Ernst Werner (civil engineer)

Ernst Werner (born November 18, 1925 in Duisburg , † January 14, 1990 in Mülheim an der Ruhr ) was a German structural engineer and university professor.

Life

Ernst Werner spent his youth in Bonn, where he attended the Ernst Moritz Arndt Oberschule . At the age of 18 he was drafted into the armed forces. As was usual with the prospective high school graduates in this situation, he received a preliminary school leaving certificate with the so-called maturity note. In May 1945 Werner was released from French captivity due to multiple wounds. As early as autumn 1945 Werner attended the pre-semester courses at the University of Heidelberg and in the spring of 1946 began studying civil engineering at the TH Karlsruhe , which he was able to successfully complete in 1950. He then joined the Duisburg engineering office of Professor Georg Lewenton (1902–1988) as a structural engineer, became his partner in 1960 and advanced to test engineer for structural analysis in 1962 . He remained loyal to the engineering office until his death. Since 1966 he has been teaching structural engineering to architecture students at what was then the Folkwang School of Design in Essen-Werden . Werner already discussed the history of structural engineering and structural engineering in his first publications . They indicate not only his commitment to technical monuments in the field of iron and steel construction, but also his historically accentuated structural theory. Werner worked with great commitment in the transfer of the Folkwang School to the University of Essen , where he was responsible for promoting the development of the civil engineering degree course. In particular, the establishment of the structural engineering course for prospective vocational school teachers is associated with his name: Here Ernst Werner succeeded in making the development history of structural engineering fruitful for university teaching. Werner was appointed professor at the Faculty of Civil Engineering at the University of Essen in 1974 and received his doctorate in the same year with a dissertation on the history of iron bridge construction at the Technical University of Munich under Franz Hart and Kurt Latzin. and completed his habilitation two years later at the University of Duisburg with a thesis on the history of beam theory . He also held a teaching position at the University of Duisburg for several years. Nonetheless, Werner did not limit himself to university teaching, he also tried to bring the relevance of building technology-historical knowledge to architects, preservationists, technical historians and advisory civil engineers. His contributions to the history of iron and steel construction as well as half-timbered and beam theory should be emphasized. He summarized all of this in 1980 in his monograph Mechanization of Building . In the same year Werner was elected to the post of deputy rector of the University of Essen for three years and was entrusted with the task of vice rector for university planning and financial matters.

Due to a serious illness, from which he died in 1990, he retired in 1984, leaving a large gap in the field of the historiography of construction technology in the Federal Republic of Germany. He was their first systematically working representative who succeeded in anchoring knowledge of the history of building technology comprehensively in structural theory, the history of technology and technology didactics of the building industry.

Works

• Early wooden and stone structures. (= Folkwang Information. No. 6). Folkwang School of Design, Essen 1969.
• Britannia and Conway tube bridges. Werner-Verlag , Düsseldorf 1969.
• Structural engineering - structural engineering for architects. Part 1 and 2. Werner-Verlag, Düsseldorf 1970.
• The Crystal Palace in London 1851. Werner-Verlag, Düsseldorf 1970.
• The bridge over the Neumagen in Staufen. In: Schau-ins-Land. Annual magazine of the Breisgau history association. Vol. 89, 1971, pp. 135-148.
• E. Werner, L. Schwarz (Ed.): Georg Lewenton on June 5, 1972. Walter Braun Verlag, Duisburg 1972.
• The Sayner Hütte casting hall. In: Zentralblatt für Industriebau. 19th vol., H. 6, 1973, pp. 254-260.
• The Haniel Bridge between Ruhrort and Duisburg. In: Duisburg research. Volume 17, 1973, pp. 101-164.
• The railway bridge over the Wupper near Müngsten 1893–1897. (= Technical monuments. Workbook 4). Bonn 1973.
• The first chain and wire rope bridges. (= History of technology in individual representations. No. 28). VDI-Verlag, Düsseldorf 1973.
• The first iron bridges (1777-1859). Dissertation. Technical University of Munich, 1974.
• Iron as an auxiliary building material and a means of connection in old structures. In: Zentralblatt für Industriebau. 21 vol., H. 2, 1975, pp. 56-62.
• The development of bending theory from Galileo to Navier. Habilitation lecture. Duisburg 1976.
• The iron bridges - some aspects of their development. In: iron architecture. The role of iron in historical architecture of the first half of the 19th century. ICOMOS colloquium in Bad Ems. Hanover 1978, pp. 33-39.
• Who knows the absolute truth? Approaches in technology and science. In: Consulting. H. 12, 1979, pp. 10-13 and H. 1, 1980, pp. 50f.
• Mechanization of building. Historical basics of modern construction technology. Werner-Verlag, Düsseldorf 1980.

literature

• Karl-Eugen Kurrer : The History of the Theory of Structures. Searching for Equilibrium. Ernst & Sohn , 2018, ISBN 978-3-433-03229-9 , p. 1078, biography.