Hermann Mattern

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Hermann Mattern (born November 27, 1902 in Hofgeismar ; † November 17, 1971 in Greimharting ) was one of the most important German landscape architects of the 20th century.

Life

Hermann Mattern was born in Hofgeismar in Hesse in 1902. After an apprenticeship as a gardener from 1919 to 1921 and several years as a journeyman in horticulture and landscaping , he began studying at the Horticultural Teaching and Research Institute (LuFA) in Berlin-Dahlem in 1924 . For a short time he worked in the planning department of the Magdeburg city administration. He also worked with the garden architect Leberecht Migge .

After completing his studies in 1927, he took over the management of the design department in the office of Karl Foerster and Herta Hammerbacher in Potsdam-Bornim. He developed local planning and urban development projects, but also carried out various property planning in landscaping.

Hermann Mattern married Herta Hammerbacher in 1928, and the marriage resulted in a daughter, Merete Mattern. The marriage was divorced again in 1935. The family commissioned Hans Scharoun to build a house in 1932 , which was completed in 1934. The contact with Scharoun arose during the construction of the Schminke house in Löbau , where Herta Hammerbacher designed the garden.

In the 1930s, Mattern, together with other landscape architects and Adolf Loos, designed a concept for the Müllerova vila garden .

Mattern designed a large number of gardens for the country houses of the architects Otto von Estorff and Gerhard Winkler , which shaped the country house style in the Potsdam area in the 1930s.

In 1935 he founded his own planning office in a planning community with Karl Foerster. In the same year until 1945 he was appointed by Alwin Seifert, despite great political resistance (the office was politically “red”), as “ landscape lawyer ” for the construction of the Reichsautobahn . Together with the landscape architect Friedrich Schaub , the anthroposophist Max Karl Schwarz from Worpswede and the motorway engineer Hans Lorenz , he was responsible for the planning and design of the influential pioneering project of the Reichsautobahn Vienna-Brünn-Breslau , in particular for the construction of the rest house at the Franciscan monastery in Mährisch -Truebuilding active.

In 1935 he founded his own office. From 1936 to 1939 he planned the 1939 Reichsgartenschau in Stuttgart on the Killesberg . Since then, however, the site has been changed again for further garden shows through many redesigns.

After the end of the war, together with Ernst Röttger and Arnold Bode, in 1948 he re-established the Kassel Art Academy (under the name Werkakademie, later State University of Fine Arts ), from 1948 he was himself a professor at the "Seminar for Landscape Culture" at this university, which became one in 1949 own "Department of Landscape Culture".

In 1950 he was responsible for planning the preparation of the grounds for the Federal Garden Show in Kassel, and from 1951 for planning the show itself, which would then take place in 1955. In 1953 he was a member of the Circle Club 53 around Arnold Bode. For this purpose, he redesigned the area in the Karlsaue, which was heavily damaged by the war and strewn with rubble. This design was also largely destroyed later in the course of the design of the second Kassel Federal Horticultural Show in 1981 in favor of the “restoration” of the structures of the originally baroque park.

He then worked in Bonn and again in Stuttgart .

In 1961 he accepted a professorship for landscaping and horticulture at the Technical University of Berlin and held this position until 1970.

In 1971 Hermann Mattern died in Greimharting am Chiemsee (Bavaria).

Hermann Mattern worked with many well-known garden architects, architects and artists, such as B. with Hugo Häring , Hans Scharoun , Hans Poelzig , Oskar Schlemmer , Herta Hammerbacher , Hermann Göritz and Gerhard Graubner .

Typical of his design was the creation of spaces by modeling the terrain, mostly by embankments (nickname among professional colleagues: "Hügel-Hermann"; his partner Herta Hammerbacher, who preferred deepening for this purpose, was appropriately called "Mulden-Herta"). Another characteristic of many of his gardens is that the lawn and planting areas are not strictly separated, but merge into one another. Garden and house design should also take into account each other:

“People and gardens are in an invigorating interrelation. Man's house and man's garden, in order to function invigoratingly and imperceptibly, cannot be added to one another, but must complement one another completely. "

estate

The Mattern estate is in the university archive of the TU Berlin .

