Marcel Lods

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Marcel Gabriel Lods (born August 16, 1891 in Paris ; † September 9, 1978 ibid) was a French architect and town planner .

Life

education

Marcel Lods studied at the higher arts and crafts school as well as at the national higher École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he obtained his Diplôme d'architecture in 1923 . During the two world wars he served in the French army and developed his passion for aviation there .

Between the wars

Lods worked as a freelance architect in Paris. From 1928 to 1940, in collaboration with Eugène Beaudouin and Eugène Freyssinet , he realized numerous designs that tested new industrial materials and methods in construction at the time. In particular, he developed the use of prefabricated building elements in building construction. As a French representative of New Building , he worked temporarily with the engineer and designer Jean Prouvé . Lods experimented early on with steel frame and reinforced concrete structures.

Lods designed the Champ des Oiseaux housing estate in Bagneux (1930) and the Cité de la Muette in Drancy (1932–1934). Since the 1930s he was a member of the Union des Artistes Modernes . Lods influenced the team towards choosing materials that made the buildings lighter and lighter. Examples of this are the école de plein air ( open-air school ) in Suresnes with its adjustable external walls and foldable glass facade, or the Volksheim in Clichy , a forerunner of the town house, which he built in collaboration with Vladimir Bodiansky (1894–1966) and the engineer Jean Prouvé realized.

This ideal of architecture moving in the direction of immateriality is exemplified by the Roland Garros Airport Clubhouse (1935). The never realized project of a large Palais des Expositions in La Défense also mainly made use of glass and steel.

From 1940 to 1944 he belonged together with Le Corbusier to the Association pour une Rénovation Architecturale (ASCORAL), an association for the renewal of architecture . After the war he worked for the military administration of the French occupation zone on a plan to rebuild the city of Mainz .

Mainz, the most modern city in the world

After the Second World War , the German city of Mainz was 80 percent destroyed . To restore the infrastructure, the French occupying forces called a “section du plan” with Lods as head, one of his employees being Adolf Bayer . The other core team was formed by the Swedish architect Elsa Sundling and Gérald Charles Hugh Hanning . The planning was based on the then current requirements of the Athens Charter . The extensive planning provided for a new road network. At the same time, a consistent separation of residential, administrative and commercial areas should be implemented.

Specifically, this would have meant the complete demolition of the Neustadt and its replacement by disc houses up to the Hartenberg . The Bleichenviertel would have been reserved for the administration, the old town would have been partially preserved as a "traditional island" but would have been cut up by numerous new streets. The industry should be located in Gustavsburg .

Neither the population nor the city administration approved of the plans. Lord Mayor Emil Kraus initiated a traditionally oriented alternative plan from Paul Schmitthenner . The implementation of both plans ultimately failed due to a lack of funds and political feasibility, and the reconstruction of Mainz was largely carried out by the respective property owners in the existing road system.

Important architectural works

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Andrew MacNeille: Between Tradition and Innovation - Historic Places in the Federal Republic of Germany after 1945. Dissertation, University of Cologne, 2004
  2. ^ Jean-Louis Cohen , Hartmut Frank, Volker Ziegler: A new Mainz ?: Controversies about the shape of the city after 1945 . Walter de Gruyter; March 2019
  3. ↑ Volker Ziegler: Lecture: "Saarbrücken and Mainz, Urban Utopias of the Occupation" Lecture series "Remembrance and departure. The European cultural heritage in Saarland after 1945 " [1]
personal data
SURNAME Lods, Marcel
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lods, Marcel Gabriel
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French architect and urban planner
DATE OF BIRTH August 16, 1891
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH September 9, 1978
Place of death Paris