin philologist Arthur Biram . The Technion was built from 1912, remained unfinished during the First World War, then became a military hospital and not until 1925 a university. The aid association had assumed German as the language of instruction, but Zionist circles were able to enforce Hebrew . In the same year, the Baerwalds moved permanently to the British mandate of Palestine and settled in Haifa, where Alexander Baerwald himself then taught as a professor at the Technion architecture faculty that he created.

By combining, for example, orientalizing round arches with tiled, European gabled roofs, Alexander Baerwald set the trend for an academic, “German” architectural style of the pioneering generation in Palestine (later Israel ). In a critical examination of the rational and aesthetic aspects of the International Style , he developed an approach that was influential for the architecture there, which decidedly incorporated the cultural and climatic conditions of the country without - especially internally - foregoing European technical standards. Lotte Baerwald reported that he wanted to fell only three of 33 palm trees for a trade center in Haifa, and he even built the Philips house on Mount Carmel (1929/1930) around a fig tree.

In addition to residential and commercial buildings in Berlin, Haifa and Tel Aviv , a large courtyard was built in 1913 according to Baerwald's design for the agricultural settlement project in Merchawia.In 1919/1920 he planned a garden city with small settlement houses in honor of the Palestine pioneer Max Nordau , and a residential building was built around 1922 for Hermann Struck in Hadar HaCarmel (Haifa). In 1924 he built the Anglo-Palestine Bank in Haifa and the ground floor of the Tahkemoni School in Tel Aviv, in 1925 the Palatin Hotel in Tel Aviv, and in 1928 the Central Hospital in Afula . Many other buildings were not or only partially realized, e.g. B. his design for the memorial at the German military cemetery in Nazareth .

Alex Baerwald painted and drew the country and its people on a large scale and made caricatures. Together with his wife Lotte, he wrote poetry and also illustrated books. This is how a Purim game came about , the shadow plays Esther (1920) and Noah's Ark (1921).

Alexander Baerwald died in Jerusalem in 1930 after a serious illness and is buried on the Mount of Olives .

Awards

• 1906: Schinkel Medal for the design of an architecture museum in Berlin

Fonts

• Three-family house in Dahlem (Berlin) . In: Zentralblatt der Bauverwaltung , vol. 33, 1913, pp. 502–504 ( digitized version of the Central and State Library Berlin ).
• A settlement house for Palestine . In: New Jewish monthly issues 1919–1920, vol. 4, issue 9/10 (February 10/25, 1920), pp. 208–214
• The Hebrew Technical Institute in Haifa . In: Palestine , No. 4-5 (April 1929), pp. 23-28

Literature and Sources

• Karl Schwarz: Baerwald, Alexander . In: Jewish Lexicon . Founded by G. Herlitz and B. Kirschner. Berlin, Jüdischer Verlag, Vol. I, 1929, Col. 747-748
• Lotte Baerwald: A Wife's Tribute to an Architect Artist. In: The Palestine Post , 28 Oct 1935, p.2
• Myra Warhaftig : Alex Baerwald Berlin 1877 - Jerusalem 1930. In: Bauwelt 32.1990, pp. 1562–64
• Alexander Baerwald (1877–1930). Architect and artist. Exhibition catalog: The National Museum of Science, Planning and Technology, Daniel and Matilde Recanati Center, Haifa. Edited by Liliane Richter et al. Haifa, 1991
• Ines Sonder: Garden Cities in Erez Israel . Zionist urban planning visions from Theodor Herzl to Richard Kauffmann , Georg Olms Verlag, Hildesheim. Zurich. New York, 2005 ISBN 3-487-12811-X
• Ita Heinze-Greenberg: Europe in Palestine. The architects of the Zionist project 1902–1923 gta Verlag, Zurich 2012, ISBN 978-3-85676-230-8

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Exhibition cat. Alexander Baerwald ... architect and artist (1991), p. 15
2. ^ Myra Warhaftig , in: Bauwelt 32.1990, p. 1582
3. ↑ Lotte Baerwald: A Wife's Tribute ... (1935), p. 2
4. ↑ Hans-Christian Rößler: Last resting place Israel . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of October 11, 2014, p. 3

Web links

• Literature by and about Alexander Baerwald in the catalog of the German National Library