Klaus Novy
Klaus Novy (born September 10, 1944 in Vienna ; † August 28, 1991 in Seattle , USA) was a professor of building economics and a publicist. In the 1980s, his research gave new impulses for the basic concepts of social housing.
Life
Klaus Novy emigrated from Linz to Canada with his parents as a child and returned to Europe at the age of 16. After a few semesters of electrical engineering and art history in Zurich , he began studying economics in Cologne in 1966 , which he graduated with a diploma in 1972. He then worked there as a lecturer until he accepted a position as a university assistant at RWTH Aachen University in 1974; There he received his doctorate in 1977 with a study on the discussion of economic reform in the Weimar Republic ("strategies of socialization"). In 1980 he received a professorship at the University of Wuppertal . In 1983 he became professor for planning and urban economics at the TU Berlin .
Novy did research on the topic of community self-organization . In this context, he was one of the first to investigate the municipal housing of “Red Vienna” in the 1920s and the previous Viennese settler movement . These were pioneering movements in reform housing construction and produced objects of social and architectural importance. In 1980, together with Günther Uhlig and in cooperation with the Arch + magazine , he curated the first exhibition on the Viennese settler movement after the First World War , which was later shown in other European cities. The exhibition was of lasting importance insofar as it raised awareness of the subject of self-help in the crisis-ridden debates of the later 1970s.
Klaus Novy lived the ideas of community life and the diversity of ways of life himself - in a house community that came together as a group in 1980 and continues to exist today.
Act
Novy took a critical inventory of economic reform theories. In particular, he went back to the early 1920s, when the ideas of socially oriented, non-profit housing construction emerged. The failure of these reforms appeared paradoxical to Novy, and as a result he began to re-sound the original ideas of the housing and construction organizations, especially the democratic sources of the cooperative movement . In order to initiate these strategies, as an economist he not only advised the groups looking for accommodation in the “alternative” social movements of the 1970s and 1980s, but also took on the major social housing organizations . With his initiatives to found new housing cooperatives and with the founding of an advisory association, the Wohnbund , he encouraged them to reform themselves . However, it was clear to him that the idealistic counter-model “cooperative” and the “self-using owner groups” (a term he coined) could not solve the problems of human living and life.
For Novy, living was a multi-dimensional, also socio-aesthetic topic that went far beyond housing construction and use. The target term that he proposed to “self-using builders”, organized in cooperatives or associations, was called “housing reform” instead of the more narrowly used term of housing reform. Through the discussion of the term “social space”, which Novy took up as early as the 1970s and referred to “space-forgotten sociology”, he came to an intensive occupation with architecture and urban planning . He attached great importance to the fact that residential construction had an aesthetic urban dimension and criticized the fact that this was neglected in the early social movements of the 1970s in the FRG.
Novy as a publicist
In his political and journalistic practice, Novy recalled the forgotten reform traditions and their potential in a large number of articles that appeared in the magazines of the new social movements, but gradually also in the specialist bodies of the established housing industry at home and abroad, and promoted them innovative, contemporary support forms in residential construction. It is also thanks to him that many German housing cooperatives have dared to return to their proud history, as they were considered socialist and thus old-fashioned during the penetration of capitalism into the regulated housing industry.
Novy wrote several popular science books. For several years he was a member of the editorial board of Arch + magazine. In 1982 he founded a private research and consulting facility ("Klaus Novy Institute") in Cologne. In 1994, former employees in Berlin founded a second association with a similar focus, the “Genossenschaftsforum”, in cooperation with local housing cooperatives.
Private
The twins Johannes and Leonard (* 1977) were born from the marriage with the journalist Beatrix Füsser-Novy. Novy died in 1991 at the age of 46 and was buried in the grave of his wife's family in the Melaten cemetery in Cologne (Hall 6 (Q)).
