Georg Kuphaldt

Portrait of Georg Kuphaldt (oil painting)

Georg Friedrich Ferdinand Kuphaldt (born June 6, 1853 in Plön , † April 14, 1938 in Berlin ) was a German garden architect . He is considered the most important garden architect in the Russian Empire before the First World War .

Life

Georg Kuphaldt was born in 1853 in Plön, Holstein, as one of four children of high school teacher Hans Hinrich Kuphaldt and his wife Dorothea Bollwitte. After completing high school, he completed an apprenticeship as a gardener in the Eutiner Hofgarten with Hermann Roese from 1871 to 1873 . Further apprenticeship years followed in 1873/1874 at the Pomological Institute in Reutlingen . After an assistantship in Trier and in the zoological garden in Cologne , he attended the Royal Gardening School at the Wildlife Park near Potsdam from 1876 to 1878 . After successfully passing the exam, Georg Kuphaldt became a district gardener in Ostprignitz on April 1, 1878 .

At the age of 27, he received the most honorable task of his creative period when he was appointed City Garden Director of Riga . In the following 34 years he led the development of the newly established municipal garden administration and designed a green system that has been preserved in its structures to this day. In 1881, this included the expansion of the Wöhrmann Gardens , the oldest park in the city of Riga, or the Kaiserwald . Between 1880 and 1914 Georg Kuphaldt was involved in the planning of almost all parks that were created in Russia for the imperial court of St. Petersburg . Among the most famous works by Kuphaldt are the gardens at the Winterpalais and Oranienbaum in St. Petersburg and the facilities in Nizhny Novgorod , in Dagomis near Sochi ( Black Sea ), in Tsarskoje Selo (Pushkin) and in Kadriorg (German Katharinenthal ) near Tallinn (German Reval ).

With these references, Georg Kuphaldt recommended himself for the planning of further parks such as the Koenigschen Güter in Scharowka ( Schariwka ) and Blücherhof . Other well-known parks in the Baltic region, which were significantly shaped by Kuphaldt, are in Cīrava ( Zirau ), Žagarė , Kehtna ( Kechtel ), Lohu ( Loal ), Olustvere ( Ollustfer ), Visusti ( Wissust ), Polli ( Pollenhof ) and Schloss from Oru ( Toila ); The Jūrmala Park, which is still popular today, is located in Liepāja ( Libau ).

Not only professionally but also privately, Riga became the focus of Georg Kuphaldt's life. On November 17, 1884, he married Martha Kroepsch and his five children (Dora, Erika, Ingeborg, Hermann, Hans) were born here. The outbreak of World War I abruptly ended Kuphaldt's artistic work in the Russian Empire . Membership in the German Naval Association and an astronomical telescope in his private home were enough reasons for the Russian authorities to accuse him of espionage and high treason . After five months in prison, Georg Kuphaldt was deported to Germany.

Due to his reputation , Georg Kuphaldt found a job again in August 1915 as a deputy municipal gardening inspector in the then independent rural community of Steglitz and was a lecturer at the Dahlem gardening school for the duration of the war . Before he retired at the age of 70, the rose garden in the Steglitz city park (1917) and on Breitenbachplatz were built under his direction . In his retirement, Georg Kuphaldt supported the dendrological mapping of parks in Berlin and he lectured to various specialist committees. He summarized his knowledge in 1927 in his most famous work The Practice of Applied Dendrology in Park and Garden .

family

Georg Kuphaldt's daughter Erika (born November 9, 1891 in Riga ; † November 24, 1981 in Aachen ) ran a photo studio in Aachen from around 1932 to 1956. In 1933 she also made a portrait of Anne Frank with her sister Margot. Erika Kuphaldt was married to the philosopher Peter Mennicken .

Fonts

• The parks in Sharovka. In: Die Gartenkunst 11 (2009), pp. 201–204 (with plans, digitized in the Internet Archive )

literature

• Hemma Kanstein: Georg Kuphaldt's parks in Riga. An example of historical open space design. Verlag Nordostdeutsches Kulturwerk / Technische Universität Berlin, 1998, ISBN 3-932267-12-5 / 3-7983-1779-8.
• Marija Naščokina: Garden projects by Georg Kupaldt in the context of the Russian country house architecture around 1900 . In: Die Gartenkunst  25 (1/2013), pp. 151–164.

Web links

Commons : Georg Kuphaldt  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Baltic Historical Commission (ed.): Entry on Georg Kuphaldt. In: BBLD - Baltic Biographical Lexicon digital
• Literature by and about Georg Kuphaldt in the catalog of the German National Library
• Photo of Georg Kuphaldt as City Garden Director of Riga , PDF