Bauhaus debate 1953

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Rudolf Schwarz with Hans Schwippert, St. Corpus Christi Aachen, 1929
The reconstructed Bauhaus building

The Bauhaus debate in 1953 or even Rudolf Schwarz debate is a 1953 public guided debate on the goals and motives of the new architecture and the architecture Modern in West Germany after 1945. It was through the pamphlet image artist, do not talk of the Cologne architect Rudolf Schwarz triggered , which appeared in January 1953 in the journal Baukunst und Werkform and followed on from the Bauhaus dispute of the 1920s.

occasion

Schwarz, a master student of Hans Poelzig and himself a pioneer of the New Building , discussed in his article the “misguided development of modern architecture, according to which the Bauhaus, by turning away from the architectural tradition, created a gap that silenced the“ occidental conversation ” brought. ”He evaluated the Dessau Bauhaus style represented by Walter Gropius as a formalism ( Fordism ) dominated by rationalism , mechanical materialism and technicalism from the pre-war period and instead called for a history-conscious modernity for the period after 1945.

effect

Schwarz found little understanding and public approval for his view, even if Theodor W. Adorno had expressed doubts about the Bauhaus before him. The often polemical arguments neglected essential questions about a reorientation of modernity appropriate to the needs of reconstruction. For example, Schwarz accused Walter Gropius of “not being able to think.” He ironically spoke of the “various rallies with which the Bauhaus made the earth happy.” He criticized the Fagus factory and the Bauhaus building and described his declared opponents from the Bauhaus as "exaggerating aesthetic technicians, as useless ideologues and cheeky and excited terrorists."

Museum of Applied Arts Cologne (originally: Wallraf-Richartz Museum Cologne by Rudolf Schwarz and Karl Band 1953–1957)

The debate dragged on over seven editions of Baukunst und Werkform and was subsequently also taken up by other magazines and newspapers such as Die Neue Zeitung : Rudolf Steinbach tried to convey the thoughts of Rudolf Schwarz; Walter Gropius was informed about the Bauhaus criticism in a letter from Hermann Mäckler on February 25, 1953. In correspondence with the Bauhaus student Paul Klopfer , Richard Döcker and Heinrich König, he represented his point of view in this dispute, on which Hubert Hoffmann , Guido Remszhardt, Peter Röhl, Louis Schoberth, Rudolf Hillebrecht , Martin Wagner , Hermann Baur , Gottfried Böhm , Theodor Heuss , Rudolf Pfister , Friedrich Lehmann and Emil Steffann participated.

meaning

“The Schwarz debate (…) was (…) repeatedly referred to, but the larger context, the question of a different modernism besides the geometric and economic 'Bauhaus style', was only discussed again when the so-called economic miracle In 1994 Winfried Nerdinger used this sentence to link the Bauhaus debate with the big city debate that Alexander Mitscherlich opened in 1969 with his pamphlet The Inhospitableness of Our Cities, Incitement to Unrest .

According to Thilo Hilpert, the Bauhaus debate in 1953 had a direct impact on the National Theater Mannheim competition (1953), to which Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was invited and in which Rudolf Schwarz also took part. In the catalog of the exhibition Mies van der Rohe in post-war Germany - The Theater Project Mannheim 1953 , which Hilpert showed in 2002 in the Kandinsky / Klee Masters' Houses in Dessau, he concluded in Chapter II The Bauhaus Polemics 1953 that Black's attack on the 'glass cube' Although Gropius was considered, he unintentionally prevented Mies van der Rohe's glass theater project for Mannheim, possibly his return to Germany; for Schwarz perceived Mies van der Rohe more as a modern classicist and less as an experimental builder. What Hilpert did not mention in this context was the re-importation of the symbol “Bauhaus” into war-torn West Germany by Gropius, who took his “Bauhaus” brand with him when he left Bauhaus Dessau in 1928 and represented it worldwide as modernity - in complete contrast to his successors Hannes Meyer and Mies van der Rohe. Apart from that, the Bauhaus debate was also an attack on architecture in the Third Reich ( architecture under National Socialism ). It was in Düsseldorf architects dispute by Josef Lehmbrock , Bernhard Pfau u. a. continued and shaped the West German post-war modernity .

Alt St.Alban - courtyard Gürzenich Cologne with the sculpture (copy) ' Mourning Parents ' by Käthe Kollwitz, Rudolf Schwarz, 1955.

