Gerd Pieper (architect)
Gerd Pieper (born November 6, 1942 in Berlin ) is a German architect and engineer.
He designed remarkable restaurant rooms in East Berlin - in addition to the restaurants in the Berlin coffee house on Alexanderplatz, also in the Moscow restaurant and for the first Beijing restaurant in the GDR - parallel to the new building of the hospital building, he designed the Charité supply center and was involved in the design of the new cemetery boundary for the Jewish cemetery in Berlin-Weißensee .
life and work
After Pieper, who grew up in Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg at Schwedter Straße 5 as the son of a seamstress together with two older sisters in a 1½ room apartment - his father was missing during the war - had graduated from high school in 1960, he studied at the university for Construction Cottbus and from 1962 at the University of Construction Leipzig, where he graduated in 1966 in building construction. In the same year he started working as an architect in the design office of the Deutsche Reichsbahn and in 1967 switched to the Gesellschaft für Betriebsberatung des Handels, a planning and research office for commercial buildings and restaurants with the projects developed under the direction of Siegfried Pasternak, the Reko study Interhotel Hotel Astoria Leipzig or Kitchen project apartment house Cottbus .
In 1968 he started working in the architectural collective Heinz Aust and Dr. Walter Herzog up. Here Pieper began his career working on the renovation of the television tower in Berlin and, in the same way, at the radiation protection center in Berlin-Karlshorst .
From 1972 he worked on the planning for the gastronomic part and the kitchen areas of the Palace of the Republic and contributed to the design of special hexagonal tables for ballroom and banquet seating. From 1978 he was involved in the conception for the new building and reconstruction of the Charité and took over the design management for the new care center for 5,000 participants - 2,000 hospital patients and 3,000 employees or students.
A demanding project for Gerd Pieper from 1981 was the design management for the classification of five restaurants in the Alexanderhaus at Alexanderplatz No. 2, built by Peter Behrens from 1930 to 1932 - the Sparkasse building. When planning the five restaurant rooms Moccabar , coffee house , pizza parlor , Pancake bars and soup tureens , which had to be designed to be memorable, he opened up new unconventional possibilities for wall decorations - u. a. with textile material and large-format marbled paper unique pieces.
In order to be effective not only in the supply and catering sector, Pieper devoted himself a year later, together with his colleague Christa Frenzel, to the design management for the planning of the 65 meter high HLS tower with a cantilever at the top for the heating, Ventilation and sanitary engineering investigations by the Building Academy of the GDR in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen.
A very special place in Gerd Pieper's architectural work is his commitment to the re-fencing of the Jewish cemetery in Berlin-Weißensee (1983) on its north-east side facing Indira-Gandhi-Strasse. In the early 1980s, vandalism, theft and outrage had reached a sad climax in this important cemetery. A cemetery wall had to be built for the length of 750 meters, the design of which had to try to combine access security, cultic, design and construction aspects. Since neither financial nor building craft resources were available for a reconstruction of the old enclosure wall and the solution was subject to the innovation specifications of modern building technologies, Christa Frenzels and Gerd Pieper's design management headed for a prefabricated construction method. A defining design element was an ornamental panel with a stylized menorah motif, with a circular opening at the end of each of the seven candlestick arms, which gave the massive panels structure and partial permeability.
Pieper was only able to dare to project such innovatively designed precast panels with more complex ornamentation, because he relied on resilient collegial relationships with special building trades - especially plasterers - and good contacts with special suppliers - here Saxon manufacturers of plastic molds for the Cast plate - could fall back. This also included metal companies that manufactured the wrought iron lattice elements, which gave the axes of the path structure of the cemetery where they met the outer wall, with opportunities to look in and out. Pieper coordinated all cultic and design aspects with the Jewish community of (East) Berlin and its chairman at the time, Dr. Peter Kirchner .
After the design management for the reconstruction of the Moscow restaurant (1984), in which the restaurants, the dance café and the four salons were given their own spatial atmosphere according to their differences, and after the new construction of the terrace café in the Tierpark Berlin (1986) - an arched, double-winged one Building complex for more than 900 guests - Pieper took on planning tasks in the southern Friedrichstrasse of Berlin-Mitte in the same year. He was entrusted with the design management for the construction of the ruins of the Leipziger-Ecke-Friedrichstraße, southeast corner - the former Moritz Mädler department store , which was built here by Robert Leipnitz in 1904 and was heavy at the end of the Second World War except for its steel framework and the basement had been destroyed.
The aim of the reconstruction should be gallery opportunities for the state art trade and the establishment of the GDR's first Peking restaurant . The building complex House of Gastronomy and Entertainment in Friedrichstrasse, which Pieper had taken over the design management for, was not completed. This new casino building on Leipziger Strasse at the corner of Friedrichstrasse was not put into operation and was demolished in 1996.
After 1990, Gerd Pieper founded an architecture office with two partners, reconstructed several old residential buildings, the train stations Wollankstraße, Karlshorst and Oranienburg and opened the bistro-pub Pieper on October 21, 2003 in Sredzkistraße 44 in Berlin , for which he was until October 31, 2005 worked as owner and innkeeper. Gerd Pieper is also involved in amateur boxing as a part-time job.
From September 15 to November 11, 2017, a cabinet exhibition in the Berlin gallery F92 pays tribute to the architect's life's work under the title Interiors and Architectures.
Organizations
- 1968 member of the Association of Architects of the GDR
- 1985 Member of the Association of Visual Artists of the GDR - Design Section
- 1990 member of the Berlin Chamber of Architects
- 1991 member of the Association of German Architects
Publications
- Large kitchens (together with Manfred Rohatsch, Fritz Lemme), 216 pages, VEB Verlag für Bauwesen, Berlin 1971
- The new restaurants in the furniture store on Alexanderplatz in: Architektur der DDR, 6/1983
- Proektirovanie predprijatij obščestvennogo pitanija (together with Manfred Rohatsch, Fritz Lemme), Strojizdat Moskva 1985
- New interior design of the “Moscow” restaurant in Berlin in: Architecture of the GDR, April 4/1985, pages 224–228
- New cemetery boundary for the Jewish cemetery in Berlin-Weißensee in: Architektur der DDR, April 4/1985
- Berlin, Unter den Linden (together with Gerd Zeuchner), Holti Agency (Berlin, East), 1990
- Peking restaurant in Berlin in: Architecture (previously architecture of the GDR ) 8–9 / 1990, Verlag für Bauwesen Berlin, 1990
Web links
- Works by and about Gerd Pieper in the catalog of the German National Library
- Review in Neues Deutschland from September 15, 2017 on the exhibition in Gallery F92
Individual evidence
- ↑ Thomas Leinkauf: Im Pieper am Kollwitzplatz in: Berliner Zeitung of November 15, 2003
- Jump up ↑ Marc Neller: Die Unflwerden // When it gets cold, the guests just have to go inside. But that doesn't hurt, because in the "Pieper" bistro you will find what has become rare in Prenzlauer Berg: warmth that no patio heater in the world can produce. in: Tagesspiegel of September 21, 2008, page 3
- ↑ Jutta Voigt: Lucky Punch - artists, champions, proletarians - real men hit sandbags all their lives in Berliner Zeitung of October 23, 2004, p. 1
- ↑ see print of the opening speech in: Matthias Thalheim: Fatzer im Radio - Encounters rare nature , pp. 331–336, Verlag epubli, Berlin 2019, ISBN 978-3-750260-96-2
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Pieper, Gerd |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German architect and engineer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | November 6, 1942 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Berlin |