Philipp Oswalt

Philipp Oswalt (born June 29, 1964 in Frankfurt am Main ) is a German architect and professor of architectural theory and design at the University of Kassel .

family

Oswalt is a son of the architect Alfred Oswalt (1910–1992), a great-grandson of the Frankfurt building contractor and city councilor Philipp Holzmann (1836–1904). Alfred Oswalt was arrested as a member of a German-Dutch resistance group in October 1944 and imprisoned in Berlin-Plötzensee prison. He escaped conviction by the People's Court in a bombing raid on February 3, 1945, during which the People's Court building was destroyed. After moving to Bayreuth, it was liberated in April 1945 when American troops marched in. On his mother's side, Philipp Oswalt is a grandson of the economist Walter Eucken and the writer Edith Eucken-Erdsiek . He is married to the historian and journalist Stefanie Oswalt and has three children.

Career

In the early 1980s, Oswalt was involved in the citizens' initiative against the West Runway , in the peace movement and with the Greens . 1982–1984 he was a board member and press spokesman for the Green Party in Frankfurt, and while studying in Freiburg in 1984 he worked on the editorial team of Radio Free Dreyeckland . He then studied architecture from 1984 to 1988 at the Technical University of Berlin and the Berlin University of the Arts . From 1988 to 1994 he was editor of the architecture magazine Arch + . In 1996/97 Oswalt worked in Rem Koolhaas ' OMA office , then he worked in the MVRDV office for the conceptual design of the Dutch pavilion at Expo 2000 .

With his own office, founded in 1998, he won, among other things, first prize in the competition for the redesign of the memorial of the former Ravensbrück women's concentration camp . From 2002 to 2008 he realized the international research and exhibition project Shrinking Cities for the German Federal Cultural Foundation .

From 2000 to 2002 Oswalt was visiting professor at the Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus . Since 2006 he has held the professorship for architectural theory and design at the University of Kassel. From March 2009 to March 2014 he was director of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation and has been an Associated Investigator at the Cluster of Excellence Image-Knowledge-Design at the Humboldt University in Berlin since 2012 on the topics of Anthropocene cuisine and Bauhaus figurative marks.

Positions

Oswalt is considered a controversial actor in architectural debates, among other things as one of " the most dogged opponents of the new Berlin City Palace ". However, he did not reject a new urban design at the site of the earlier castle, but warned against a historicizing reconstruction, which "should primarily serve to generate new images ". He criticized a reconstruction in the cubature of the former city palace and a reconstruction of the baroque facade. In this context, he led legal disputes with the Friends of the Berlin Palace and its chairman Wilhelm von Boddien . Oswalt had repeatedly criticized the association for opaque business conduct and improper handling of donations. In the end, the Berlin regional court agreed that Oswalt was right in the dispute.

On the other hand, he was as director of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation , the pump room of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and some master houses of Walter Gropius rebuild. It was important to him "that the masters' houses are already a kind of reconstruction and that the historical interiors can also be reproduced".

In the Berlin architectural dispute of the 1990s, Oswalt first got involved in 1994 by criticizing the concepts of a “Berlin architecture” and a “Prussian style”. In 2000 the book Berlin - Stadt ohne Form. Strategies of a different architecture his own interpretation of the identity and shape of the city of Berlin. Using nine themes, he presented Berlin as a city that has essentially been shaped by conflicting forces and ideologies since the beginning of modernity in the 19th century.

Following on from this, he and Klaus Overmeyer developed the European research project Urban Catalyst , which both led from 2001 to 2003. Part of the project was a feasibility study for the cultural interim use of the Palace of the Republic (with Philipp Misselwitz), which led to the establishment of the ZwischenPalastNutzen initiative. After lengthy debates and negotiations, the Volkspalast 2004 project, which Oswalt curated together with Amelie Deuflhard and Matthias Lilienthal, was finally implemented in the ruins of the Palace of the Republic.

In the following period, Philipp Oswalt and various partners presented several alternative plans for dealing with the ruins of the Palace of the Republic and the palace area, most recently in the open space competition in 2012 with the work Active Reconstructions - The Berlin Palace Environment as a historical drama .

Trinkhalle (reconstructed 2013)

House Moholy-Nagy / Feininger (reconstructed 2014)

House Gropius (reconstructed 2014)

Another focus of Oswalt's work is dealing with shrinking cities. In 2001 he and Klaus Overmeyer presented the study Less is more. Experimental urban redevelopment in East Germany for the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, which in the following year led to the establishment of the Saxony-Anhalt International Building Exhibition 2010. Together with his office and several partners, he realized the international research and exhibition project Shrinking Cities for the German Federal Cultural Foundation from 2002 to 2008, which explored the phenomenon in North America, Europe and Asia in an interdisciplinary manner and also dealt with possible options for action.

As the successor to Omar Akbar and head of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation from 2009 to 2014, Oswalt opened the International Building Exhibition Urban Redevelopment Saxony-Anhalt 2010 . He promoted Bauhaus tourism, cultivated the Bauhaus myth as well as the classic avant-garde in the tradition of controversy, and, in contrast to his predecessor Akbar, advocated the reconstruction of the director's villa Gropius, which was destroyed in the war, and the Moholy-Nagy semi-detached house of the Dessau Masters' Houses (Bruno Fioretti Marquez Architects Berlin) and the drinking hall by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe , relaunched the Bauhaus magazine after 80 years , published important historical writings such as Siegfried Ebeling's Space as Membrane and Laslo Moholy-Nagy Seeing in Motion (German translation of Vision in Motion ) and supplemented the educational program of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation with fellowships, artist in residence and postgraduate studies.

