Karl August Orf

Karl August Orf (born July 5, 1912 in Hann. Münden , † December 23, 1977 in Bremen ) was a German garden and landscape architect .

biography

Karl August Orf came from a family of teachers. Father and grandfather had been educators. After attending grammar school in his hometown, he studied at the Horticultural Research and Laboratory (VuFA) in Berlin-Dahlem. His first job was in 1937 with Wilhelm Hübotter (1895–1976) in Hanover. During the Second World War he served in France and was taken prisoner of war there. After his return to Germany he studied in Kassel at the Werkakademie in Kassel with Hermann Mattern "Landscape Culture" and worked as an employee of Mattern at the garden shows in Kassel and Cologne. 1954 was poached from there to the construction department of the union housing company Neue Heimat under the direction of Ernst May . In 1960 he married Gunda Krüger, daughter of a painter, who was trained as an interior designer ( Burg Giebichenstein ), and in 1954 also worked as a draftsman at Neue Heimat in Hamburg. Both worked closely together in the design department of Neue Heimat and, after getting married and moving to Bremen in 1961, ran a small office for garden architecture in their house on Paul-Singer-Straße. Ernst May obviously valued his abilities highly, so that he designed the green areas for numerous large estates and large housing competitions. However, this close collaboration ends with the move to Bremen. Due to illness, Karl August Orf only worked as a garden architect in Bremen for a few years, until around 1965.

Designs in collaboration with Ernst May

• 1954: Bremerhaven green yards
• 1954–1957: Garden City Vahr, Bremen
• 1954–1957: St. Lorenz Süd, Lübeck
• 1955: Jahnstrasse housing estate, Hof
• 1956–1957: Competition environment Fennpfuhl, Berlin
• 1956–1961: Neue Vahr, Bremen
• 1957: Ernst May house, Groß Flottbek, Hamburg

literature

• "The house gardener at GEWOBA", in: Vahrer Echo, May 20, 1961
• Nils Aschenbeck: New Vahr model. Exhibition catalog. Bremen 1993 (therein biography Karl August Orf, pp. 22–23)
• Florian Seidel: Ernst May: Urban development and architecture in the years 1954–1970 . Dissertation. Technical University of Munich 2008 (PDF; 7.43 MB).