Ernst Cramer (garden architect)

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Ernst Friedrich Cramer (born December 7, 1898 in Zurich ; † September 7, 1980 in Rüschlikon ) was a Swiss garden architect .

Life

After an apprenticeship as a gardener in Zurich under the direction of the garden architect Gustav Ammann and after his apprenticeship and traveling years in Switzerland , Germany and France between 1918 and 1922, Cramer attended the horticultural school in Oeschberg in Switzerland until 1923. In 1929, Cramer founded his first own office for garden design in Zurich and began teaching at technical schools for gardeners. Between 1972 and 1980 he also taught at the Athenaeum Ecole d'Architecture in Lausanne in the subject garden architecture . Cramer realized numerous projects, including gardens, parks and squares in Switzerland, Germany and Italy and from 1950 - after years of traditional garden design - developed a minimalist , architectural landscape architecture with a sculptural character, which was unusual for the time .

The garden of the poets , temporarily created in 1959 at the G59 , the first Swiss horticulture - exhibition with archaic -looking lawn pyramids , Erdkegeln, an architecturally designed water pools and modern sculpture Slender Aggression by Bernhard Luginbühl is internationally recognized as one of the first works of garden architecture of the 20th Century, which about ten years before American Land Art questioned the boundary between landscape architecture and fine arts . The Museum of Modern Art in New York recognized this work in 1964 as an icon of modern garden architecture. A partial reconstruction of the poet's temporary garden with three large lawn pyramids has been located in front of the Institute for Landscape Architecture at Leibniz University Hannover since the end of 2003 .

Appreciation

Ernst Cramer's abstract works have been rediscovered in landscape architecture since the 1980s . As part of a landscape-historical and theoretical research work at the ETH Zurich , the estate of the garden architect was inventoried and scientifically evaluated from 1997 to 2002 in cooperation with the archive for Swiss landscape architecture in Rapperswil SG . The research results are in the publication Visionary Gardens. The modern landscapes by Ernst Cramer are comprehensively documented by Udo Weilacher and prove, among other things, the formative influence that Ernst Cramer's creative approach had on modern landscape architecture in Switzerland. “Planning from the people's point of view. Order in versatility. Return to simplicity. Keeping pace with modern architecture and art ”, named Ernst Cramer in a public lecture in 1967 as the basic principles of his work. The renowned Swiss landscape architect Dieter Kienast described these basic principles in Cramer's work as well as his concise design approach as timeless and was inspired by these principles in his works of the eighties and nineties of the twentieth century.

Works

Reconstructed turf pyramids at the Leibniz University Hannover

literature

  • Udo Weilacher: visionary gardens. The modern landscapes by Ernst Cramer. Birkhäuser, Basel / Berlin / Boston 2001, ISBN 3764365684
  • Architekturforum Zürich (Ed.): Garden of the Poet. G59 / 2009. Zurich 2009, ISBN 9783033019850

Web links