Chen Kuen Lee

Lee Chen-kuan ( Chinese  李承 寬 ; born June 16, 1914 in Wuxing , Republic of China ; † September 14, 2003 in Berlin ) was a German architect of Chinese origin. The student and colleague Hans Scharoun founded the Chinese Werkbund with him and Hugo Häring from 1941 to 1953 . Lee is an important representative of organic architecture after 1945. His work is particularly determined by single-family houses in southern Germany.

Life

Chen Kuen Lee moved to Germany in 1931 and in the same year began studying architecture at the Technical University of Berlin , which he graduated in 1937. On the side, Lee worked in Hans Poelzig's office . He passed his main diploma examination in 1939.

From 1939 to 1941 he worked for Hans Scharoun. He then worked with Hugo Häring on the idea of ​​the Chinese Werkbund until 1943 . From 1943 to 1947 he worked with Professor Ernst Boerschmann and from 1947 to 1953 he worked repeatedly with Hans Scharoun. Then Lee went into business for himself and had offices in Berlin and Stuttgart . From 1981 a visiting professorship was held at Tunghai University in Taiwan. He moved there in 1988 to teach at various universities, but returned to Germany in 1996 and lived there in Berlin's Märkisches Viertel until his death on September 14, 2003 .

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House Ketterer (1955)

House Straub sr. (1956)

Schmidt House (1960)

Eduard-Pfeiffer-Strasse 29 (1962)

Am Schlachtensee 144 (1965)

House Audry (1969)

Residential houses, Märkisches Viertel (1970)

House Straub Jr. (1978)

In the mid-1930s, Chen Kuen Lee was a guest at Hans and Marlene Poelzig's house on Tannenbergallee, near Berlin's Grunewald. There he met Egon Eiermann , who introduced him to the gardens of Herta Hammerbacher , but not only: Here Lee got to know the works of the “Hammerbacher - Mattern - Foerster” working group, which, as the Bornimer Circle, played an important role in New Building, played the New Garden and ultimately also for Lee's architecture. The garden of the host couple Poelzig was already a reform work. In 1931 Hammerbacher, Foerster and Poelzig realized the building and the landscape together. The designers from different disciplines had set themselves the goal of merging the house and the surrounding greenery with artistic means. Lee summarized the impression he got there in the mid-1930s with the words: An architecture "as if the Grunewald had been absorbed by the house".

In contrast to the landscape garden, with the landscape garden, as Hammerbacher called it, the connection to the garden arises not only through looking at it, "but only through the fact that the garden offers space for daily activities". That is why the development, the course of the paths and the direct interlinking with the architecture are just as important as the organization that is committed to the landscape. The house is not conceived as a closed structure, where the view through the window conquers the surroundings, but as a fanned-out sculpture that continues in the garden space. The connection between house, garden and surrounding forest, which Chen Kuen Lee got to know through the Bornimer Kreis, had an effect. When he received orders for his first single-family houses in the mid-1950s, he commissioned Hermann Mattern to design the gardens of the houses. Mattern realized the landscaping for the builders Ketterer (1954), Straub senior (1956), Kiekert (1960), Mellert (projected 1960), Strack (1960), Bense (1962) and Ong (1968). The house Ketterer is located on a hill plateau of the Stuttgart Gänsheide. The traffic routes around the house are marked with connected slabs, in the garden area they are laid more freely and provide the step motif for the circular route. Individual large trees, such as pines at the entrance, were planted selectively. Mattern also integrated the existing tree landscape, so that there is a single deciduous tree on the terrace, around which the panels were laid and which pierces the roof of the pergola through a rectangular opening. Two years after the completion of Haus Ketterer, Lee and Mattern realized the grounds of Haus Straub senior. It is an example of the residential garden of the single-family home, which Mattern viewed as the original form of his designs and as a building block for urban development. The building is located on a trapezoidal plot. The room is framed by trees like a backdrop, as if by a “forest coat”.