In the aftermath of the Bauhaus debate in 1953, the Behnisch-Sterling and Behnisch-Ungers debates, the Stuttgart 21 debate, the debates about the Palace of the Republic and the Berlin Palace, as well as the reconstruction of the Frankfurt Römerberg and the Dessau Masters' Houses the sense and nonsense of building, which not least also applies to a culture of remembrance with its concern to pass on, preserve and take responsibility for history, as Hilpert noted in retrospect in 2015:

“After 1945, Schwarz was the first architect for young architects like (Paul) Schneider-Esleben to draw their attention to the achievements of modernism. He was also the only prominent architect who - mocked by Eiermann at the Darmstadt talks 'Mensch und Raum' in 1951 - mourned the disappearance of the fragmented old cities. (...) The conservative Schwarz (...) was concerned with the lost labyrinths of the city. "

Reconstructed director's villa Gropius (Masters' Houses Dessau), garden side, Bruno Fioretti Marquez (BFM), 2014.

literature

  • Ulrich Conrads , Magdalena Droste, Winfried Nerdinger , Peter Neitzke : The Bauhaus Debate 1953. Documents of a suppressed controversy ( Bauwelt Fundamente , Volume 100) . Vieweg, Braunschweig, Wiesbaden 1994, ISBN 978-3-7643-6375-8 .
  • Brigitte Braun: Missed Opportunity? Rudolf Schwarz and the Bauhaus debate of 1953 . In: New home, new home. From Bauhaus to product and object culture . 2000, p. 85-92 .
  • Christian Borngräber: The Rudolf Schwarz Debate . In: ARCH + . No. 56 , 1981.
  • Rudolf Schwarz: Make artists, don't talk . In: Baukunst und Werkform . 1953, p. 9 ff .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c 1953: The Bauhaus dispute - Rudolf Schwarz versus Bauhaus. (No longer available online.) Deutscher Werkbund NW eV, archived from the original on February 25, 2017 ; Retrieved February 25, 2017 .
  2. ^ Wolfgang Pehnt: Industrial garden realm. In: Der Spiegel . March 28, 1994. Retrieved February 25, 2017 .
  3. ↑ a b c d Öznur Takıl: Gürzenich Cologne / The Bauhaus Debate 1953. In: Post-war architecture in North Rhine-Westphalia. Art History Institute of the Ruhr University Bochum , accessed on February 25, 2017 .
  4. ^ Adolf Stock: The Gropius principle. Deutschlandradio Kultur, May 14, 2008, accessed on February 26, 2017 .
  5. ↑ Manfred Sundermann: Mechanical City? In: Manfred Sundermann (Ed.): Junkers.Dessau, Mechanical City? Anhalt Edition, Dessau 2002, ISBN 3-936383-06-5 , p. 153 .
  6. ↑ Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, Asyl für Homdachlose, Frankfurt 1951, p. 57, ISBN 3-518-41300-7 .
  7. ↑ Florian Fischer: What one may or must be able to. Baumeister - Das Architektur Magazin, October 13, 2015, accessed on February 26, 2017 .
  8. ↑ Hermann Mäckler, Walter Gropius et al .: The Bauhaus Debate 1953, p. 52 eff. Ed .: Ulrich Conrads ...
  9. ↑ Winfried Nerdinger: The Bauhaus between mystification and criticism . In: Ulrich Conrads u. a. (Ed.): The Bauhaus Debate 1953, documents of a repressed controversy . Vieweg, Braunschweig, Wiesbaden 1994, ISBN 3-528-06100-6 , pp. 7th f .
  10. ↑ Thilo Hilpert: Mies van der Rohe in post-war Germany - The Theater Project Mannheim 1953 . EASeemann, Leipzig 2001, ISBN 3-363-00770-1 , p. 125 f .
  11. ↑ Rudolf Bertig: The theater project. Mies van der Rohe Haus Aachen eV, accessed on March 8, 2017 .
  12. ^ Thilo Hilpert: Century of Modernity, The Century of Modernity, Architecture and Urban Development, essays and texts . Springer-Vieweg, Wiesbaden 2015, ISBN 978-3-658-07042-7 , pp. 248 f .: Rudolf Schwarz, Ruin Aesthetics and Baroque .