Gustav Oelsner

Typical Oelsner clinker structure

Gustav Oelsner (born February 23, 1879 in Posen , † April 26, 1956 in Hamburg ) was a German architect , urban planner , construction officer and, during his exile, also a university professor .

Life

Oelsner was born in Posen as the son of German Jews and converted to the Protestant faith in his youth. After completing his studies at the Technical University (Berlin-) Charlottenburg in 1900, he practiced with Paul Wallot in Berlin and the architect Max Hasak , under whom he worked on the construction management for the construction of the Bode Museum . In 1907 he became a town planning inspector in Breslau (under town planning officer Richard Plüddemann ) where, among other things, he was responsible for the construction of the technical university. In 1911 he was appointed town planning officer in Katowice , an office that he held until 1922, when Upper Silesia was awarded the Second Polish Republic. Here he built a new building for the Fürstlich-Plessische Bergwerksdirektion and several schools. During this time he dealt with the models of the garden city movement and made the acquaintance of Bruno Taut , who had designed a garden city settlement in Katowice on a former mine site. In 1921, Taut became a town planning officer in Magdeburg, an office for which Oelsner had also applied.

The city planner

His work for Altona began in 1923 when he was commissioned to draw up a general development plan for the Prussian cities of Altona, Wandsbek and Harburg surrounding Hamburg for the Prussian People's Welfare Ministry. The general settlement plan and a green belt plan for Altona emerged from this task, under the direction of city planner Joseph Brix .

Due to the planning, a parceling of plots on the Elbe slope could be prevented, so several plots were acquired or leased by the city. These are now accessible as public parks. With Ferdinand Tutenberg he designed the Elbe parks in the city and created the Elbe bank hiking trail .

In March 1924 he became a non-party building senator under the social democratic mayor Max Brauer , who later became town building officer in Altona, an office that he held until 1933.

In the first years of his term of office, the area of ​​Altona increased as a result of the Groß-Altona law through the incorporation of the Elbe suburbs from 2,200 hectares to 9,084 hectares in order to create space for a restructuring of the site for new construction projects.

A few days after Oelsner's appointment, Fritz Schumacher congratulated him in a letter. A friendship began that lasted until Schumacher's death and went beyond everyday professional life and led to numerous mutual visits. Like Schumacher, Oelsner lived unmarried and exchanged ideas with him about art and literature. Schumacher, who published much more, often praised Oelsner's achievements.

The necessity of coordinating urban planning developments between the two neighboring cities of Hamburg and Altona and, of course, Harburg as well, led to the establishment of a Hamburg-Prussian state planning committee in December 1928, which covered the economic area on the Lower Elbe within a radius of thirty kilometers from Hamburg Stock market should evolve. In addition to the development of the port, road construction, the expansion of the railway network as well as the water supply and sewage disposal were also included.

The architectural style

Oelsner was a representative of the new building in its strict cubic form. He mostly did without additional ceramic architectural jewelry and used the opportunity to set design accents with the arrangement of the clinker bricks. In the Helmholtz Block and at the Lunapark, the attic floors were accentuated with darker bricks with a strong horizontal structure. Here corner windows bring additional light into the apartment.

He took over what was practiced in England and by the architects of the Amsterdam School : colored, especially yellow bricks and thus set themselves apart from Hamburg's red-brown bricks. By changing the arrangement of the stones, he achieved horizontal dividing bands. He had also got to know flat roofs during his visits to Dutch architects ( Michel de Klerk , Jacobus Johannes Pieter Oud ) and the urban planning congress in Amsterdam in 1924, as well as when dealing with the work of the De Stijl group .

The load-bearing concrete parts are emphasized in the »House of Youth« and the »Employment Service«.

During the National Socialist rule, the character of a number of buildings was taken into account by converting the attics into full storeys and the steep or hipped roofs attached to the ideologically desirable style. Energy-related renovation measures in recent years have also led to significant changes in appearance.

Municipal buildings

He created buildings that shape the Altona cityscape for municipal purposes in a style of his own.

• The Kieler Strasse employment office was set up in 1926–1927; the construction management was in the hands of Rudolf Lodders , who worked for the Altona building authority for three years. The cubic reinforced concrete structure has a visible skeleton facade, the wall surfaces are clad with ceramic tiles. The building complex has an inner courtyard. Originally there were sixteen entrances that led to the various exchanges. The building was converted by Wolfgang Rudhard from 1953 to 1956 and an extension was added. After it was vacant, the house was rebuilt again (1995–2000) and has been used as an employment office again since 2001.