The interlocking structures of the architecture fan out in three directions. The main garden area is assigned to the broadly bent front, from which the garden structure develops. It follows the soil modeling that is recorded by the lawns and their troughs. This creates three winding valleys that are kept open like clearings. Similar to the garden for House Ong, they are each divided by tongue-like plant strips. The perennials and shrubs create space here, pushing themselves into the lawns in different lengths. Plants directly on the house are not used; instead, pictures of vegetation frame the garden. The path is designed as a path with irregular natural stone slabs and is accompanied by grass borders and plant tongues. The arrangement and the course are based on the freely strolling path, which is recorded in the laying pattern of the unmounted natural stones, because the path is an "organic part of the garden" and "so the footpath, if it is adapted to human walking, can also be shaped and in the way to put it on, express those rhythms ”. The foot of the garden dweller gradually feels the terrain sculpture with its modeled heights. The closer you get to the house, the thicker the slabs are, pointing to the terrace. They look like scattered terrace elements that lead into the lawn. The gently curved footpath leads to a swimming pool, slows down, circles the pool and finally disappears behind the woods. As in the garden for the client Mellert, the swimming pool, which is set without borders in the lawn, forms the end point of a path through which the site can be measured and explored.

For the Stuttgart builder Bense, Mattern realized five small garden rooms that belong to a multi-storey residential building on a steep hillside. In a small space, Mattern reacted to the angularly shifted balconies, cantilevers and the high gradation of Lee's architecture. He thus continued a design that he and the Bornimer Kreis had already made with the multiple kinked, rounded and open structures of Hans Scharoun's architecture in the early 1920s. As with Scharoun, Lee had created residential houses whose faceted and expansive shape was designed as a free form and in which the interlocking of architecture and garden was understood as a central building task. What Herta Hammerbacher formulated in her paper about house gardens and organic buildings can also apply to Lee: A garden type was coined in which the relationship between the garden and architecture was presented as the integration of the elements of building and the garden. Crystalline structures form a cohesive whole in the building, while self-assembling free spatial compositions arise with the vegetation.

Lee mainly concentrated on residential construction and tried to take into account the specifics of the specific location. In addition to the open and largely oblique-angled floor plans, the strong interlocking of the buildings with their closer and wider surroundings is characteristic of his construction. For most of the buildings, Lee worked closely with gardening architects from the very first design considerations. a. with Hermann Mattern , Adolf Haag and Hannes Haag . In many buildings, the inside and outside penetrate one another through the continuation of visual axes in the form of winter gardens or bodies of water.

In his designs, Lee oriented himself strongly to the requirements of the functional processes inside the building. By designing from the inside out, the shape of the building results as the fulfillment of its functions, that is, the floor plan is not subordinated to an externally superimposed form. The free floor plan could only be achieved through self-supporting structures. The roof often forms a landscape folded in different directions with different views of the surroundings and light guides. Lee's spatial ideas often required special static and structural solutions that far exceeded the limits of conventional residential buildings. Here it was the structural engineer and designer Christian Sättele who, in decades of friendship, translated Lee's ideas into space structures for most of Lee's buildings, which allowed great freedom in the floor plan without coming into the foreground.

The creation of interiors with very different living qualities for the users resulted in open floor plans with rooms flowing into one another. For many of his buildings, Chen Kuen Lee designed the interiors himself, with numerous designs for furniture, lighting and other fixtures.

Lee realized 63 buildings; there are also around 40 designs that were not implemented. In addition to residential buildings, Chen Kuen Lee has built a number of industrial buildings and set up various Chinese restaurants in Berlin, Karlsruhe, Stuttgart and Munich.

Chen Kuen Lee has written several essays on the subject of New Building and two books in Taiwan on New Building, the ideas of which he explains on various houses.

estate

Part of his estate is in the architecture archive of the Academy of Arts in Berlin.

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Buildings (selection)

• 1953: House Scharf in Oberstdorf
• 1954–1955: House Ketterer in Stuttgart
• 1956–1957: House Straub sr. in Knittlingen
• 1960: Schmidt House in Giengen an der Brenz
• 1960: House Kiekert in Heiligenhaus
• 1961–1962: Apartment house Eduard-Pfeiffer-Strasse 29 in Stuttgart
• 1963–1965: Residential house and apartment house at Schlachtensee 144, Berlin-Nikolassee
• 1965–1970: Residential buildings in the Märkisches Viertel in Berlin
• 1967–1969: Audry House in Luxembourg
• 1968: Dr. Gilliar in Nabburg
• 1975–1978: House Straub jr. in Knittlingen
• 1976–1981: Dr. Gardener in Bretten
• 1980–1982: House in Schützingen

