Otto Kolb
Otto Kolb (born November 5, 1921 in Schaffhausen ; † December 12, 1996 in Wermatswil , Canton of Zurich) was a Swiss-American architect and designer .
At home in the environment of the advocates of classical modernism and new building , he dealt with the synthesis of art , science and architecture . Early on, he dealt with resource-saving construction, used recycling materials and developed alternative energy concepts. He also experimented with new spatial arrangements (not only horizontally but also vertically free floor plan) and spectacular constructions (rope tensioning).
Life
Kolb first completed an apprenticeship as a bricklayer before taking an apprenticeship as an architect at the Technikum in Winterthur . In 1944 he obtained his diploma and in 1945, after a few internships, joined the office of the architect and university professor Alfred Roth . Through his employer he came into contact with the art scene of the time and met Richard Paul Lohse and Max Bill in particular . After marrying Heidi Müller, his first house was built in 1945/46, the studio house in Brüttisellen (ZH), which he furnished with furniture that he had designed himself; among other things with the “book tree” and the “mobile lamp”. House and furniture brought him his first journalistic success.
Roth introduced him to the circle around the chronicler of classical modernism Sigfried Giedion and his wife Carola Giedion-Welcker , where he met artists, architects and writers such as James Joyce , Wassily Kandinsky , Le Corbusier , Paul Klee , Walter Gropius , Kurt Schwitters , Jean Arp , Max Ernst or Aldo van Eyck . Johannes Itten brought him to the Zurich School of Applied Arts , where he taught technical drawing in the general department, and Richard Paul Lohse edited the article on the subject of indoor climate from Kolb's pen in 1947 in the magazine Bauen + Wohnen that attracted the attention of Serge Chermayeff , director of the institute of Design (ID) in Chicago.
On the recommendation of Sigfried Giedion, Chermayeff appointed Kolb in 1948 to the successor institution to the New Bauhaus founded by László Moholy-Nagy in 1937 . Until 1951, when the ID merged with the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) , Kolb taught product design, sketched buildings and designed furniture there. Among them, the bat chair stands out, which was celebrated as the Love Chair in Playboy magazine - at that time not yet the respectable reference it represents today. During this time he built his first house on American soil, the weekend and vacation home for Imre and Maria Horner on Lake Michigan in Beverly Shores, Indiana .
The Beverly Shores area bordering the Indiana Dunes State Park nature reserve developed into a popular retreat from the metropolis of Chicago . As an attraction, the developer, Robert Bartlett, had model houses from the Chicago World's Fair of 1933/34 transported by ship across Lake Michigan to Beverly Shores. The Horner House, which was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1996 , is still in the immediate vicinity of George Fred Keck's House of Tomorrow, which was presented at the “A Century of Progress International Exposition” as the epitome of future living. In contrast, the Horner House is characterized by a strong influence of traditional Japanese architecture, for which Kolb had a strong sense.
In 1951, when he left the institute, he also separated from Heidi Müller and married Ridi Spiesman, b. Oppenheim, whom he had met on a visit to the house built by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1915 for Emil Bach in Chicago. He intensified furniture design and built - now living on the Hudson River with a view of the New York skyline - the Clark (1953–57), Tennant (1957), Botway (1956–58) and Solotorovsky (1954–59) houses. In 1955 the doctors diagnosed Kolb with a brain tumor, the surgical removal of which and the subsequent convalescence kept him busy until 1957. His marriage to Ridi, who divorced in 1959, also suffered under the strain. In the same year he married the journalist Jane Lace. After working in the public relations department of the Office of the Secretary of Defense in Washington for four years, shortly before meeting Kolb in 1956, she moved to New York to take a position at IBM.
In 1960 she moved to Brüttisellen with Kolb, who was returning to Switzerland. Their first home was the studio house, which Kolb had added a sleeping wing in 1959. In the following years he realized the single-family houses Schuppisser in Humlikon (1963–1966) and Vollenweider in Zufikon (1967), the Galvanische Anstalt Walt in Fällanden (1966/67) and the apartment house Wallisellen (1961 and 1968) and designed a new furniture collection . A number of projects remained on paper: from the design of a house for the family of his sister Susi Iff-Kolb to the conversion of a rustico in Intragna (1967) for H. Elmendorff and two studio house projects for the artist Bill Slattery and his wife Helga to Competitions for the opera in Baghdad (1962) and the city theater in Zurich (1963) as well as the planning of a development for the Munot district in Schaffhausen (1969).
He did not make a living as an architect, but as the inventor of the standard spiral staircase, for which he received the patent in 1965. It was the inherent variability of the system that made the staircase a best seller - as a space-saving vertical connection in a single-family house, as an escape staircase on the factory site and as a step up the diving tower in the swimming pool (e.g. Weiermatt, Köniz). As a focal point, Kolb designed the stairs in his own house in Wermatswil (1980–1982) in the Zurich Oberland - his manifesto and legacy.
In the cylindrical glass house, themes that Kolb dealt with throughout his life merge: organic spatial design and industrial materialization, embedding in nature in Japanese style and the ecological use of energy, borrowing from Richard Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion House and the ancient round temple.
It is Kolb's “Musée Sentimental” à la Daniel Spoerri (1979), his Merzbau in the spirit of Kurt Schwitters . At the same time, the villa was associated with a UFO in a film documentary in 2006 and proclaimed a potential setting for James Bond films. It became a Mecca for those interested in architecture and in 2012 was classified as a protected object of regional importance by the Zurich Cantonal Monument Preservation. However, her architect did not experience that anymore. In the 1990s, the non-smoker Otto Kolb fell ill with lung cancer, which he succumbed to on December 12, 1996.
In June / July 2016 an exhibition of his works will take place in the Uster town hall.
Buildings and projects (selection)
- Atelierhaus, Brüttisellen Zurich, 1944/45 and 1959
- Bachelor house, Wildhaus St. Gallen, around 1948, project
- Seneca Grill Inc. , Chicago, Illinois, 1949
- Horner House , Beverly Shores (Indiana), 1948-50
- Apartment House, Hudson Heights New Jersey, 1956, project
- Clark House Plainfield, New Jersey, 1953-57
- Tennant House Plainfield, New Jersey, 1957
- Botway House Westport (Connecticut), 1956-58
- Solotorovsky House Plainfield, New Jersey, 1954
- Apartment block OKA Wallisellen (Zurich), 1960/61
- Apartment house Brissago (Ticino), 1961, project
- Schuppisser Humlikon House (Zurich), 1963/64
- Galvanische Anstalt Walt Fällanden (Zurich), 1966/67
- Vollenweider house in Zufikon (Aargau), 1964–68
- Munotquartier Schaffhausen, 1970, project
- Villa Kolb Wermatswil (Zurich), 1980–82
literature
- Rahel Hartmann Schweizer: Otto Kolb - architect and designer. gta Verlag , Zurich 2013, ISBN 978-3-85676-315-2
Individual evidence
Web links
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Kolb, Otto |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Swiss architect |
| DATE OF BIRTH | November 5, 1921 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Schaffhausen |
| DATE OF DEATH | December 12, 1996 |
| Place of death | Uster |