Karl August Hoepfner

Karl August Ludwig Friedrich Hoepfner (born November 19, 1880 in Langendorf near Weißenfels , † June 14, 1945 in Poland ) was a German civil engineer , urban planner and university lecturer .

Live and act

Karl Hoepfner's parents were the manor owner Paul Hoepfner from Böhmenhöfen near Braunsberg (East Prussia) and his wife Elisabeth, née Bartels. In 1909 he married Hedwig Buchardi (* 1885), daughter of the high school teacher Dr. Karl Buchardi from Emden . Between 1910 and 1922 three sons and a daughter were born.

After graduating from high school in Elbing in 1899 , he studied civil engineering at the Technical University of Charlottenburg . During his studies he became a member of the Academic Association Motiv . This was followed by a legal clerkship as a government building manager in the Prussian civil service with stations in Emden, Staßfurt and Kassel ; He passed the 2nd state examination to become a government architect ( assessor ) in 1909. From the winter semester 1909/1910, Hoepfner was assistant to Ewald Genzmer at the chair for building construction and urban planning at the Technical University of Danzig for two semesters . From 1910 Hoepfner worked as a town planning inspector in Königsberg . The city of Königsberg had acquired the area of ​​the fortress belt in 1910 and wanted to de-strengthen them; Hoepfner's task was to draw up urban plans for the fortress belt.

As early as the winter semester of 1912/1913, when he was 32, Hoepfner was appointed full professor at the Technical University of Karlsruhe , Department of Engineering. There he followed Reinhard Baumeister to the chair for town planning and urban civil engineering and began teaching in the subjects of town planning, town cleaning, bridge and foundation engineering previously represented by Baumeister. In addition, he soon read fundamental questions of urban planning for the students of architecture and civil engineering . From 1915 to 1918 Hoepfner took part in the First World War.

In addition to his work as a university lecturer, he took on various planning tasks for municipalities and was involved in the establishment of the Study Society for Automobile Road Construction (Stufa) in 1924 . Similar to his predecessor master builder, Hoepfner became known for his basic specialist books: Basic Concepts of Urban Development Volumes I (1921) and II (1928). In his textbooks, if design aspects are accepted, he calls for urban planning developed from a holistic perspective. With this goal, Hoepfner combined the job description of an urban planner between artistic architect and construction engineer: "This gap can only be closed by training a new discipline that intervenes between architecture and civil engineering and represents a new branch of engineering of its own." (Hoepfner 1925) .

After 15 years at the Technical University of Karlsruhe, he accepted the offer at the Technical University of Danzig as the successor to Friedrich Gerlach to the chair founded in 1904 by Ewald Genzmer. For the academic year 1927/1928 Hoepfner became a full professor for urban construction and road construction at the civil engineering department and at the same time head of the East Prussian road construction research center .

For training in urban planning, Hoepfner took over the interdisciplinary seminar for urban planning that had existed in Gdansk since 1910 , which Ewald Genzmer had set up at the Technical University of Charlottenburg based on the model of Josef Brix and Felix Genzmer (1907/1908); In the meantime Gerlach had continued the urban planning seminar as a collegial lesson with the professors for transport Richard Petersen and Otto Kloeppel for architecture and urban planning.

In his more than 30 years (1912–1945) time as a university lecturer, Hoepfner worked on a changing interpretation of the discipline of urban planning, which was only to develop into an independent discipline of urban and spatial planning very late after the Second World War.
As a member of the NSDAP, Hoepfner held the post of Senator for Construction of the Free City of Danzig in Senate Rauschning and Senate Greiser from 1933 to 1939 .

Fonts

• What tasks does the Department of Civil Engineering at the TH have to fulfill in order to meet the special needs of cities? Karlsruhe 1920.

Basic concepts of urban planning. Berlin 1928.

• Basic concepts of urban planning. (2 volumes) Berlin 1921.
• The settlement system ... In: Festschrift of the Technical University Fridericiana in Karlsruhe. Karlsruhe 1925, p. 246f.

literature

• The TH Fridericiana Karlsruhe. Festschrift for the 125th anniversary, Karlsruhe 1950.
• Erich Gassner: Urban planning as a joint task. In: Allgemeine Vermessungsnachrichten , year 1964, issue 1, p. 10.
• Klaus Wächter: Hoepfner, Karl August Ludwig Friedrich. In: Concise dictionary of spatial research and spatial planning. Hanover 1970, Sp. 1215-1220.
• 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.
• Eberhard Berg:  Höpfner, Karl. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 9, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1972, ISBN 3-428-00190-7 , p. 349 ( digitized version ).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The Black Ring. Membership directory. Darmstadt 1930, p. 32.
2. ↑ Bertold Spuler : Regents and Governments of the World: Vol. 3. Modern Times, 1492-1918. , 2nd edition, AG Ploetz, p. 132, ( limited preview online at Google Book Search ).