Hans Bernhard Reichow

Hans Bernhard Reichow (born November 25, 1899 in Roggow ; † May 7, 1974 in Bad Mergentheim ) was a German architect and urban planner in the 20th century. His work Die Autogerechte Stadt , published in 1959, was widely received .

Live and act

Reichow took part in the First World War from 1917 to 1918 and from 1919 studied architecture at the Technical University of Danzig and the TH Munich . From 1923 to 1925 he was an assistant in Danzig, in 1926 he received his doctorate in engineering.

Reichow worked freelance in Berlin from 1925 to 1928, in the office of Erich Mendelsohn and in the civil service. In the years 1928–1934 he was urban planner for the city of Dresden, 1934–1936 city planning officer in Braunschweig and 1936–1945 construction director in Stettin. In order to be able to continue his career in public building construction, Reichow joined the NSDAP in 1937 . In Stettin he was temporarily released to work on the redesign of Hamburg, which was led by Konstanty Gutschow .

During the Second World War he worked on the General Plan East , which aimed to "colonize" occupied territories in Poland, Ukraine and Russia by German settlers. In 1944 he was an advisory member of the workforce led by Albert Speer for the reconstruction of bombed-out cities .

From 1945 he worked as a freelance architect and urban planner in Hamburg. The beginnings of settlement development in the post-war period tell of his work in Wolfsburg , Hamburg (garden cities: Hohnerkamp and Farmsen , the latter together with Otto Gühlk ), Bielefeld- Sennestadt (together with Fritz Eggeling and Peter Holst ), Bremen-Vahr (together with Ernst May , Max Säum and Günther Hafemann ) and the Limes city in Schwalbach near Frankfurt am Main .

After 1945 he became known with three publications: Organic urban architecture. From Big City to Urban Landscape (1948), Organic Architecture (1949) and The Car-Friendly City (1959). Because of this title, Reichow was misunderstood as a propagandist for the following phase of West German urban development. As required by the CIAM , the reconstruction of German cities proceeded according to the principle of functional separation between living and working. The new construction of densely populated forms of settlement on the outskirts of the cities led to a sharp increase in the number of commuters as early as the end of the 1950s , which the cities, with their 19th-century structures, were not able to cope with. Contrary to what the title of the book suggests today, Reichow by no means proposed the forced expansion of inner-city streets. It was funded by the Bonn “Ministry for Housing”. Reichow expressly criticized “planning the car-friendly city primarily with traffic routes on different levels, as Le Corbusier demands” (p. 28). He had in mind "optimal driving in a constantly light flow" (p. 28). Instead of the major “surgical interventions” on inner-city highways (p. 5), he was interested in small interventions. He proposed the targeted reduction of urban “junctions” which, in his view, were responsible for the majority of accidents as well as for obstructing the flow of traffic. He advocated the conversion of intersections into staggered junctions, a "curb-regulation", which, like the curved roads, should lead to reduced speeds and at the same time a "minimum of stops, noise and regulations". Because he also thought traffic lights and the regulation by signs were wrong. His traffic system understood itself as “differentiated according to the types of traffic, footpaths, bike lanes and roadways” as well as according to the “widths of streets and paths that change at every node”. Last but not least, the considerable number of road deaths (in the foreword, Reichow mentions a number from 1953 with 12,000 people per year, by 1970 it rose to 19,000 in Germany, today it is around 3,400 per year), spoke in his view for a fundamental one Revision of the urban transport system.

Reichow's writing has little in common with the concept of the “car-friendly city”, which primarily aimed to remove obstacles of all kinds (buildings, pedestrians, trams) from the car. Nevertheless, this type of “car-friendly planning” became increasingly popular in urban development and traffic planning in the 1960s. From 1970 this concept was heavily criticized and understood as an example of unsuccessful urban development. From today's point of view, what is questionable about Reichow's “car-friendly city” is its permanent reference to biological ideals, which he presents as “organic” and thus “naturally grown”. This was accompanied by the idea of ​​the big city as an unhealthy large unit, as a juggernaut that had to be cured and divided into clear neighborhoods through order and town planning. This impulse was already to be found among the city reformers of the English garden cities and the town planners of the 1920s. In the case of Reichow, he was also able to connect to small-scale “organic” motivated by ethnic and leadership-state motives. Mixing, overlapping and chaos, which characterize urban life and make it attractive, do not appear in such an argument.

From 1961 until his death Reichow was also chairman of the Society for Pomeranian History, Archeology and Art . In 1964 he was appointed professor by the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, and in 1966 he was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit.

The West Park Residential Complex in Nuremberg-Sündersbühl , built by Reichow in 1962–1966, was placed under monument protection (ensemble protection) in 2005 by the Bavarian State Office for Monument Preservation as the only consistently implemented model of "organic urban architecture and architecture" in Bavaria . The garden city of Farmsen in Hamburg, built by Reichow, has been a listed building since 2003 .

