Herbert Sprat

Herbert Sprotte (born January 31, 1904 in Breslau ; † June 15, 1962 on Helgoland ) was a German architect .

Live and act

Herbert Sprotte was born in Breslau, which was considered a focus of progress in architecture during the Weimar Republic . After studying at the Academy of Fine Arts , he worked in various offices, including the architects Adolf Rading and Hans Scharoun and in the civil engineering department in Beuthen . In 1928 he moved to Hamburg. In the office of Fritz Block and Ernst Hochfeld , he helped plan the Deutschlandhaus . The architects dismissed him due to the bad construction industry in 1931. Sprotte then worked as a freelance architect. In 1933 it belonged to the so-called “building room”, in which 17 young architects worked in shared offices in the Deutschlandhaus. Here he met Peter Neve , with whom he founded an office in 1935.

In the mid-1930s, the order situation in the construction industry improved. The architects Sprotte & Neve managed to establish themselves. They received several orders for single-family and multi-storey houses, which they designed strictly, in parts traditional, and which thus appeared rustic. Their clearly structured designs show that they also took up elements of the New Building .

During the Second World War , Hamburg was increasingly destroyed by air raids. Konstanty Gutschow , who headed the Office for War -related Operations (AKE), commissioned numerous other architects, Sprotte and Neve, to plan the reconstruction and repair of the war-related damage. After the end of the war, the British military government gave the architectural office the provisional management of the clean-up office. Sprotte planned to rebuild damaged structures and received orders for new buildings. These included the simplex houses built in 1949 on Nüßlerkamp in Bramfeld . The architects tried to build with a pronounced lightness and thus to create a contrast to the massive buildings that were built during the Third Reich . For this they used simple plastered facades, large glass fronts and flight roofs . They caused a sensation with their buildings, for example with buildings on the grounds of the Hamburg Messe on Jungiusstrasse. Sprotte's most famous work was exhibition hall 4, which had a fully glazed south facade and attracted a lot of attention.

Sprotte & Neve often worked with playful elements. This included filigree balustrades and organically designed balconies that were reminiscent of kidney-shaped tables. They were significantly inspired by Scandinavian modernism and were based on models such as Kay Fisker and Arne Jacobsen . Yellow brick, which shaped the post-war architecture of Hamburg, was characteristic of their designs.

Herbert Sprotte died as a result of a heart attack that he suffered during a beach holiday on Heligoland. Peter Neve continued the office together with other architects.

literature

• Jan Lubitz: Sprat, Herbert . In: Franklin Kopitzsch, Dirk Brietzke (Hrsg.): Hamburgische Biographie . tape 5 . Wallstein, Göttingen 2010, ISBN 978-3-8353-0640-0 , p. 352-353 .