Works

  • Hermann Mattern: Freedom within limits (pictures from gardens), Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1938
  • Hermann Mattern (ed.), Fritz Caspari [u. a.] (Staff): The living landscape: a collection of statements about human activity in the landscape , Stuttgart: Hatje, 1950
  • Kassel garden book: at the same time exhibition catalog of the Federal Garden Show Kassel 1955 ; Kassel: Federal Garden Show, 1955 (overall planning and artistic direction: Hermann Mattern)
  • Erika Brödner, Immanuel Kroeker, Maximilian Debus, Hermann Mattern (collaborators): School buildings ; 2. reworked. Ed., Munich: Rinn, around 1951
  • Beate Mattern, Hermann Mattern: Gardens and garden landscapes, planned a. built by Hermann Mattern, discussed a. described with Beate Mattern , Stuttgart: Hatje, 1960
  • Hermann Mattern: Grass must no longer grow: 12 Chap. about d. Consumption d. Landscape , (Bauwelt Fundamente, 13); Berlin, Frankfurt / M., Vienna: Ullstein, 1964
  • Hermann Mattern: Landscapes ; in: Ernst May: Stadtlandschaft, (reports from the work of the working group for the improvement of the agricultural structure in Hessen eV, 16); Wiesbaden: AVA working group z. Improvement d. Agricultural structure in Hessen eV, 1964
  • Hermann Mattern, Peter Pfankuch : Peter Joseph Lenné (exhibition catalog); Berlin: Senator f. Science and Art / academy d. Arts, 1966

Executed projects

literature

  • Diez Brandi : Hermann Mattern, planning and design of gardens , (workshop report ... of the art service, 12), Berlin: Riemenschneider, 1941
  • Vroni Hampf-Heinrich: Hermann Mattern: 1902–1971; Gardens, garden landscapes, houses; Exhibition by the Academy of Arts and the Technical University of Berlin, from October 17 to November 17, 1982 , (Academy Catalog, 135), Berlin: Akad. D. Kuenste, 1982, ISBN 3-88331-923-6
  • Vroni Heinrich: Hermann Mattern: Gardens - Landscapes - Buildings - Teaching: Life and Work. Berlin: Technical University, 2013, ISBN 978-3-7983-2525-8 (print) 978-3-7983-2526-5 ( online )
  • Vroni Hampf-Heinrich:  Mattern, Hermann. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 16, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1990, ISBN 3-428-00197-4 , p. 389 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Dorothea Hokema: Ecological awareness and artistic design: on the functioning of planning awareness based on three historical examples: Willy Lange , Paul Schultze-Naumburg , Hermann Mattern , (contributions to the cultural history of nature, 5; also: Berlin, Techn. Univ., Diploma thesis, 1994), 2nd edition: Berlin: Eisel / Freising-Weihenstephan: Trepl, ISBN 3-931472-04-3
  • Thomas Bufe: Garden monument conservation inventory of Mattern's private and public facilities in Germany after 1945 (unpublished lecture on November 22, 2002, as part of the lecture event “Green Modernism passé?” For the 100th year of birth organized by the Institute for Landscape and Environmental Planning at the Technical University of Berlin by Reinhold Lingner and Hermann Mattern)
  • Charlotte Reitsam: Reichsautobahn in the field of tension between nature and technology. Habilitation thesis Technical University of Munich , Faculty of Architecture 2004 ( PDF Online, 10 MB )

supporting documents

  1. ↑ University archive of the TU Berlin: Flyer with chronicle and self-description (PDF; 1.2 MB), 2012
  2. ↑ Extra Tip from June 2, 2018 p. 5

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Mattern, Hermann
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hill-Hermann (nickname)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German landscape architect
DATE OF BIRTH November 27, 1902
PLACE OF BIRTH Hofgeismar
DATE OF DEATH 17th November 1971
Place of death Greimharting