Peter Feile
Peter Feile (born January 12, 1899 in Würzburg , † October 22, 1972 in Bad Tölz ) was a German architect and a representative of " New Building ".
life and work
Peter Feile was born on January 12, 1899 in Würzburg as the second child of the sculptor and restorer Josef Feile. In 1905 he moved with his family to Markelsheim and attended the New Gymnasium in Würzburg. The High School was adopted him in 1917 due to the confiscation for military service. After the end of the war he studied art history at the university in his hometown , but dropped out to study interior design at the Stuttgart School of Applied Arts . After stops in Düsseldorf and 1923/1924 in Berlin (in Carl Stahl-Urach's office ), Feile worked in Josef Hoffmann's studio in Vienna from 1924 to 1926 . It was there that he met Walter Loos , who was six years his junior . Both developed a keen interest in the ideas of a new architecture with a strongly functional character, which after the end of the First World War was consciously different from the historicism of the 19th century, later became known under the term " New Building " or "Modern Architecture" and in terms of architectural history " New Objectivity " is assigned. Among other things, Feile is said to have worked on the Austrian exhibition pavilion at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et industriels moderne 1925 in Paris .
In 1926, Feile returned to Würzburg, set up his first architectural office in the “Kontorhaus Zentral” (Schönbornstrasse 8) and tried to realize a first building project for a typesetter on his property at Leutfresserweg 6 in the new style. The building application for the so-called “roofless house” caused heated discussions at the meeting of the Würzburg city council on August 4, 1927, as it was about the first flat-roofed house to be built in Bavaria . Although the city council voted in favor of the project with a narrow majority, the planning failed due to the veto of the government of Lower Franconia and Aschaffenburg, which qualified the unusual building as a disturbing "foreign body" due to its proximity to the Marienberg Fortress , which "in contrast to the local building ethos" stand The house was finally given a steep hipped roof. The asymmetrical window design was fundamentally changed and replaced by a symmetrical row of standing rectangular windows. The house is still there in this form.
Also known is a plan by Feile from May 1927 for the conversion or replacement of the Café Dauch at Dominikanerplatz 1 in Würzburg, which shows a multi-storey, almost unstructured, cube-shaped flat roof building with a perforated facade. However, the planning failed to take account of the defining surrounding development and was withdrawn by Feile as hopeless on May 21, 1927.
In 1927, Feile took part in the Werkbund exhibition “The Apartment” with the “ Siedlung am Weißenhof ” in Stuttgart , which is considered a milestone in New Building.
Feile achieved his first own success in 1928 with the semi-detached house at Keesburgstrasse 29 / 29a in the Würzburg district of the same name. Here, a flat-roof semi-detached house in the “New Building” style could be built on the property of his future father-in-law and owner of a plastering business, without having to fear any conflicts with the integration into the surrounding area. Immediately after completion, the owner of a department store in Würzburg bought a semi-detached house, who assigned the color scheme to the painter Carl Grossberg . Feile obtained the other half from his family himself.
The strong interest that the public presentation of the new, for Würzburg completely unfamiliar building aroused in October 1928, the positive appreciation by the art historian Werner Burmeister on October 2, 1928 in the "Würzburger Generalanzeiger" as well as the presentation by the art historian Justus Bier in the architecture journal “ Master builders ” in March 1929 contributed to Feile's decision to implement a housing estate project with 27 single-family and two semi-detached houses that same year together with his colleague from his Viennese years, Walter Loos.
For this purpose, Feile founded the "Baugesellschaft Lerchenhain mbH" and shared management with a member of the company. In July 1929, the city of Würzburg was able to acquire an area of around 20,000 m² in the Frauenland district , for which Feile prepared a development plan , which, in its version of August 1929, provided for a condensed development with 31 so-called type houses on all plots of around 400 m². However, the city of Würzburg, as the owner of the planning authority, insisted on reducing the number of building units in favor of a more relaxed development, so that the development plan finally approved in November 1929 in the version of October 1929 only provided for 22 houses and should be implemented within a five-year period. In 1929/1930, the construction company built three model houses of different sizes in Lerchenhain, which branches off from Keesburgstrasse . What all house types had in common was the new style, which was completely different from conventional construction. Simple cubic forms in different variations, smooth wall surfaces, white coloring, window development from the inside out and above all the flat roofs formed the structural characteristics of the new houses. Hollow pumice blocks, pumice board walls, concrete and solid ceilings with reinforced concrete beams were used as building materials .
