Hubert Hoffmann

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Hubert Hoffmann (1968)

Hubert Hoffmann (born March 23, 1904 in Berlin ; † September 25, 1999 in Graz ) was a German-Austrian urban planner , architect , author and painter . Hoffmann is the grandson of the architect Hubert Stier from Hanover.

Life

Hoffmann, the son of an architect, first completed an agricultural apprenticeship, then from 1920 to 1925 attended the construction school, arts and crafts school and technical college in Hanover . After a year at the Munich Art Academy , he continued his studies at the Bauhaus Dessau from 1926 to 1930 , particularly with Walter Gropius . From 1929 to 1931 he practiced in the architecture offices of Fred Forbat and Marcel Breuer , then became head of a carpentry in Berlin and developed a successful modular system for shop fittings. At the end of the Weimar Republic , Hoffmann worked at the Bauhaus and became a member of the Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM).

At the beginning of the Nazi era Hoffmann spent two months in a prison camp in a Berlin cemetery and tried in vain to gain a foothold abroad (Switzerland, France), but then from 1934 to 1936 he became the main assistant to Professor Georg Müller at the Technical University of Berlin ( Motor transport and urban development) and participated in the motorway planning of the Third Reich. From 1935 to 1945 Hoffmann belonged to the politically opposition "Freedom Group" / "Friday Group", which, however, continued to pursue its career in the Nazi regime. According to the current state of research, the form in which this group actually “opposed” or “resisted” the Nazi regime is based solely on the self-portrayals of Hoffmann - u. a. in his unpublished memoir (1989) - and on Roland Rainer's "counter-representation" in the socially critical magazine FORVM (1993). This representation remains to be questioned critically for the time being.

Hoffmann was a city planner in Potsdam from 1938 to 1939 . From 1942 to 1944 he was head of the Office for Spatial Planning in Lithuania , from 1944 to 1945 urban planning clerk for the reconstruction of German cities at the German Academy for Urban Development, Reich and State Planning in Berlin (with Johannes Göderitz and Roland Rainer ).

After the end of the war, Hoffmann was initially a city planner in Magdeburg and Dessau and then went to West Berlin, where he was head of the planning design office for West Berlin from 1949 to 1952.

Since 1950 delegate of CIAM for Berlin, Hoffmann taught from 1952 to 1954 as a lecturer at the teaching and research institute (LuFA) in Berlin-Dahlem , worked from 1953 to 1958 as a freelance architect in Bonn and Berlin (with Walter Rossow, among others ) and became 1959 appointed full professor at the Graz University of Technology .

Hoffmann headed the Institute for Urban Development and Design until his retirement in 1975 and also acted as an advisor to various citizens' initiatives , for example as the initiator of the Plabutsch Tunnel in Graz .

Hoffmann received numerous honors, including becoming a member of the German Academy for Urban Development and Regional Planning, an honorary member of the German Werkbund, an honorary member of the Association of Greek Architects in 1983, and an honorary member of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in 1993 .

Fonts

  • Urban planning in the post-war period . In: Bruno E. Werner: New building in Germany , Munich: Bruckmann 1952, [p. 9-15].

literature

Web links

Commons : Hubert Hoffmann  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Hubert Hoffmann: the Friday group . unpublished manuscript; Bauhaus Archive Berlin, NL Hoffmann, 1989.
  2. ^ Roland Rainer: FORVM . No. 480 . Ueberreuter, Vienna December 17, 1993, p. 65 .
personal data
SURNAME Hoffmann, Hubert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Austrian urban planner, architect, author and painter
DATE OF BIRTH March 23, 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH September 25, 1999
Place of death Graz