Friedrich Ignaz von Emperger

Friedrich von Emperger in Teutonencouleur at the 30th foundation festival of the Prague fraternity Teutonia 1906 in Prague

Friedrich Ignaz Edler von Emperger (born January 11, 1862 in Beraun , Böhmen , † February 7, 1942 in Vienna ) was a Bohemian-Austrian civil engineer and university professor at the Vienna University of Technology .

Career

Fritz von Emperger was a student of bridge builder Joseph Melan . He studied at the German Technical University in Prague and was active there in 1879 with the Prague fraternity Teutonia , with which he remained connected until his death. In 1881 he went to the Technical University in Vienna, where he became a member of the Vienna academic fraternity of Albia . He was also a member of the Arminia fraternity in Graz .

The Abbey Bridge in Berlin, a work by Emperger

From 1890 he was a consulting engineer in New York, designed and built subways and high-rise buildings in Boston and New York in the USA from 1890 to 1896. From 1893 to 1894 he built the Edenpark Bridge in Cincinnati according to the construction method of his teacher Melan . With this construction, after it defied a flood, and with many lectures, Emperger made reinforced concrete popular in America . In 1897 he returned to Vienna from the USA. From 1898 he was a private lecturer at the Technical University of Vienna , from 1926 to 1938 President of the Railway Committee and the Austrian Association of Engineers and Architects. In 1901 he founded the trade journal “Newer Construction Methods and Structures made of Concrete and Iron” (“Concrete and Iron” since 1905, then “ Concrete and Reinforced Concrete ”) , which is still relevant today . In 1906 he founded the “ concrete calendar ”, which he published until 1922. In 1908/09 he published the multi-volume work “Handbuch für Eisenbeton”, which subsequently appeared in several editions. The latter forms the specialist journalistic system of reinforced concrete construction of the Wilhelm Ernst & Sohn publishing house , which Fritz von Emperger created with Georg Ernst, with the aforementioned specialist journal and the concrete calendar . At the building trade exhibition in Leipzig in 1913, Friedrich von Emperger was the engineer in charge of the “Fürst von Schwarzenberg Bridge”, a pedestrian bridge that was the first to be built using the building system he developed. Von Emperger was also the master builder of the Berlin Abbey Bridge, completed in 1916 , which spans the Spree and leads pedestrians from Treptower Park to the Abbey Island .

Political commitment

Emperger was a German citizen and was a member of the "Greater German People's League" until it was dissolved in 1938. In 1940 he applied for admission to the NSDAP , in which he stated that he was a member of the NSV , the National Socialist Lawyers' Association and the NS-Bund Deutscher Technik . Indeed Emperger was performed as a party candidate of the Nazi party since 1938 and was described by the Viennese district administration in 1939 as an "active fighters" of the Nazi movement had remained faithful to the prohibition period from 1934 to 1938 and various Nazi organizations such as the Winter Relief was supporting . Due to the membership ban of the NSDAP , Emperger's admission process was only resumed in 1941 after several requests from his daughter and the responsible local group, but Emperger died in 1942 before the process could be completed.

Awards

"For his contributions as a champion of the introduction and development of the iron concrete construction" awarded him in 1932 the Technical University of Dresden , the honorary doctorate (Dr.-Ing. E. h.). He was also awarded the Goethe Medal for Art and Science in 1941 by the National Socialist Gauleiter Baldur von Schirach .

In 1953, Empergergasse in Vienna- Floridsdorf (21st district) was named after him.

literature

• Karl Kugi:  Emperger, Friedrich Ignaz Edler von. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 4, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1959, ISBN 3-428-00185-0 , p. 487 ( digitized version ).
• Emperger Friedrich Ignaz von. In: Austrian Biographical Lexicon 1815–1950 (ÖBL). Volume 1, Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna 1957, p. 246.
• Helge Dvorak: Biographical Lexicon of the German Burschenschaft. Volume II: Artists. Winter, Heidelberg 2018, ISBN 978-3-8253-6813-5 , pp. 172-174.
• Karl-Eugen Kurrer : The History of the Theory of Structures. Searching for Equilibrium , Ernst and Sohn 2018, pp. 616f and 991f (biography), ISBN 978-3-433-03229-9

Web links

Wikisource: Friedrich Ignaz von Emperger  - Sources and full texts

• Entry on Friedrich Ignaz von Emperger in the Austria Forum  (in the AEIOU Austria Lexicon )
• Entry about Friedrich Ignaz von Emperger in the database of the Wilhelm Exner Medal Foundation .
• Literature by and about Friedrich Ignaz von Emperger in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Karl-Eugen Kurrer: 100 years of the magazine 'Beton- und Stahlbetonbau' . In: Concrete and reinforced concrete construction . 96th year, no. 4 . Ernst & Sohn, Berlin 2001, p. 212-222 .
2. ^ Karl-Eugen Kurrer: structural analysis. Four case studies on the media presentation of reinforced concrete design from the beginnings to the early 20th century . In: Wolfgang Sonne (Ed.): The media of architecture . Deutscher Kunstverlag, Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-422-06821-6 , p. 195-229 .
3. ↑ Die Bau- und Kunstdenkmale in Berlin , Volume II, page 369; Published by the Institute for Monument Preservation at Henschelverlag, Berlin, 1984
4. ^ Street names in Vienna since 1860 as "Political Places of Remembrance" (PDF; 4.4 MB), p. 265f, final research project report, Vienna, July 2013