Herbert Ricken

Herbert Ricken (born May 3, 1924 in Nordhausen ; † September 6, 2007 in Berlin ) was a German architect, cultural scientist and historian of technology.

Live and act

Herbert Ricken, son of the architect Gustav Ricken (1877–1972) and his wife Anna trained as a carpenter and draftsman after high school, war and Soviet imprisonment. He then studied architecture from 1949 to 1953 at the University of Architecture and Fine Arts in Weimar , today's Bauhaus University . There he worked initially as an assistant and later as a senior assistant and left the university in 1960 with a dissertation. He then became a consultant in the State Secretariat for higher and technical schools in the GDR , which was then headed by Wilhelm Girnus . After just one year, Ricken rose to head the construction sector and later the mining science , construction and transport department . In 1965 Ricken accepted a position as a research assistant at the Institute for Urban Development and Architecture of the Building Academy of the GDR in Berlin, completed his habilitation in 1972 at the Technical University of Dresden on the subject of the architect - development of a profession , and in 1974 became a university lecturer for architectural theory at the University of Civil Engineering Leipzig and from 1981 he represented architectural theory and the history of technology as associate professor . As early as 1977, Ricken summarized his research results on the professional history of the architect in a monograph , which also earned him a scientific reputation beyond the borders of the GDR.

In the 1980s, Ricken turned increasingly to the history of civil engineering. From 1985 to 1989 he worked as Spiritus Rector of five colloquia "History of Civil Engineering" at the TH Leipzig .

In 1989 Ricken retired as planned and the cultural theory / history of technical sciences at the TH Leipzig, which he directed , was continued by his student Klaus-Dieter Heidrich; In 1990 he was responsible for the 6th colloquium on the history of civil engineering on Johann Wilhelm Schwedler , where u. a. Frank Werner, Christian Schädlich , Andreas Kahlow, Karl-Eugen Kurrer and Rolf-Herbert Krüger gave presentations. Nonetheless, the work area set up by Ricken at the TH Leipzig was soon closed.

As a result, Ricken was able to realize numerous publication projects. For example, he regularly published articles on the history of construction technology in the magazine Bautechnik , which was headed by Doris Greiner-Mai from 1992 to 2010 . There he recalled the achievements of civil engineers such as Heinrich Gerber , John Smeaton , Otto Intze , Jean-Rodolphe Perronet , Robert Stephenson , August von Pauli, Joseph Paxton , Hubert Engels , James Hobrecht , Karl Imhoff . In 1994 Ricken added a history of the development of the civil engineering profession to his professional history as an architect. Four years later, Ricken edited the extensive special issue of the journal Bautechnik with the title On the History of Civil Engineering Art and Science , to which he contributed several articles and which also included articles by Konstantinos Chatzis, Dietrich Conrad, Thomas Hänseroth , Max Herzog , Herbert Kupfer , Karl- Includes Eugen Kurrer, Stefan Polónyi , Wolfgang Rug, Otto Steinhardt , Klaus Winter and Wilhelm von Wölfel .

Works

• Herbert Ricken: The architect. History of a profession . Berlin: Henschel-Verlag 1977.
• Herbert Ricken: On the interaction between building technology and architectural design . In: Architektur der DDR (1977), no.11.
• Herbert Ricken: The architect. A historic job description . Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt 1990.
• Herbert Ricken: Notes on the dialectic of the technical and the aesthetic in architecture . In: Wiss. Z. Hochsch. Archit. Construct. - A. - 36 (1990), 1-3, pp. 31-34.
• Herbert Ricken: Johann Wilhelm Schwedler . In: VDI Bau. Yearbook 1994, ed. from VDI-Gesellschaft Bautechnik, Düsseldorf: VDI-Verlag, pp. 320–367, ISBN 3-18-401378-2 .
• Herbert Ricken: The civil engineer: history of an occupation . Berlin: Verlag für Bauwesen 1994, ISBN 3-345-00266-3 .
• Herbert Ricken (Hrsg.): On the history of civil engineering art and science , special edition construction technology, Berlin: Ernst & Sohn 1998.

literature

• Siegfried Gurt: Laudation on the 65th birthday of Prof. Dr. sc. techn. Herbert Ricken . In: Scientific reports from the Technical University of Leipzig, (1989), no. 22, pp. 5-7.
• Doris Greiner May: Herbert Ricken died . In: Bautechnik, Volume 84 (2007), H. 12, pp. 915-916.

proof

1. ↑ Gustav Ricken on NordhausenWiki. Retrieved January 3, 2020.
2. ^ Karl-Eugen Kurrer: Report on the State of Construction History in Austria, Germany and Switzerland. In: Construction History. Research Perspectives in Europe, ed. By Antonio Becchi, Massimo Corradi, Federico Foce and Orietta Pedemonte , pp. 61–112 (here p. 70). Kim Williams Books, Florence 2004, ISBN 88-88479-11-2
3. ^ Herbert Ricken: Johann Wilhelm Schwedler . In: VDI Bau. Yearbook 1994, ed. from VDI-Gesellschaft Bautechnik, Düsseldorf: VDI-Verlag, pp. 320–367, ISBN 3-18-401378-2 .