Heinrich Westphal

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Heinrich Westphal, passport photo 1938

Heinrich Westphal (born November 5, 1889 in Braunschweig , † June 30, 1945 in Slovenia ) was a German architect of the New Building of the 1920s.

Life

Westphal began studying architecture in the summer semester of 1910 at the Technical University of Darmstadt . In Darmstadt he also served as a one-year volunteer from October 1, 1910 to September 30, 1911 . In the winter semester of 1912/13 he moved to the Technical University of Dresden , where he passed the main diploma examination in building construction with distinction in 1914. At the beginning of the war he was mobilized as a non-commissioned officer in the reserve in August 1914. As a lieutenant in the reserve, he was taken prisoner by the French on December 21, 1915. On February 6, 1920 he was released from captivity, which was followed by compulsory internment in Switzerland after the end of the war.

In May 1920 he moved to Insterburg in East Prussia . There, his wife's brother-in-law found him a job as an employee in the municipal building department. He also worked as a freelance architect. He carried out several construction projects for the city, including from 1923 the construction of the port on the newly built branch canal of the Pregel River. On the river Omet southeast of the district town of Gerdauen , he built the Kanoten power plant , which no longer exists today. He maintained professional and personal contacts with Hans Scharoun , who at the same time ran an architecture office in Insterburg. Together they were active in the Insterburger Kunstverein founded in 1919. In August / September 1921 the Folkwang Museum in Hagen showed the exhibition "Architectural drawings by Bruno Taut , Magdeburg, Scharoun and Westphal, Insterburg".

Gildenhall

In 1926 Westphal left Insterburg and joined the Gildenhall Freiland-Siedlung, a registered cooperative with limited liability at Neuruppin . There he was elected as the new settlement architect in 1927 as the successor to Max Eckardt. He also ran an architecture office under the name "Baustube Westphal". Westphal also joined the second Gildenhall cooperative, the “Handwerkschaft Gildenhall eGmbH”. In the life reform community founded by Georg Heyer in 1921, craftsmen, artists and architects endeavored to implement the principles and ideals of the Deutscher Werkbund and the Bauhaus in their lives, work and living. Westphal continued the building projects based on the settlement plans by Eckardt (1923) and Otto Bartning (1924/1925). For the Gildenhall estate, the architect Adolf Meyer had previously built row houses, a semi-detached house and an exhibition house for the presentation and sale of the products of Gildenhall's craftsmen and artists. From 1927 to 1929 Westphal built a row of single-family row houses at Gildenhaller Allee 59–85 for the cooperative. In addition, a four-family house with a bakery was built on the same street (house number 43/45) and the waiting hall for the open-air estate on the Neuruppin-Herzberg railway line running parallel to Gildenhaller Allee. The global economic crisis from 1929 damaged the financial basis of the open-air settlement. The cooperative could no longer service its loans and mortgages. The Ruppin district became the new owner of the building. Westphal carried on some construction projects for the open-air settlement for the settlement company of the Ruppin district. A row of row houses was built in 1930, Gildenhaller Allee 39/41, and on the same street another row of row houses with house numbers 47 to 57.

Gildenhall joinery from 1929, Gildenhaller Allee

As early as 1929 Westphal built a joinery for 25 to 30 carpenters at the northern end of the open-air settlement on Gildenhaller Allee in the direction of Alt Ruppin. The factory-like low-rise building was used for the production of all kinds of furniture. The arrangement of the rooms followed the production path of the furniture, beginning in the wood store and ending in the store of the finished goods. In place of these buildings, two rows of terraced houses were built during the GDR era. Westphal was a member of the Association of German Architects (BDA) since 1929 . Westphal designed three residential buildings in Neuruppin for private clients: in 1929 the Irmler house and in 1930 the Villa Gerhart-Hauptmann-Strasse 11 for the veterinarian Walter Just, which was included in the list of monuments of the state of Brandenburg .

In 1931, the Stern apartment building followed, Junckerstraße 7/9. Outside Neuruppin, Westphal built a residential and commercial building for the grocer Edwin Jahn on Plantagenstrasse in Ketzin an der Havel , which was added to the list of monuments in 1995. In 1927, Westphal built the House Stiller on Wilkauer Chaussee in what was then Schwiebus in Neumark. The villa in the New Objectivity style in today's Świebodzin, Lubusz Voivodeship , has remained almost unchanged.