Klaus Novy Prize
In memory of Novy's work, the housing cooperative Spar- und Bauverein Solingen eG launched the nationwide "Klaus Novy Prize for Innovations in Cooperative Building and Living" in 1997 on the occasion of its 100th anniversary. It was awarded for the fourth time for the International Cooperative Year 2012. The previous first prize winners were Wogeno München eG in 1997, MiKa Karlsruhe eG in 2002, Bremer Höhe eG in 2007, Berlin and in 2012 the Mietshäuser Syndikat . 1st prize 2017: “More than Living eG”, Zurich
Fonts
- Books
- 1978: strategies of socialization. The discussion of economic reform in the Weimar Republic. (333 pages) Campus-Verlag, 1978, ISBN 3-593323133 .
- 1983: Cooperative movement. On the history and future of housing reform. (176 pp.) Transit-Verlag, Berlin 1983, ISBN 3-887470176 .
- 1985: (Ed.) Housing industry beyond pure economic theory. (259 p.) Foreword by Klaus Novy, Studienverlag Brockmeyer, Bochum 1985, ISBN 3-883394300 .
- 1985: Living differently. History and future of cooperative culture. Bonn, 1985.
- 1985: Illustrated History of the Common Economy. Economic self-help in the labor movement from the beginning to 1945. (239 pp.) With Michael Prinz . Verlag Dietz Nachf, Bonn 1985, ISBN 3-801201112 .
- 1986: (Ed.) Housing reform in Cologne. History of the building cooperatives. With Ulrich Bimberg, afterword by Uwe Kessler. Bachem, Cologne 1986, ISBN 3-761608403 .
- 1989: New residential projects, old cooperatives, forms of cooperation. Darmstadt, 1989.
- 1991: Housing reform in Berlin, Berlin.
- 1991: Reform leader NRW - social movements and their buildings, Cologne.
- 1991 (Ed. With Felix Zwoch ): Reflecting on urban planning. Urban policy, building culture, architecture criticism. Braunschweig / Wiesbaden.
- 1993 Contributions to planning and housing , Urban Planning Vienna Volume 41, Magistrat Stadt Wien 1993, Dept. 18, various publications - compiled by Wolfgang Förster. link
- Articles and brochures
- 1979: The Viennese community housing: "Socialization from below" in: Arch + 45.
- 1981: Self-help as a reform movement, in: Arch + 55.
- 1982: Building cooperatives between tradition and new beginnings (with G. Uhlig) in: Stadtbauwelt 75.
- 1984: A future for charitable organizations, in Arch + 74.
- 1985: Just build. Cooperative self-help after the turn of the century. For the reconstruction of the Viennese settler movement. (198 pp.) Catalog for a growing exhibition. A project by the Association for Modern Local Politics. Exhibition in the Vienna Künstlerhaus, November 8th to December 1st, 1985. Association for Local Politics , Vienna 1985, DNB 891485562 .
Web links
- Klaus Novy Institute Cologne for Cooperative Living - About the Institute - at kni.de
- Bibliography (Novy) on archplus.net Status: 2016.
- Slide picture archive on the subject of "Cooperative Housing Reforms" at ... genossenschaftsforum.de
proof
- ↑ source? The official bio ( memento of the original from April 28, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. does not mention E-technology, Cologne from '65
- ↑ Novy said that the established social builders only tried to express the demarcation to the social and urban environment in their communal housing projects, instead of also architecturally formulating symbols of the project's embedding. Here too, the historical building cooperatives were role models.
- ↑ Novy short biography at kni.de ( Memento of the original from April 28, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ SBV awarded fourth Klaus Novy Prize for ideas for cooperatives . On SBV-Solingen, accessed on July 10, 2012.
- ↑ http://www.sbv-solingen.de/sites/1707171316130.html
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Novy, Klaus |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Austrian university lecturer for architecture and publicist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | September 10, 1944 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Vienna |
| DATE OF DEATH | August 28, 1991 |
| Place of death | Seattle , USA |