• The vocational school center “House of Youth” on the Platz der Republik was built between 1928 and 1930 in a direct line of sight to the Wilhelmine Altona town hall . It is a particularly massive building that appears almost filigree due to the clever terracing of the various components. The load-bearing grid construction is emphasized, the few wall parts under the large windows are clad with copper sheet. Lange sees this as an appropriate expression of the pressure to save in the late Weimar Republic . The hall, designed for city hall use, has been used by the Altona Theater since 1950 .

• He built schools near his residential complexes, most of which were demolished. Particularly noteworthy is the Pestalozzi School he designed in 1927 in the Kleine Freiheit in Altona. The generosity and solid elegance of the bright and wide stairwells with the child-friendly flat steps reveal the student orientation of the building in the spirit of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi as soon as you enter. The building is a listed building and has meanwhile been converted to residential use by a building community while retaining the historic gymnasium.

• The Altona stadium in the Volkspark , inaugurated on September 11, 1925 and replaced by the Volksparkstadion in 1953 after it was largely destroyed in the war. A swimming stadium, which was demolished in 1989, was also built in its neighborhood.

• Quay sheds E (1926) and F (1928) were built on Neumühlen quay, which were demolished in 1989.

Social housing in Altona

After the First World War , the economic situation in Altona, nominally the largest city in Schleswig-Holstein, deteriorated considerably after Altona had prospered as an industrial location until the end of the 19th century. The population structure was predominantly proletarian with poor quality and quantity of housing. The house interest tax gave the city the financial leeway to sustainably improve the housing situation.

Under Max Brauer's magistrate, 3800 apartments were built between 1923 and 1932 on behalf of and for the account of the municipality, all of which were managed by Siedlungsaktiengesellschaft Altona (SAGA) , which itself did not appear as a property developer. A total of 10,395 apartments were built during this time. In addition to non-profit housing associations, the city played a major role in these buildings. As an architect, Oelsner designed and built many of these new municipal buildings himself. His light and sun-flooded communal residential buildings on Helmholtzstrasse in Hamburg-Ottensen and on Luruper Chaussee in Bahrenfeld were considered revolutionary thanks to their clear architecture. The usual perimeter block development was given up in favor of row development with playgrounds and open spaces with small parks. Karl Schneider and Friedrich Richard Ostermeyer worked closely with Oelsner and designed cooperative residential complexes. Ostermeyer stuck to the conventional perimeter block development, for example when building the Friedrich-Ebert-Hof in Ottensen (1928–1929 with 738 apartments).

In addition to the more inner-city residential complexes, Oelsner was able to put into practice his previous theoretical considerations on ideal living in the country from the Katowice period in the third construction phase (1925–1926) of the Steenkamp settlement . The Steenkampsiedung is one of the most important garden cities founded in the 1920s. It comprises 1050 residential units on an area of ​​33.17 hectares. Fritz Neugebauer, Kurt F. Schmidt and F. Ostermeyer were involved in the planning of the first two phases. The area at the western end of Bahrenfeld was well developed for traffic. The design of the buildings in the last phase was characterized by an economical objectivity.

At the height of the global economic crisis , two suburban small settlements emerged in Lurup and Osdorf, the Elbkampiedlung ("fish box villages"), in which the unemployed and large working-class families built single-storey semi-detached houses with their own kitchen gardens designed by Oelsner on urban land (1932/1933) the resulting wild growth on makeshift homes was given a certain order. The Altona Senator August Kirch , who had social issues in mind in the city's new building projects, had suggested this.

Exile and return

As a member of the Social Democratic Magistrate, which had been deposed by the National Socialists, Oelsner lost his office in 1933. A lawsuit initiated by the National Socialists for abuse of office and wasting public funds was discontinued at the end of 1934 without any result. From 1937 Oelsner was forced to use the first name "Israel" due to his German-Jewish origins. His origin had not yet played a role in the process. In the same year he received permission to travel to a town planning congress in Cleveland , where he met the emigrant Max Brauer, who advised him against returning to Germany.

Tomb of the Althamburg Memorial Cemetery in Ohlsdorf

Through Schumacher's mediation, Oelsner took on an advisory role for urban planning issues at the Turkish Ministry of Public Works in Ankara in July 1939. Here he built an organization for planning in the modernizing Turkey. From 1940 his work was split between Ankara and Istanbul, where he promoted the establishment of a chair for urban planning at the Technical University; He also taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul and was from March 1, 1943 to December 31, 1949 professor of urban planning at the academy. Kemal Ahmet Arû was one of his students .