  • Irmler House in Neuruppin, topping-out ceremony in 1929

  • House Irmler in Neuruppin

  • House Stiller in Schwiebus (1927)

  • House Stiller in Schwiebus, photo 2012

Elementary school "Am Weinberg" in Alt Ruppin

Westphal's main plant is undoubtedly the “Am Weinberg” elementary school in Alt Ruppin , which was built in 1929/1930. With his concept of a functional, no-frills school building with a modern flat roof, he surprisingly won the city's design competition in 1928. The focal point of the plastered main facade is the protruding, clinkered staircase into which the main entrance of the school leads. The school was completely renovated from 2002 to 2006 and expanded with a successful extension. Since 2000 the school has been included in the list of monuments for the Ostprignitz-Ruppin district because of its historical, artistic and urban significance for the Ruppin region.

  • School in Alt Ruppin, 1930

  • School in Alt Ruppin, 2010

Berlin

At the end of 1932, Westphal ended his membership in the Gildenhall Craftsmen's Association because the cooperative had become insolvent. Due to the economic decline, his shares in the two Gildenhaller cooperatives had been lost. He was financially at the end of his life too. In 1932 he moved with his family to Eggersdorf near Strausberg in what was then the Niederbarnim district, east of Berlin. He found a job at the Düren paper factory Renker , which had bought the Berlin company Belipa - Berliner Lichtpausen and which manufactured and sold architectural supplies at Köpenicker Strasse 179 in Berlin-Kreuzberg. In the premises of this company, he also continued his architecture office as a freelance architect. No buildings by Westphal are known from the Berlin years 1933–1939.

War years

In March 1939, at the age of 49, Westphal was registered in Landwehr I by the Bernau military district command and in May 1939 he was assigned to the Reich Waterways Administration of the Reich Ministry of Transport . Until 1942 he worked in the waterways directorate in Kiel (planning work for the expansion of the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal ), then in Koblenz (designing high-rise structures for Moselle barrages ). In 1943 he was transferred to Graz and then sent to the branch in Cilli , which at that time belonged to Lower Styria . Until the end of the war he was involved in the design of high-rise structures for hydropower plants on the Save .

Private

Heinrich Westphal was the eldest of three sons of the pharmacist Heinrich Westphal (1859–1920) and his wife Agnes Westphal born. Paul. His great-grandfather was Franz August Westphal (1779-1847), abbot of the Königslutter monastery and ducal court and cathedral preacher , director of the Braunschweig school teachers' seminar and the orphanage schools and the garrison schools in Braunschweig . His father Heinrich Westphal ran various pharmacies in the Braunschweig area. The youngest brother of Heinrich Westphal, Hans Westphal sen. (1895–1974) also became a pharmacist at the Salzgitter-Thiede site. His descendants run two pharmacies there. Heinrich Westphal married Hermine (called Hermy) Helkenberg (1889–1980) in Braunschweig at the beginning of 1915, whose family comes from Iserlohn and Hagen . The couple had two sons, Hans-Dieter (* 1916 in Bad Harzburg) and Bernhard (called Bernd; * 1921 in Insterburg). Both sons died on the Eastern Front in World War II . The professional officer Hans-Dieter Westphal married the trainee student Lisa Spornhauer in the Insterburg district in 1943. The twins Bernd Westphal (German diplomat ; * 1944 in Diez an der Lahn) and Gesine Freifrau Droste zu Senden born from the marriage . Westphal.

Heinrich Westphal was arrested on June 4, 1945 at his workplace as the acting head of the Cilli building construction department and taken to a prison in Ljubljana . He is missing there. In 1950 he was declared dead by a decision of the Koblenz District Court. June 30, 1945 was set as the date of death. Through the mediation of the German Red Cross , his wife, interned in Slovenia, was able to travel to her husband's relatives in West Germany in 1946.

literature

  • Kristina Bake: The Gildenhall open-air settlement. Crafts, life reform, social utopia. (= European university writings, art history , volume 384.) Peter Lang Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 3-631-37820-3 .
  • Kristina Bake: Neuruppin. The Gildenhall open-air settlement. Architecture of a concrete utopia. In: Brandenburgische Denkmalpflege ( ISSN  0942-3397 ), 9th year 2000, issue 1, p. X.
  • Matthias Metzler: District of Ostprignitz-Ruppin, City of Neuruppin. (= Monument Topography Federal Republic of Germany , Monuments in Brandenburg , Volume 13.1.) Wernersche Verlagsgesellschaft, Worms 1996, ISBN 3-88462-135-1 , p. X.
  • Matthias Metzler: New building in Alt Ruppin. Heinrich Westphal's school at the vineyard. In: Christof Baier, André Bischoff, Marion Hilliges (eds.): Order and manifold. Contributions to the history of architecture and urban construction for Ulrich Reinisch. Publishing house and database for the humanities, Weimar 2011, ISBN 3-89739-718-8 , p. X.
  • Lisa Riedel: Gildenhall. Art, craft, life. Materials on the history of a settlement. Edition Rieger, Karwe 2010, ISBN 978-3-941187-18-4 .

