Alexandre Altberg

Alexandre Altberg

Alexandre Altberg (formerly: Alexander , born June 29, 1908 in Berlin ; † August 15, 2009 in Marília , Brazil ) was a Brazilian architect .

Training in Germany

Alexander Altberg was born on June 29, 1908, the son of the Austrian trader Falk Altberg and the Russian nurse Rachel Altberg - both of whom came from Jewish families. His father, who was deported as a civilian prisoner to Manchuria at the end of the First World War , had an import-export company and settled in Berlin after he had returned from captivity . Little Alexander learned the Russian language from his mother and only began to speak fluent German at the age of six when he attended the Goethe School in Berlin's Wilmersdorf district .

From an early age, Altberg was enthusiastic about music and drawings. In 1925, at the age of 17, he enrolled at the Bauhaus in Weimar , where he studied until the beginning of 1926. At the urging of his father, who advised him to pursue a formal academic degree, he did an internship at the construction company Lenz & Co. in Berlin (an internship was a prerequisite at the time in order to be admitted to university) and wrote himself afterwards at the State Engineering Academy in Oldenburg .

In the second half of the 1920s, he began his political involvement in the Jewish Student Association in Oldenburg, which he took over as head. In doing so, he felt the latent anti-Semitism at the end of the Weimar Republic . In addition, as a student, he had great difficulty adapting to traditional academic practices, after he had already felt the breath of modernity at the Bauhaus . The rector of the Faculty of Architecture, Professor Bast, refused to admit him to the diploma examination. Altberg remembers that Professor Bast already wore the symbol of the NSDAP on his clothes at the end of the 1920s . Altberg's father, who had been living in Lisbon for some time for professional reasons and was in Germany at the time, traveled to Oldenburg to protest with the rector, but the rector argued that “the boy did not yet have the necessary maturity to do so Practicing profession ". Altberg was obliged to design a project for a hospital with a gable roof, whereby he was expressly forbidden to apply the principles of new building . Unmotivated, since he had actually already passed all of his exams, he designed a banal project in six months and finally received the academic degree " Diplom-Ingenieur " at the end of 1929 .

During his studies, Altberg also completed internships at the renowned Berlin architects Korn & Weizmann. Arthur Korn was part of the Berlin avant-garde ; In 1926 he was together with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe , Hans Poelzig , Bruno Taut and other members of the group “ Der Ring ” and took part in the founding of CIAM (1928). In an article he published in 1923, Korn provided one of the most relevant analyzes of the transition from Expressionism to New Architecture in Germany. Altberg was involved in the most important projects of the architects Korn & Weizmann.

Emigration to Brazil

Alexander Altberg's father also had trade contacts with Brazil due to his professional activity in Lisbon . With a premonition of the coming political developments in Germany, the Altberg family decided in 1930 to leave the country. At that time it was still possible for them to take their property and possessions with them to Rio de Janeiro. The family settled in the then hardly populated district of Ipanema . After the difficulties in getting a visa, Alexander Altberg left the port in Bremen in October 1931 and drove after his parents.

His first job in Brazil was in the office of the architect Arnaldo Gladosch, a Brazilian architect and descendant of German immigrants, where he only stayed a month. Despite language barriers in the first few years, Altberg was very active and looked for social connections. He made his first contacts through the German and Jewish communities in Rio de Janeiro . Altberg described one of the meeting places, the Club Germania on Botafogo beach , as an elite group of business people with whom he had little in common. He sought contact with the “Eastern Jews”, who were traditionally less wealthy, with European political refugees who began to come to Brazil even before 1933, and with the artist community.

He soon integrated into an intellectual group that had been led by the cultural activist Theodor Heuberger since 1939 and originally called the “Association of German-speaking Artists and Art Friends” and later “PRÓ-ARTE”. The group consisted mainly of Jews, both Brazilian and emigrants from various German-speaking countries. Exhibitions and discussions were organized at its headquarters on Avenida Rio Branco, in whose small restaurant a permanent exchange of information on political developments in Germany was maintained. Altberg approached Carlos Lacerda and met Guignard , a friendship that would last for many years. Via PRÓ-ARTE he also came into contact with Gregori Warchavchik and was introduced to Lasar Segall, who had returned from a long stay in Paris.

The first structures

The experience gained at Korn & Weizmann made a great impression on Altberg. He had the chance to start his professional activities as early as 1932, when his father started buying small plots of land in Ipanema and Leblon . Altberg built single-family houses on these plots in Rua Redfern. In the same year he started a residence for the Hungarian immigrant and trader Adalbert Vertecz on the same street. Both his family houses and the Vertecz residence attracted the attention of colleagues and students from ENBA who visited him. He received his guests in the Altberg family home, where he could spread and discuss his ideas. At that time he also met the Italian sculptor Lélio Landucci, who had worked in Paris as an assistant to the renowned sculptor Paul Landowsky. Altberg became friends with Landucci, and together they took part in a competition to build a school with sports facilities in Ilhéus . Although they won the first prize, they never received the prize money and did not know whether the project would ever be implemented in any form.

1 ° Salao de Arquitetura Tropical

The idea of organizing the 1 ° Salao de Arquitetura Tropical , which opened in the Palace Hotel on April 17, 1933, probably originated in the Costa & Warschavchik office, which Altberg regularly visited informally. This architecture exhibition was also organized by João Lourenço da Silva, Adhemar Portugal and Alcides da Rocha Miranda, while the Associação de Artistas Brasileiros was responsible. Altberg, who was able to fall back on the valuable experience he had gathered at the “Exhibition of Proletarian Architecture” in Berlin, was co-organizer and designer of the catalog and the invitation to the salon. The catalog also contained a programmatic text by Walter Gropius and a photo of the Bauhaus in Dessau with the accompanying text “Closed due to the political situation!”.

The magazine base

Due to the lack of modern architecture magazines in Brazil, Altberg, who was used to a large supply in Germany, decided to found his own magazine, which was named "base - revista de arte, técnica e pensamento" . He was also the editor , financier, graphic designer, illustrator , author , curator of texts and - to reduce costs - also the typographer of this magazine. However, Altberg did not want to publish a simple architecture magazine. He intended to update Brazilian production and to embed it in an internationalized context, and tried to give the reader an integral view of architecture as a cultural phenomenon in organic connection with the other - especially the plastic - arts. Using his contacts from the PRÓ-ARTE association, Altberg invited various authors from modernist circles to write contributions. The base magazine contained articles on literature, music, ballet, photography, new publications and various critical texts.

On June 28, 1934, Altberg received Brazilian citizenship and officially took the name Alexandre. As a passionate collector of antiques , he found a professional niche in the field of interior design in the 1950s. He withdrew more and more from purely architectural work and opened a furniture and antiques shop in Botafogo , which he kept until the 1970s. Altberg lived in Rio de Janeiro for 70 years ; since 2001 he lived in Marília, the city of his wife Odete, in the interior of São Paulo .

Web links

• O centenário de Alexandre Altberg, o Niemeyer alemão Nova Urbis of July 8, 2008, Portuguese. Accessed August 29, 2008.
• Alexandre Altberg ea Arquitetura Nova no Rio de Janeiro Arquitextos - Periódico mensal de textos de arquitetura (Portuguese). Accessed August 29, 2008.