After the war, Max Brauer brought him back to Hamburg in 1949, where he worked as a consultant under the Senator for Construction, Paul Nevermann, on the design of the East-West Street and on the Inner Alster Building Regulations as part of the reconstruction planning. In 1950 he was a founding member of the Free Academy of the Arts in Hamburg and received the Fritz Schumacher Prize from the University of Hamburg. At the age of seventy-three in 1952, he retired from active professional life. The Istanbul Technical University awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1955.

Gustav Oelsner died on April 26, 1956 in Hamburg and was buried next to Fritz Schumacher in the Ohlsdorf cemetery in the area of ​​the Althamburg Memorial Cemetery. Werner Hebebrand gave the commemorative speech . The Oelsnerring in Hamburg-Osdorf was named after Oelsner .

Preserved buildings

The following list contains only a selection of the buildings; it is essentially based on the list of listed buildings.

photo	Construction year	object	Explanation
	1924-1925	Housing development Moltkeblock Griegstraße, Am Rathenaupark 1–15, Bernadottestraße 70–72, Bleickenallee ( → location )	At the time of construction, Bernadottestrasse was still called Moltkestrasse. Complex with 176 apartments, each with three to four rooms with 15 to 20 m² living space, kitchen and bathroom. Hamburg monument list² ° ¹³ 16009 and others
	1924	Apartment building Arnkielstrasse 14–18 / Langenfelder Strasse 50–58 ( → Location )	Hamburg Monument List² ° ¹³ 15175f
	1925	Bus shelter Stadionstrasse (formerly Roehl Str.) ( → Location )	Hamburg Monument List² ° ¹³ 11764
	1925-1927	Housing development Leverkusenstrasse 20–26 / Schützenstrasse 53–69 Stresemannstrasse 30 ( → Location )	Hamburg Monument List² ° ¹³ 17264
	1926	Transformer house Max-Schmeling-Strasse 9	Hamburg Monument List² ° ¹³ 16972
	1926-1927	Housing complex Arnisstrasse / Augustenburger Strasse / Düppelstrasse / Gefionstrasse / Kieler Strasse 12–18 / Koldingstrasse 2–15 ( → location )	Hamburg Monument List² ° ¹³ 15527
	1926-1927	Housing development Borselstrasse 19–29, Bunsenstrasse 3–13, 2-2, Helmholtzstrasse, Ohmstrasse ( → Location )	Here Oelsner tried to loosen up the dense, conventional development with 339 typified 2- 2 ½ room apartments by means of a row construction. The buildings were increased in 1934/35, the flat roof by pitched roofs acc. replaced by the Nazi doctrine. Hamburg Monument List² ° ¹³ 16044 f
	1926-1927	in the former Altona hospital Nurses home Max-Brauer-Allee 136 ( → location )	Hamburg Monument List² ° ¹³ 15620 Here Oelsner consistently pursued his design approach and rejected the furniture for 50 nurses' rooms already purchased by the administration. This was also the subject of his 1934 trial for wasting public funds.
	1927	Extension of the Technical school for women's professions today: Gymnasium Altona Bleickenallee 5 ( → location )	Hamburg Monument List² ° ¹³ 17799
	1927	Altona employment office Kieler Strasse 39 ( → Location )	Extensions 1953–56 by Wolfgang Rudhard Hamburg monument list² ° ¹³ 29368
	1927-1928	Apartment building Bahrenfelder Steindamm 37–49 / Thomasstrasse 1–9 ( → Location )	During the Nazi era, the building was significantly changed by extending the roof and adding a hipped roof. Hamburg Monument List² ° ¹³ 17810 f
	1927-1928	kiosk Bleickenallee 26a ( → location )	Hamburg Monument List² ° ¹³ 16051 one of the last examples of comparable pavilions; In 2003 it was converted into a studio for scholarship holders at the University of Fine Arts.
	1927-1930	State commercial school / youth center and Altona theater Museumsstrasse 15, 17, 19, Ottensener Marktplatz ( → location )	Hamburg Monument List² ° ¹³ 29232 f
	1928	Pestalozzi School Kleine Freiheit 68 ( → Lage )	Hamburg Monument List² ° ¹³ 13284
	1929	Housing development Little Liberty 60,62, 64; Great freedom 60-64 ( → location )	1951 rebuilt Hamburg monument list² ° ¹³ 13283
	1929-1930	Luruper Chaussee residential area ( → location )	Plastered buildings erected in a row construction, heightened in 1935 and provided with hipped roofs
	1929-1930	Lunapark settlement construction Kieler Strasse 55 / Lunapark / Memellandallee / Waidmannstrasse ( → Location )	With this property, Oelsner moved away from the common kitchen-living room and installed small kitchens with built-in equipment. Hamburg Monument List² ° ¹³ 16206
	1930-1931	Watchmaking school Braunschweiger Straße 6 ( → Location )	Integrated in the construction of the Altona Museum, Hamburg Monument List² ° ¹³ 16041

