Peter Koller (architect)

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Special cancellation for the 70th anniversary of the founding of the city of Wolfsburg with a picture of the city planner Peter Koller and the central building in Steimker Berg
tomb
Grave slab

Peter Koller (born May 7, 1907 in Vienna ; † March 2, 1996 in Wolfsburg ) was an Austrian - German architect and urban planner who played a key role in the planning and construction of the city of Wolfsburg.

Life

Koller's ancestors come from Carinthia , his father was a dentist in Vienna. He was born there on May 7, 1907 and also spent his school days.

Peter Koller studied at the Technical University of Vienna from 1925 to 1928 , then switched to the Technical University of Berlin for a winter semester before returning to Vienna and taking the main diploma examination in architecture . He then completed another year of studies in Berlin in 1929, where he met Albert Speer .

Koller worked in Germany for two years before returning to Austria in 1931. Since 1931 Koller belonged to the NSDAP. From 1933 onwards, Koller worked as an architect for various German authorities, including the Reichsheimstättenamt, with only brief interruptions .

At the end of 1937 he was entrusted with the planning of the city ​​of the KdF car by the Society for the Preparation of the German Volkswagen . In the spring of 1938 he presented the draft, which, after a few changes in favor of Adolf Hitler's design wishes, became the basis for the construction of the new city. Koller was appointed head of the city construction office by General Building Inspector Speer and held this position until 1942, when construction work largely came to a standstill due to the Second World War . He volunteered for the Wehrmacht and on December 24, 1943 , as a private , was taken east of the Dnieper into Soviet captivity , from which he was released in November 1945.

He exemplifies a group of architects who did not have to be seduced by National Socialism because they agreed with Hitler's goals and ideas long before he came to power . In the Nazi state, they had almost unlimited power to implement their plans.

Koller's NSDAP membership number was still six digits long and read: 394.167. He was one of the "old party comrades" and had been involved in the Bundestag youth at a young age. He had come into contact with Wilhelm Kotzde-Kottenrodt , who in 1920 had founded the national youth organization “ Adler und Falken ”. In 1954, Koller wrote to a former classmate with whom he had been to the Schottengymnasium in Vienna about his political attitudes as a teenager and young adult : “You will remember that as a boy I was strictly national, as they said, and I was I was the only so-called swastika in our class. Of course, I later joined the party, not only for practical or political reasons, but because my whole life, my whole upbringing, pushed for it and I also went through all these things from the beginning and experienced all this development and degeneration of this worldview, which caused such a tremendous catastrophe all over the world. "

After the end of the war, Koller never missed an opportunity to portray himself as an “apolitical” urban planner. If this does not succeed, reference was made to the change from "Saul" to "Paul". As the architect of two Catholic churches in Wolfsburg in the post-war period, he claimed to have changed his personal attitude. In addition, he sought to influence the image of himself and his work in post-war Germany in a variety of ways. He wrote extensive letters to the editor when he disliked newspaper articles and the judgments expressed in them about “his life's work” - the city of Wolfsburg. In the evaluation of the correspondence in his estate, however, attempts to revive old contacts, to re-network and to reposition themselves in the young Federal Republic are evident.

Until 1948 Peter Koller worked in the architecture office of his former colleague Titus Taeschner and then went into business for himself. In the following years he was mainly entrusted with projects in Wolfsburg and the surrounding area. In 1955 he was appointed city planning officer of Wolfsburg and in this position headed further urban development until he was appointed full professor at the Technical University of Berlin in 1960 .

In 1972 Koller retired to a mountain farm near Arriach (Austria), but kept an apartment in the Steimker Berg district of Wolfsburg , where he died on March 2, 1996.

Koller was born in 1931 with Margarete. Lehky (1909–1997) married and had nine children. His grave in the forest cemetery in Wolfsburg has been preserved to this day. His son Peter Koller also worked as an architect in Wolfsburg, among other things he designed the Church of St. Heinrich (Wolfsburg) .

Awards

Realizations

Residential houses on Steimker Berg

literature

  • Nicole Froberg: “A man of speech and pen”. Peter Koller, architect and urban planner of Wolfsburg. Series: Texts on the history of Wolfsburg, 31. City of Wolfsburg, 2007 (City Archives).
  • this: Wolfsburg. Use of high quality architecture as a trademark of a city. In: BDA in Lower Saxony , BdA, Yearbook 2006, Hanover. Pp. 49-57.
  • this: The inventor of the city - Portrait: Peter Koller (1907-1996). In: Christoph Stölzl (Ed.): The Wolfsburg Saga . Theiss, Stuttgart 2008, ISBN 978-3-8062-2216-6 . Pp. 70-73.
  • Marcel Glaser: History politics as a relief strategy: The architect Peter Koller in Wolfsburg. In: Forum Stadt 43 (2016), pp. 3–18.
  • ders .: Tacit learning processes. The architect Peter Koller and National Socialism. In: The archive. Newspaper for Wolfsburg City History 3 (2018), 1, pp. 4–6. (available online https://www.wolfsburg.de/~/media/wolfsburg/statistik_daten_ffekten/izs/das-archiv/dasarchiv_februar_2018_final_1.pdf?la=de-DE )
  • ders., Manfred Grieger : The "City of the KdF-Wagons near Fallersleben". A model room of the National Socialist national community? In: Winfried Suss, Malte Thießen (Ed.): Cities in National Socialism. Urban spaces and social orders (BGNS, vol. 33), Göttingen 2017, pp. 127–150.
  • Alex Koschel: Peter Koller is planning the city in the country. In: Seniors Journal Wolfsburg. Edition 1/2018, Braunschweig 2018, p. 4.

Web links

Commons : Peter Koller  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

References and comments

  1. ↑ a b PhD project by Marcel Glaser zu Koller at the University of Kassel , accessed on June 29, 2016
  2. ↑ Annette Harth, Ulfert Herlyn, Gitta Scheller, Wulf Tessin: City as an experience. Wolfsburg: on the importance of major projects for urban culture. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2009, ISBN 353116984X , p. 23. Readable in online shops
  3. ↑ City Archives Wolfsburg, S 11/75
  4. ↑ Workshop at the Alvar-Aalto-Kulturhaus: Well-kept secrets or tacitly accepted certainties? - NSDAP membership and continuities in the Volkswagen factory and in the city of Wolfsburg after 1945 , November 29, 2012
  5. ^ Article by his successor Sigurd Trommer in the exhibition catalog of the DHM in Berlin , accessed on June 29, 2016
  6. ↑ scroll down. Text accompanying the exhibition in the Sprengel Museum until March 2013. According to dsb., When sentiment becomes form. A collection of essays on post-war architecture in the FRG. Scriptor, Leipzig 2012, ISBN 3940064564 .
personal data
SURNAME Koller, Peter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian-German architect and city planner
DATE OF BIRTH May 7, 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH March 2, 1996
Place of death Wolfsburg