Leopold Fischer (architect)

Leopold Fischer (born April 28, 1901 in Bielsko-Biała , Silesia; died 1975 in Long Beach , California) was an Austrian architect who, in collaboration with the landscape architect Leberecht Migge, built semi-rural housing developments between 1925 and 1929 the Nuremberg Laws emigrated to the USA .

Life

Leopold Fischer, who came from an assimilated Jewish family, studied from 1920 to 1924 in Adolf Loos' construction school in Vienna and was his master class . There he worked with Loos on settlement projects and met Leberecht Migge in 1924 , who worked with Loos in the Vienna Settlement Office. He built for Migge his house in Worpswede to and developed with him self catering houses and settlements for self-catering . Since Loos gave up his office in Vienna and moved to Paris, Fischer accepted an invitation from Walter Gropius to Dessau in 1925 to work at the Gropius construction office at the Bauhaus Dessauto take over the planning of the Bauhaus estate Dessau-Törten. Due to differences of opinion, especially with Ernst Neufert , Fischer left Gropius and then headed the Anhalt settlers' association from 1925 to 1931 in order to build  housing estates in Dessau (Klein-Kühnau, Dessau-Ziebigk), Coswig , Zerbst , and Köthen until its bankruptcy in the course of the global economic crisis , Bernburg to build and develop over three hundred semis ecological design principles. On March 2, 1927, he invited Adolf Loos to give a lecture in Dessau. The management of the building department at the Bauhaus Dessau offered to him by Hannes Meyer in 1927 was rejected by Fischer due to his obligations in the settlers' association. In 1927/28 he built for the milliner Hedwig Liebig (1872-1959) a studio and residential house (Villa Liebig) with a roof garden in a cubic design according to the floor plan of Adolf Loos in the Kleiststrasse near the Bauhaus, where he himself from 1930 to Lived in 1933. In 1931 he met the dancer and Mary Wigman student Gerda Vogt (1905–2002) in Dresden , who came from Bielefeld , became his fiancée and gave him orders. Between 1932 and 1936, Fischer built single-family houses in Berlin , Bielefeld, Stuttgart , Kronach and Werther . The last buildings that Fischer was able to realize in Germany were three small single-family houses on Stölpchensee  in Berlin-Wannsee, one of them for Klara Vogt, the mother of his fiancée. In 1936 Fischer lived with Gerda Vogt in Bielefeld, where they were friends with the painter Peter August Böckstiegel and from where he emigrated to the USA via Rotterdam on September 24, 1936, fleeing from the National Socialists to Los Angeles .

Fischer, who played the violin and valued the Second Viennese School , worked there with Frank Lloyd Wright in Spring Green, Wisconsin, from 1938 to 1940 based on a recommendation from Arnold Schönberg , with whom Adolf Loos was friends, and then opened in 1940 his own office on Santa Monica Boulevard in Beverly Hills , which he closed in 1961 due to a lack of orders and moved to Seal Beach . In the mid-1950s he visited Gerda Vogt in Bielefeld and the international building exhibition Interbau in West Berlin. In 1975 he died in Long Beach.

reception

Leo Adler mentions Leopold Fischer and shows an aerial photo of the Dessau-Ziebigk settlement in Wasmuth's Lexikon für Baukunst (vol. 2, 1930), but not in his monograph “Modern Rental Houses and Settlements” (1931/1998). It was only the Bielefeld art historian Irene Below who began researching Leopold Fischer in 1993 and, together with the Bauhaus e. V., represented by Wolfgang Paul, draws attention to the importance of the forgotten work of Leopold Fischer in publications and lectures.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Foundation Bauhaus Dessau: Bauhaussiedlung Dessau – Törten by Walter Gropius (1926–28). In: https://www.bauhaus-dessau.de/ . Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, accessed on January 9, 2018 (German). 
2. ↑ Leo Adler (editor) a. a .: Dessau . In: Günther Wasmuth (Hrsg.): Wasmuths Lexikon der Baukunst . tape 2 . Wasmuth, Berlin 1930, p. 156-157 .
3. ↑ Irene Below: The unknown architect and the other modern: Leopold Fischer in Dessau . In: Anja Baumhoff and Magdalena Droste (eds.): Myth of the Bauhaus . Reimer, Berlin 2009, p. 245-272 .
4. ↑ Wolfgang Paul: 4th panel discussion in the Masters' House in Dessau: Leopold Fischer - Settlements and buildings of the modern age in the twenties. Bauhaus e. V., accessed on January 9, 2018 . 
5. ^ Fritz Becker, Irene Below, Peter Koitzsch, Wolfgang Paul, Sandra Striebing, Juliane Vierich, Frank Wolter: Leopold Fischer Architect of Modernism. Bauhaus e. V., accessed on January 9, 2018 (German).