Heinz Wetzel

Heinz Wetzel (born October 19, 1882 in Tübingen , † June 14, 1945 in Göppingen ) was a German architect , influential university professor and town planner .

Life

Wetzel studied architecture in Stuttgart and Munich since 1900. Then he worked as an architect. From 1919 to 1925 he was head of the Stuttgart city expansion office. From 1921 he also taught as a lecturer at the Technical University of Stuttgart . In 1925 he was appointed professor of town planning and settlement at the Technical University of Stuttgart, where he taught until 1945. Wetzel was a member of the Stahlhelm, the Association of Frontline Soldiers . From May 1933 to May 1934 he was rector of the TH Stuttgart.

Heinz Wetzel was the brother of the anatomist Robert Wetzel .

plant

The Archangel Michael, a design by Heinz Wetzel, which was hung in Ulm Minster on August 5, 1934

Along with Paul Bonatz and Paul Schmitthenner, Wetzel is considered to be one of the formative architecture teachers at the Technical University of Stuttgart . As a professor of urban planning and settlement, he had an influence that could hardly be overestimated on a generation of students who were to dominate planning and construction in Germany in the 1940s and 1950s. Growing up in an environment of educated civic enthusiasm for equestrian sports, nature and the military, Wetzel first came into contact with architecture and urban planning through Theodor Fischer . Nevertheless, with Adolf von Hildebrand, it was again a visual artist who significantly influenced Wetzel's later principles in building and teaching. With Hildebrand, he understood the way of seeing modern sculpture and converted it into principles for pictorial urban planning.

From his pen he created sketches that successively portrayed walks through old Swabian cities in pictures. He did not see the houses of a city as solitaires, but downgraded them to building blocks, the design of which should serve the overall appearance of the city, its visual impact on the viewer. Using specially developed terms such as “optical guidance” or “visor breaks”, he wanted to prove for each city how the topography and uniqueness of a landscape was reflected in the built mass. The city thus became a three-dimensional body, the components of which should form an appealing overall picture, as shown, for example, in the cityscapes of the vedute painter Canaletto .

Wetzel was able to intervene in the housing plans of the Nazi era towards the end of his life. He himself, but especially his students such as Georg Laub , Ludwig Schweizer or Helmut Erdle, as a planner for the Reichsheimstättenamt , gained more and more influence on the design of the settlements, which during the Nazi era were primarily intended to make armaments workers settle near the arms factories. Their model settlements published in specialist journals were supposed to serve as models for this, as they provided the de facto industrially mass-produced housing units with an aura of cozy unity. Ultimately, it was also about promising people a “home” worth living in, in order to compensate for the increasingly brutalized living conditions in the Nazi state.

However, beyond the homely idyllic blood-and-soil, beyond traditionalist or pictorial ideas based on Wetzel's role models Camillo Sitte or Paul Schultze-Naumburg , the aspects of the spatial planning , which was developing for the first time at the time, came into play in these settlement structures . An organization in “neighborhoods” and echoes of organic structures could also be observed. Above all, Wetzel's residential construction gained more and more assertiveness compared to Albert Speer's monumental urban development, which was competing within the planning landscape of the Third Reich . So this principle was able to hold its own, beginning with the reconstruction after the last world war, at least until 1960.

Fonts

• Changes in urban planning. Lecture given on the occasion of the Gauagung des NSBDT, Fachgruppe Bauwesen on September 21, 1941 in Stuttgart Karl Kraemer Verlag, Stuttgart 1942.
• Stadt Bau Kunst - thoughts and images from the estate. Karl Kraemer Verlag, Stuttgart 1962.

literature

• Karl Friedrich Bozenhardt: An excellent town planner. For the 60th birthday of Professor Heinz Wetzel. in: Württemberger Zeitung from October 19, 1942.
• Carl Blunck (Hg): Heinz Wetzel in memory. Edited on behalf of the Wetzel friends by Carl Blunck, Stuttgart 1958
• Michael Grüttner : Biographical Lexicon on National Socialist Science Policy (= Studies on Science and University History. Volume 6). Synchron, Heidelberg 2004, ISBN 3-935025-68-8 , p. 182.
• Max Guther : On the history of urban planning at German universities. In: Heinz Wetzel and the history of urban planning at German universities. Stuttgart 1982
• Hans-Günther Burkhardt et al. (Ed.): City shape and home feeling. The reconstruction of Freudenstadt 1945-1954. Hamburg 1988.
• Matthias Freytag: Stuttgart School of Architecture 1919 to 1933. Attempt to take stock in words and pictures. Stuttgart 1996.
• Wilhelm Hofmann: Memories of a city planner. Heinz Wetzel 1882-1945. in: Bauverwaltung 55 (1982), pp. 408-409.
• Hans Joachim Maurer: In Memoriam Heinz Wetzel. in: Bauamt und Gemeindebau 1957, Issue 11, pp. 349–351.
• Christian Schneider: City founding in the Third Reich. Wolfsburg and Salzgitter. Munich 1979.
• Elke Sohn: Urban planning of the Stuttgart school: Heinz Wetzel in New Tradition. Dresden: Thelem, 2009, pp. 97–120.

Web links

• Literature by and about Heinz Wetzel in the catalog of the German National Library
• Heinz Wetzel's “Urban Planning Walk through Alt-Gmünd” with 18 drawings by Adolf Schuhmacher online , in ostalbum.hypotheses.org on July 30, 2020

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Michael Grüttner : Biographical Lexicon for National Socialist Science Policy (= Studies on Science and University History. Volume 6). Synchron, Heidelberg 2004, ISBN 3-935025-68-8 , p. 182.
2. ↑ Isabel Hafner, Der controversial angel, in: Evangelisches Gemeindeblatt für Württemberg , issue 43, from October 28, 2018, p. 28