Alfred Schinz

Alfred Schinz (* 1919 in Berlin ; † 1999 in Herrsching am Ammersee ) was a German architect , urban planner and building researcher . His investigations into the theory and history of the Chinese city, especially its morphology and metronomy, make important contributions to Western China research.

Life

The fact that his parents lived in China before the First World War (his father worked there as a civil engineer for 18 years, including in Shandong around 1908) encouraged him to develop an affinity for Chinese culture from an early age.

Schinz studied art history with Wilhelm Pinder and archeology and architectural history with Walter Andrae in Berlin before and during World War II . He was a participant in the war, u. a. as a pioneer in Hungary. The prisoner of war (1945–1947 in Ebensee and Kassel) was followed by a degree in architecture and urban planning with Hans Scharoun at the Technical University of Berlin .

From 1947/1948 Schinz worked first as a student, then as an assistant at Scharoun's chair for urban planning, at the same time with his friend Chen Kuen Lee , the student and assistant of Ernst Boerschmann , a pioneer of Chinese building research.

Schinz worked in Scharoun's office until December 1955, where he was involved in the collective plan for Berlin (concept of urban landscape ) and in competitions and projects such as B. for the Liederhalle Stuttgart in 1949, the Friedrichshain neighborhood in 1949, an elementary school in Darmstadt in 1951, the Kassel State Theater in 1952, the Mannheim National Theater in 1953, the planning for the Hansaviertel in 1954 and the Charlottenburg Nord estate in 1955.

From January 1956, Schinz worked as an urban planner in Wolfsburg , in the vicinity of the city planning officer Peter Koller . 1961–1964 he worked independently in the planning company Ritter und Schinz in Frankfurt am Main . During this time he worked a. a. Projects in India (urban planning at the Rourkela steelworks) and in Peru (industrial park).

A seven-year activity as a scientific advisor for UNDP (1967–1974) in Taiwan gave him for the first time the opportunity to deepen the understanding of Chinese culture. The sinologist Wolfram Eberhard encouraged him to deal with traditional Chinese town planning.

In 1976 Schinz received his doctorate in engineering. with Gerd Albers at the Technical University of Munich , his dissertation was entitled Chinese Urban Development in the Manchu Dynasty (1644–1911), illustrated using the example of the Ting city of Hsinchu in Taiwan .

From 1975 to 1977 Schinz was involved with UNDP in Iraq , 1977-1980 on behalf of Speer-Plan in Saudi Arabia . Starting in 1976, he traveled to all 18 core provinces of China, as well as Qinghai, Inner Mongolia and Manchuria, as well as North and South Korea and Japan, within a period of more than ten years. The last phase of his life was devoted to research into contemporary Chinese town planning and the tradition of Chinese town planning.

Services

In the monograph Cities in China , Schinz processed material that he had collected on his travels and in contacts with municipal building and planning authorities and universities (e.g. he was visiting professor at Tongji University, Shanghai in 1983/84). The book is a detailed, illustrated with many plans the status quo representation of Chinese urban development at the beginning of the reform period (mid-1980s). Around 150 cities are presented with short portraits and uniformly cartographically in their regional context.

Building on this preliminary work, Schinz created his main and late work The Magic Square, Cities in Ancient China . As an overall representation of the Chinese urban culture from its beginnings in the late Neolithic to the Qing period, it can best be compared in type and scope with Leonardo Benevolo's history of the city . Thanks to his multidisciplinary training and his many years of professional experience in the Middle East, India, Latin America and China, Schinz presents the city's history with a great thematic breadth and differentiation. Constructive architectural details are also taken into account, such as B. hydrological aspects, the change of land use, the urban social structure or questions of terminology. The city is presented and interpreted as a document of the interplay between the change in the natural environment and that of the economy and society. Its sources are archaeological, art-historical, historical-geographical and architectural literature (as of the mid-1980s) of Chinese and foreign provenance.

With this universalistic approach, there is a risk of dissolution. But Schinz has his own question, to which everything is subordinate: It is always about the dimensions and the geometry of the city, i. H. their metronomy . Its foundation was laid in prehistoric times, its first perfection and political-religious, mythological foundation was given in the Zhou period, and then until the end of the Qing period it provided the indisputable pattern for urban design. The ideal-typical city plan according to the rites of the Zhou (Zhou Li) is mentioned repeatedly in the literature as an archetype of the Chinese city shape, but never before has the continuity, generality and variability of this pattern been worked out so conclusively as here. The metronomic pattern provides the framework for the inner structure of the city as well as for its integration into the natural topographical environment. Schinz has compiled around 180 city plans from the heterogeneous sources and presents them in a consistent sequence of scales, mostly 1: 40,000 and 1: 20,000.

Fonts (selection)

• Berlin. City fate and urban planning. Westermann, Braunschweig 1964. (264 pages)
• Measurement systems in Chinese urban planning. In: Architectura , 6th year 1976, No. 2, p. 136.
• The emergence of the city of Xi'an. In: Die Erde , Volume 114 (1983).
• Fengtian, Mukden, Shenyang. In: Geosciences in Our Time , 1st year 1983, No. 6.
• Cities in China. Bornträger, Berlin / Stuttgart 1989. (492 pages)
• (with Eckart Dege): Pyöngyang. Ancient and Modern. The Capital of North Korea. In: Geojournal , Volume 22, 1990, No. 1, pp. 21–32.
• The Magic Square. Cities in Ancient China. Edition Axel Menges, Stuttgart / London 1996. (428 pages)

Web links

• Alfred Schinz at quergeist.net

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Letter from Dr. Alfried Schinz (February 5, 2015)
2. ↑ Final Remarks. In: Alfred Schinz: The Magic Square. 1996, p. 422.