• Chain houses, Stuttgart-Sonnenberg (1963)
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Fonts

• yesterday Today Tomorrow. (Commentary on the opening of new exhibition rooms at Behr Möbel GmbH) In: Bauwelt , born 1958, No. 22, p. 514.
• Reply. In: Bauwelt , year 1971, No. 47/48, p. 1916 and p. 1918.
• Contrast and complement between building and landscape. A consideration based on the writings of Hugo Häring, based on the collaboration with students of Karl Förster. In: Axel Jacobshaagen, Karin Sommer-Kempf (Hrsg.): Contributions to the problem of the relationship between open space and building. (Festschrift for Herta Hammerbacher) Berlin 1975, pp. 226–247.
• xin jian zhu zhi yi yi. (The Importance of New Building) Taipei 1993.
• xin jian zhu zhi yan jien. (The Development of New Building) Taipei 1996.
• xin jian zhu yu da zhueng wen hua. (New building and mass culture) unpublished, Taipei 1999.

literature

• Giuliano Chelazzi: Equilibrio espressionista tra i tempi e gli spazi nell'opera di Chen Kuen Lee. In: L'architettura, cronache e storia , year 1985, issue 1, pp. 24–38.
• Hugo Häring: Interview with Chen Kuan Li about some roof profiles. In: Heinrich Lauterbach, Jürgen Joedicke: Hugo Häring. Writings, drafts, buildings. Stuttgart 1965, pp. 60-63.
• Institute for Foreign Relations (Ed.): Chen Kuen Lee - House Landscapes - Organic Building in Stuttgart, Berlin and Taiwan. Stuttgart 2015, ISBN 978-3-7828-1618-2 .
• Michael Koch: Chen Kuen Lee. Building as a philosophy of life. (Booklet accompanying the exhibition in the Architekturgalerie am Weißenhof from February 6 to March 17, 1985) Self-published, Stuttgart 1985.
• Eduard Kögel: Chen Kuen Lee's residential landscapes. An obituary. In: archplus , issue 168 (2004), p. 20 f.
• Matthias Schirren : Chen Kuen Lee 1915–2003 (obituary). In: Bauwelt , year 2003, No. 37, p. 4.
• Klaus-Jakob Thiele: Building - an interpretation of life. In: Bauwelt , born 1963, No. 50, pp. 1487–1495.
• Otto Maier: Follow-up call to Chen Kuen Lee during his lifetime. In: Bauwelt , year 1988, No. 40, p. 1715.
• Wen-chi Wang: Lee Chen-kuan (1914–2003) and the Chinese Werkbund. Reimer, Berlin 2010.

Web links

Commons : Chen Kuen Lee  - Collection of Pictures, Videos and Audio Files

• Chen Kuen Lee (1915-2003). House landscapes. Organic building in Stuttgart, Berlin and Taiwan. Exhibition of the ifa , Stuttgart 2015
• Chen Kuen Lee: Projects (Bense House and Garden, apartment in the Märkisches Viertel) in the Architecture Museum of the Technical University of Berlin
• Organic architecture by Chen Kuen Lee. Architect portrait, A&W Architektur & Wohnen
• Chen Kuen Lee archive in the archive of the Academy of Arts, Berlin
• "The German-Chinese architect Chen Kuen Lee" , online magazine of the Goethe-Institut China, January 2016

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Wen-chi Wang: Chen-kuan Lee and the Chinese Werkbund . Reimer, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-496-01419-5 (Wang was able to prove that the usually assumed birthday on May 23, 1915 is based on an incorrect conversion from the Chinese calendar).
2. ↑ Valérie Hammerbacher: "As if the Grunewald had been absorbed by the house" - landscaped gardens of the Bornimer district. In: Institute for Foreign Relations (Ed.): Chen Kuen Lee - House Landscapes - Organic Building in Stuttgart, Berlin and Taiwan. Stuttgart 2015, pp. 46–50.
3. ^ Academy of the Arts in Berlin: Architecture Archive: Chen Kuen Lee Archive
4. ^ ^{A b} Chen Kuen Lee - exhibition in Berlin. News from January 19, 2016, BauNetz .
5. ↑ Alexander Hoff, Thomas Steigenberger: House & Apartment House Am Schlachtensee 144 . State Monument Office Berlin. Retrieved February 4, 2020.