The public presentation of the model houses from September 17, 1930 to October 1, 1930 saw an unexpectedly large number of visitors with a corresponding response in the local press. The great interest in visiting these completely different “white houses” was not followed by a corresponding interest in buying, so that Feile planned other types of houses, but could not realize any more buildings. Ultimately, it stayed with the three model houses.
In 1930, Feile set up his architecture office as the first tenant on the sixth floor of Würzburg's first high-rise (architects Christoph Mayer and Franz Kleinsteuber ) at Augustinerstraße 9. Here he traded for the first time as an architect DWB ( Deutscher Werkbund ) in a building that can be considered a successful compromise between modern construction and the requirements of a historic old town. The choice of this building as the seat of his architecture office was certainly to be understood as a programmatic one. Due to the financial failure of his designed flat-roof houses, however, it was not possible for him to keep the office space for long, so that he had to leave it again at the end of 1931.
Feile planned further flat roof houses in Würzburg on a private contract. The buildings Steubenstrasse 4-6 and Judenbühlweg 28 have been preserved.
The building convictions dictated by the new rulers in Germany since 1933 increasingly had an impact in Würzburg. New building, especially in the form of the Bauhaus , has now been disqualified as "cultural Bolshevik" - at least in the area of residential construction . The development plan for the Lerchenhainsiedlung was redesigned in February 1935 and the main features of the planning were massively changed. The buildings were set as single-storey gabled houses with a steep pitched roof in the now officially favored Heimatschutz style .
Feile, who had been a member of the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts since March 1936 and a member of the NSDAP since the end of 1937 , continued to build conventional buildings, such as the coffee mill houses in the Frauenland district, before he was drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1939 .
Released from captivity in 1945, he returned to his family, who had meanwhile moved to Bad Tölz . A professional ban in 1946 due to his party membership was only lifted after his denazification . Later, Feile built again in Würzburg, in addition to some renovations and the residential building Rottendorfer Straße 1, the Woolworth department store and the “Bavaria” and “CC” cinemas (both no longer available).
Peter Feile died on October 22, 1972 in Bad Tölz and was buried in the family grave. His name and work seemed to have already been forgotten when local and architectural historians remembered and drew attention to Peter Feile as an avant-garde architect of the 1920s in a retrospective in the Würzburger Kulturspeicher in 2003 and an exhibition in the Haus der Architektur in Munich in 2005 . The four remaining “white houses” have now been placed under monument protection.
Extract from the list of Bavarian monuments for the city of Würzburg:
- Keesburgstraße 29 / 29a : Double dwelling, three-storey stepped flat roof building, Neue Sachlichkeit, 1928 by Peter Feile
- Lerchenhain 2 : Villa, three-level terrace house with flat roof, New Objectivity, 1930 by Peter Feile
- Lerchenhain 4: Villa, three-story, cubic flat-roof building with terrace and staircase tower, Neue Sachlichkeit, 1930 by Peter Feile
- Lerchenhain 5: Villa, three-storey cubic flat roof building with terrace and roof attachment, Neue Sachlichkeit, 1930 by Peter Feile
literature
- Suse jewelry: From box houses and flat roofs. Peter Feile and the New Building in Würzburg, In: Tradition and Awakening. Würzburg and the art of the 1920s. Würzburg 2003, ISBN 3-8260-2763-9
- The lark grove settlement. Issue 2 of the Heiner Reitberger Foundation, Würzburg 2002, ISBN 3-87717-810-3
- Heiner Reitberger: The old Würzburg. Wuerzburg 1977
- Justus Bier : The Lerchenhain settlement in Würzburg by Peter Feile and Walter Loos. In: The builder . Issue 12, 1931
- Bettina Keß: Art life and cultural politics in the province. Würzburg 1919 to 1945. Publications on folklore and cultural history, Würzburg 2001
Web links
- Peter Feile. In: arch INFORM .
- Photo of the Lerchenhainsiedlung ( Memento from September 27, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | File, Peter |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German architect and representative of "New Building" |
| DATE OF BIRTH | January 12, 1899 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Wurzburg |
| DATE OF DEATH | October 22, 1972 |
| Place of death | Bad Tölz |