Friedrich Tamms

Grave slab Hanna and Friedrich Tamms in the Düsseldorf North Cemetery

Friedrich Tamms (born November 4, 1904 in Schwerin ; † July 4, 1980 in Düsseldorf ) was a German architect . He was a professor at the Technical University in Berlin and later building department in Düsseldorf.

Life

education

From 1923 to 1929, Tamms studied at the Technical University of Munich. In 1929 he moved to the Technical University of Berlin with Albert Speer and Rudolf Wolters . There he studied with Heinrich Tessenow as well as with Hans Poelzig . After graduating in architecture, he worked from 1929 to 1934 at the bridge construction office in Berlin and from 1935 to 1939 as a consulting architect for the construction of the Reichsautobahn and the equipping of petrol stations . At the second German architecture exhibition in the Munich House of German Art , he was represented in 1938/1939 with designs for a gas station in Breslau and the Nibelungen Bridge in Linz . From 1938 to 1941, the Nibelungen Bridge in Linz was built according to his design.

Career

Flak tower (gun tower) in the Augarten in Vienna

From 1938 to 1945 Tamms worked in Albert Speer's authority as general building inspector for the capital of the Reich , and from 1942 to 1945 he was professor of design and planning at the TH Berlin. Hitler personally appointed Tamms as a university professor. As an employee of the Organization Todt realized Tamms for the leader cities Berlin, Hamburg and Vienna eight Flakturm pairs equipped with anti-aircraft guns (Flak) whose medieval castle appearance should suggest valor. Furthermore, Tamms was responsible for the reconstruction of cities destroyed by bombs in Aachen and Lübeck . In the final phase of the Second World War , Adolf Hitler included him in the God-gifted list of the most important architects in August 1944 , which freed him from military service, including on the home front .

After the war he first moved to Gartow in the Lüchow-Dannenberg district , where he tried unsuccessfully to continue his professorship in Berlin. An appointment to the City Planning Council of Ankara , Turkey , initiated by Paul Bonatz , also failed.

From 1948 to 1954, Tamms was head of the Düsseldorf city ​​planning office , where his personnel policy, which favored his former high-ranking friends such as Helmut Hentrich , Konstanty Gutschow and Rudolf Wolters , caused the Düsseldorf architects' dispute. The Architektenring Düsseldorf founded by Bernhard Pfau accused Tamms of preferring architects who were friends, even if Tamms was not a member of the NSDAP . The dispute escalated when Julius Schulte-Frohlinde , former architect of the German Labor Front (DAF), was appointed head of the Düsseldorf Building Department in 1952 at the instigation of Tamms and designed the new town hall in a very traditional look .

Create

From 1954 Tamms was as a municipal councilor responsible for town and country planning, since 1960 he was head of the department for the construction of the city. He understood the urban space as an urban landscape and propagated the car-friendly city . With this view he succeeded in building the Berliner Allee with the continuation of the millipede and Kennedydamm as a north-south axis through the war-torn city. He also designed and implemented the bridge family , three similar cable-stayed bridges that connect both sides of the Rhine in Düsseldorf. From 1956 he also planned the satellite town of Garath . Tamms also designed the congress hall and the renovation of the Rheinstadion in Düsseldorf for the 1974 World Cup . In 1970 he was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit. In 1974, published by the German Academy for Urban Development and Regional Planning , with a foreword by Rudolf Hillebrecht and an afterword by Wilhelm Wortmann , the book Von Menschen, Stadt und Brücken , a collection of texts from Tamms from the period between 1930 and 1974, was published contained.

Awards

• 1972: Honorary doctorate from the Vienna University of Technology
• 1975: Corresponding member of the Braunschweig Scientific Society

Literature and Sources

• Werner Durth : German Architects. Biographical entanglements 1900–1970 . Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Munich 1992, ISBN 3-528-28705-5 , p. 345 ff., P. 516
• Friedrich Tamms and Wilhelm Wortmann : Urban planning. Environmental design. Experiences and thoughts. Darmstadt, 1973.
• The (partial) estate of Tamms, v. a. from the time in Düsseldorf, is kept in the state archive of North Rhine-Westphalia, Rhineland department, and forms the RW 0254 inventory there.
• Further documents can be found in the Düsseldorf City Archives.

Web links

• Literature by and about Friedrich Tamms in the catalog of the German National Library
• Biography on Architekten-Portrait.de
• History workshop Düsseldorf: Friedrich Tamms
• Flak towers, monuments of the Nazi megalomania on Spiegel.de

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} Ernst Klee : The culture lexicon for the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-10-039326-5 , p. 607.
2. ^ Adolf Stock: Destruction and Reconstruction, Düsseldorf: The Janus face. In: Deutschlandfunkkultur.de. September 20, 2005, accessed April 13, 2019 . 
3. ↑ Friedrich Tamms: Of people, cities and bridges . Econ Verlag, Düsseldorf 1974, ISBN 3-430-19004-5
4. ↑ TU Wien: Honorary doctorates ( memento of the original from February 21, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Retrieved March 26, 2015.