Reichow's private library is now largely integrated into the library of the HafenCity University .

Buildings and settlements

Hohnerkamp housing estate , Hamburg

• 1928–29: House Gresens, Podejuch near Stettin
• 1928–29: Row house settlement, Belgard
• 1934–35: Clothing Office , Braunschweig (today art college)
• 1936–38: Area Leader School of the Hitler Youth "Peter Frieß" , Braunschweig (not preserved)
• 1938: Revierhof in the Quistorp-Aue, Stettin
• 1938–39: Johannistal retirement home, Stettin
• 1940: Züllchow settlement, Stettin
• 1946–47: Reichow House, Hamburg
• 1951–52: ECA housing estate, Lübeck
• 1953–54: Garden City Farmsen , Hamburg
• 1953–54: Hohnerkamp housing estate , Hamburg
• 1956: Framework plan for the Bremen - Vahr district with Max Säum and Günther Hafemann .
  • 1957–62: Satellite town Neue Vahr, Bremen
• 1956: overall planning and road network of the Senne city in the area of former town Senne II , since 1971 the district of Bielefeld
  • 1956–65: Aula of the Oststadtschule (Adolf Reichwein School), Sennestadt
  • 1956–65: Single-family house P., Sennestadt
  • 1956–65: Neotechnik factory building, Sennestadt
  • 1956–65: House of Health, Sennestadt
  • 1956–65: Ostallee (Elbeallee) central high-rise, Sennestadt
  • 1956–65: Nadler-Werke industrial building, Sennestadt
  • 1956–65: Cinema with restaurant »Bacchus«, Sennestadt
  • 1956–65: Kreissparkasse, Sennestadt
  • 1956–65: Ostallee storefront (Elbeallee), Sennestadt
  • 1956–65: GAGFAH apartment building, Sennestadt
  • 1956–65: Apartment buildings in the Sennestadt
  • 1960–61: Westallee residential high-rise (Rheinbeallee), Sennestadt
• 1959: Residential town Limes , Schwalbach am Taunus
• 1962–66 Ensemble Parkwohnanlage West, Nuremberg (under ensemble protection since 2005)
• 1965–68: School Ossietzkystraße, Nuremberg

Fonts

• Organic urban architecture. Georg Westermann, Braunschweig 1948.
• Organic architecture. Georg Westermann, Braunschweig 1949.
• The car-friendly city. A way out of the traffic chaos. Otto Maier Verlag, Ravensburg 1959.

Remarks

1. ^ Architect Reichow: Romantics in the Nazi service. Frankfurter Rundschau, regional section, accessed on March 25, 2016 . 
2. ↑ Ulrich Herbert: History of Germany in the 20th Century, 2014, based on Patrick Bahners: Sonderweg? What a special way ?, in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, May 20, 2014, p. 10. Online
3. ^ Werner Durth : German architects. Biographical entanglements 1900–1970. Munich 1992, pp. 232, 251
4. ↑ File No. E-5-64-000-35
5. ^ Nuremberg monuments. (PDF) Bavarian State Office for Monument Preservation, accessed on August 2, 2014 . 

literature

• Werner Durth : German Architects. Biographical entanglements 1900–1970. Braunschweig / Wiesbaden 1986.
• Werner Durth: Dreams in ruins. Braunschweig 1988, p. 228.
• Sabine Brinitzer: Hans Bernhard Reichow (1899–1974). An “organic” architectural story. in: DAM. Yearbook for Architecture 1991. Braunschweig 1991.
• Sabine Brinitzer: Hans Bernhard Reichow - planner of the Sennestadt. Genesis of an organic urban planning concept from 1927 to 1974. Dissertation, Philipps University Marburg, microfiche edition, 1994.
• Elke Sohn: On the concept of nature in urban concepts based on the contributions by Hans Bernhard Reichow, Walter Schwagenscheidt and Hans Scharoun on reconstruction after 1945. LIT-Verlag, Münster 2008, ISBN 978-3-8258-9748-2 .
• City of Schwalbach am Taunus, Sabine Brinitzer (Ed.): 50 years of Limes as a residential town in Schwalbach am Taunus. An organic urban landscape by Hans Bernhard Reichow. Schwalbach am Taunus 2009.
• Sabine Brinitzer: The residential town Limes in Schwalbach am Taunus - an organic urban landscape by Hans Bernhard Reichow. in: Summer in the City. Frankfurt in the Rhine-Main Architecture Summer 2011. City of Frankfurt am Main (ed.), Berlin 2011.

Web links

• Literature by and about Hans Bernhard Reichow in the catalog of the German National Library
• Hans Bernhard Reichow on Architekten-Portrait.de
• Biography in the Hamburg Architecture Archive ( Memento from October 15, 2007 in the Internet Archive )