In conflict over the location of the new museum building proposed and requested by him in 2009, the Chairman of the Board of Trustees, Minister Stephan Dorgerloh (SPD) , decided to fill the position after the first term of five years, which led to international criticism. The Foundation's Scientific Advisory Board resigned in protest. The media consistently criticized the decision. " In fact, the minister of culture seems to see the director at the Bauhaus as a subordinate of his sovereign power, " wrote Ronald Berg in the daily newspaper. The parliamentary group of the left in the state parliament spoke of an “outrageous process”. "Anyone who is uncomfortable and who takes their own positions openly has to leave Saxony-Anhalt, regardless of whether they are a minister, state secretary or the director of the Bauhaus Philipp Oswalt Foundation," said Stefan Gebhardt , who was spokesman for cultural and media policy at the time . In the aftermath, deputy member of the Board of Trustees Gunnar Schellenberger also criticized the non-renewal of Oswalt's contract.

After leaving the foundation, he and his partners founded the “projekt bauhaus” initiative, which since 2015 has been dedicated to the potential of the Bauhaus for the present. Philipp Oswalt is also researching the past and present of the Bauhaus at the Humboldt University in Berlin (Bauhaus image brand project) and the University of Kassel (Hannes Meyer arcade houses).

In December 2016, Oswalt resigned from the Protestant church in protest against the reconstruction of the Potsdam Garrison Church. In a letter to the Berlin superintendent Ulrike Trautwein , he accused the church, in his opinion of being “ too closely connected to the state ”, with “ false statements about its own church history ” and wrote: “ The idea of peace and reconciliation is not only instrumentalized, it is also counteracted. Because with the project one consciously accepts to cause strife in town and church. "

Fonts (selection)

Philipp Oswalt (Ed.), With the collaboration of Susanne Rexroth: Well-tempered Architecture , CF Müller, Heidelberg 1994, ISBN 978-3-7880-7533-0 . Awarded the prize of the German environmental foundation "Reading for the Environment"

Philipp Oswalt for the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation (ed.): Lázló Moholy-Nagy: Seeing in motion. (German edition of the book Vision in Motion ) Spector Books, Leipzig 2014, ISBN 978-3-944669-32-8 . Awarded the German Photo Book Prize Silver 2015.

Philipp Oswalt: Berlin - city without form, strategies of a different architecture. Prestel, Munich 2000, ISBN 978-3-7913-2440-1 , Italian edition Berlin - Citta senza Forma , 2006 Meltemi

Philipp Oswalt (Ed.): Shrinking Cities, Volume 1. International Investigation. Hatje Cantz 2004, ISBN 978-3-7757-1481-5 , English edition Ostfildern 2005, Chinese edition Shanghai 2012 (Tonji University Press)

Philipp Oswalt (Ed.): Shrinking Cities, Volume 2. Concepts of action. Hatje Cantz, 2005, English edition 2006.

Philipp Misselwitz, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Philipp Oswalt (Eds.): Fun Palace 200X. The Berlin Palace Square. Demolition, new building or green field? Martin Schmitz Verlag, Berlin 2005, ISBN 978-3-927795-35-8 .

Philipp Oswalt and Tim Rieniets (eds.): Atlas of Shrinking Cities / Atlas of Shrinking Cities. Hatje Cantz 2006, (German / English), ISBN 978-3-7757-1714-4 . Awarded as one of the »Most Beautiful Swiss Books« 2006.

Philipp Oswalt (Ed.): Bauhaus dispute 1919-2009. Controversies and adversaries. Hatje Cantz 2009, ISBN 978-3-7757-2454-8 , English edition 2010.

Philipp Misselwitz, Philipp Oswalt, Klaus Overmeyer (eds.): Urban Catalyst: Developing the city with temporary uses . Actar 2011, ISBN 978-3-86922-244-8 , English edition: ISBN 978-3-86922-261-5 .

Kerstin Faber, Philipp Oswalt (Hrsg.): Space pioneers in rural areas - New ways of public services. Spector Books, Leipzig 2013, ISBN 978-3-940064-58-5 .

Philipp Oswalt for the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation (ed.): Dessau 1945: Modernism destroyed. Spector Books, Leipzig 2014, ISBN 978-3-944669-57-1 , edition of the bpb ISBN 978-3-8389-0453-5 .

Guest editor of the Arch + magazine, No. 222, March 2016: Can design change society? project bauhaus issue 1

Thomas Flierl , Philipp Oswalt (Ed.): In the dispute of the interpretations: Conflicting Interpretation. Hannes Meyer and the Bauhaus. Spector Books, Leipzig 2018, ISBN 978-3959051507

Philipp Oswalt (ed.): Hannes Meyer's new Bauhaus teaching: From Dessau to Mexico. Birkhäuser, Berlin 2019, ISBN 978-3-035617-24-5 .

Birgit Joos, Philipp Oswalt, Daniel Tyradellis (eds.): Bauhaus | documenta. Vision and brand. Leipzig 2019, ISBN 978-3-959052-99-3

Philipp Oswalt: Bauhaus brand 1919-2019. The victory of the iconic shape over use . Scheidegger & Spiess Verlag, Zurich 2019, ISBN 978-3-85881-620-7 .