literature

• Paul Theodor Hoffmann: New Altona. Ten years of building a big city 1919–1929. 2 volumes, Jena 1929.
• Christoph Timm: Gustav Oelsner and the New Altona. Municipal architecture and urban planning in the Weimar Republic. Ernst Kabel, Hamburg 1984, ISBN 3-921909-27-9 .
• Olaf Bartels : Altona architects. A history of urban construction in biographies. Junius, Hamburg 1997, ISBN 3-88506-269-0 .
• Christoph Timm:  Oelsner, Gustav. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 19, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-428-00200-8 , p. 441 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Gustav Oelsner Society for Architecture and Urban Development (Hrsg.): Gustav Oelsner. Altona Building Senator 1924–1933: an architectural city tour. Dölling and Gallitz, Hamburg 2006, ISBN 978-3-937904-42-9 .
• Burcu Dogramaci (Ed.): Gustav Oelsner. Urban planner and architect of the modern age. Junius, Hamburg 2008, ISBN 978-3-88506-594-4 .
• Peter Michelis (ed.): The architect Gustav Oelsner. Light, air and color for Altona on the Elbe. Dölling and Gallitz, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-937904-56-6 .

Web links

Commons : Gustav Oelsner  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Gustav Oelsner in the catalog of the German National Library
• Website of the Gustav Oelsner Society
• Jan Lubitz: Gustav Oelsner on architects portrait - German architects of the 20th century
• Gustav Oelsner. In: arch INFORM .
• German-speaking architects in exile 1933-1945: Gustav Oelsner. Department of Art History at KIT
• From the estate of Gustav Oesler. Digitized holdings at the University Library Hamburg
• Gustav Oelsner: Altona's Forgotten Builder , in: abendblatt.de , March 14, 2019.

Individual evidence

• Hans Harms / Dirk Schubert: Living in Hamburg - a city guide . Hamburg 1989, ISBN 3-7672-1079-7 . referenced as »Harms / Schubert«
• Ralf Lange: Architecture in Hamburg The great architecture guide . Hamburg 2008, ISBN 978-3-88506-586-9 . referenced as "Lange"
• Hamburg Monument List² ° ¹³ from Hamburg published under Monument List Hamburg from May 1, 2013

1. ^ Christoph Timm: Gustav Oelsner and the New Altona, page 9
2. ↑ Klaus Bocklitz: The development and organization of the Hamburg building administration until 1933 in: Dieter skull, editor: How the work of art Hamburg came about , Hamburg 2006, ISBN 978-3-937904-35-1 , p. 130
3. ^ Wolfgang Voigt: Two cities, two city architects, two bachelors: Gustav Oelsner and Fritz Schumacher in Altona and Hamburg in Burcu Dogramaci: Gustav Oelsner , undated , p. 69.
4. ↑ cf. Lange 2008, C65.
5. ↑ cf. Lange 2008, C 52.
6. ↑ Press release of the Hamburg tax authorities: "Oelsner-Bau goes to housing association housing school" from May 4, 2012 , accessed on May 20, 2013
7. ↑ Program of Architecture Day 2019, p. 18 , accessed on July 16, 2019
8. ↑ cf. Harms / Schubert 1989, p. 36.
9. ↑ Hildegard Kösters: From the apartment to the city - municipal housing policy in the Weimar Republic. The example of the Prussian city of Altona , in Burcu Dogramaci: Gustav Oelsner , undated , p. 33 f
10. ↑ cf. Harms / Schubert 1989, p. 143ff.
11. ^ Christoph Timm: Gustav Oelsner and the New Altona
12. ↑ B. Dogramaci, introduction to the anthology, p. 15
13. ↑ Burcu Dogramaci: Gustav Oelsner in Turkish exile in Burcu Dogramaci: Gustav Oelsner , undated, p. 119ff.
14. ↑ Burcu Dogramaci: Gustav Oelsner , undated , p. 179 ff.
15. ↑ cf. Harms / Schubert 1989, p. 134 f.
16. ↑ cf. Lange 2008, J 19.
17. ↑ cf. Lange 2008, C 57.1
18. ↑ cf. Lange 2008, J 24.

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