Web links

Commons : Heinrich Westphal  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ see the personal directory of the Grossherzoglich Hessische Technische Hochschule zu Darmstadt for the summer semester 1910 , digital collections of the University and State Library Darmstadt, online .
  2. ↑ see personnel directory of the Königl. Saxon. Technical University for the winter semester 1912/13 , digital collections, university archive of the Technical University of Dresden, online and report on the Königl. Saxon. Technische Hochschule zu Dresden , 1913/14, p. 7, University archive of the Technische Universität Dresden , signature XXVII / no. 13.
  3. ↑ photo from the work portfolio of Heinrich Westphal
  4. ↑ Photo from the work folder
  5. ^ List of exhibitions at the Folkwang Museum in: Herta Hesse-Frielinghaus (Ed.): Karl Ernst Osthaus. Life and work. Bongers, Recklinghausen 1971, ISBN 3-7647-0223-0 , pp. 511-516.
  6. ↑ Hans Lehmann-Borges: How did Gildenhall come about and how did I become a Gildenhaller. In: Märkische Zeitung of January 1, 1928 - quoted from: Lisa Riedel, p. 85
  7. ^ Genossenschaftsregister 1, Handwerkschaft Gildenhall, Staatsarchiv Potsdam - Rep. 5 E Neuruppin, quoted from: Lisa Riedel, p. 24
  8. ↑ on the goals and principles of Gildenhall see: Bake: Die Freilandsiedlung Gildenhall. 2001, pp. 124-130; Metzler: District of Ostprignitz-Ruppin, Part I: City of Neuruppin. 1996, pp. 283-287.
  9. ↑ Bake: The Gildenhall open-air settlement. 2001, p. 62.
  10. ↑ Bake: The Gildenhall open-air settlement. Architecture of a concrete utopia. 2000, pp. 44-48.
  11. ^ Metzler: District Ostprignitz-Ruppin, Part I: City of Neuruppin. 1996, p. 285; Bake: Neuruppin. The Gildenhall open-air settlement. 2000, pp. 62-63; Riedel, pp. 51-52, p. 122.
  12. ↑ Bake: The Gildenhall open-air settlement. 2001, pp. 72-73 and pp. 124-139
  13. ↑ Photo from work portfolio
  14. ↑ Entry "Heinrich Westphal" in: "archthek" - Historical Register of Architects, Section Weiser - Wezel , accessed on November 24, 2013
  15. ↑ Photos of Haus Irmler from work portfolio: Topping- out ceremony 1929 ; House Irmler in Neuruppin
  16. ^ Metzler: District Ostprignitz-Ruppin, Part I: City of Neuruppin. 1996, p. 208.
  17. ↑ Brandenburg State Office for the Preservation of Monuments and the State Archaeological Museum (ed.): List of monuments of the State of Brandenburg - Ostprignitz-Ruppin district . D) Monuments of other genres, ID number 09171345, December 31, 2018, p. 29 ( bldam-brandenburg.de [PDF; 346 kB ; accessed on May 13, 2019]).
  18. ^ Metzler: District Ostprignitz-Ruppin, Part I: City of Neuruppin. 1996, p. 237 and photo from work portfolio
  19. ↑ Entry in the list of monuments for the Havelland district, p. 26 (pdf; 243 kB) Photo from work folder
  20. ↑ Photo from work portfolio ; Photo from 2012
  21. ^ Metzler: New building in Alt Ruppin. Heinrich Westphal's school at the vineyard. In: Order and Manifold , 2011; Photo from work folder
  22. ↑ List of monuments in the Ostprignitz-Ruppin district, p. 8 (pdf; 243 kB), Alt-Ruppin, Weinberg 1, school
  23. ↑ Bake: The Gildenhall open-air settlement. 2001, p. 62; Cooperative register 1, Handwerkschaft Gildenhall, Staatsarchiv Potsdam - Rep. 5 E Neuruppin, quoted from: Lisa Riedel, p. 24
  24. ↑ photo from work portfolio: stand-Renker Belipa paper mill, Leipzig Trade Fair, designed by Westphal 1935
  25. ↑ as an example photo from work portfolio: Design from 1943 for the Zwischenwässern ad Save power plant (now Medvode) near Ljubljana, Slovenia
  26. ↑ see title page book from 1830 about Taubstummen-Institut Braunschweig by David Mansfeld and Franz August Westphal with functional information for Westphal, page 7 Permalink
  27. ↑ see article 100 Years of Pharmacy Thiede-Steterburg , to be found at: http://apotheke-thiede.de/fileadmin/user_upload/100_Jahre.pdf
personal data
SURNAME Westphal, Heinrich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German architect
DATE OF BIRTH November 5, 1889
PLACE OF BIRTH Braunschweig
DATE OF DEATH June 30, 1945
Place of death Slovenia