Philipp Tolziner

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Philipp Tolziner ( Russian Филипп Тольцинер ; born October 16, 1906 in Munich , † May 1, 1996 in Moscow ) was a German- Soviet architect .

Life

Tolziner, son of a Jewish - Polish basket maker , learned to build wicker furniture in his father's small shop in Munich-Schwabing . In the Jewish youth movement Blau-Weiß he became a Zionist and a socialist . In 1924 he traveled to Tel Aviv-Jaffa to work in the basket-making workshops of a blue-and-white cooperative . However, he fell ill with typhus , so that he had to return to Munich.

1927–1930 Tolziner studied architecture with Hannes Meyer and Hans Wittwer at the Bauhaus Dessau . He was friends with Tibor Weiner and came into contact with communist fellow students . In 1928 he developed a terraced house project for Tel Aviv as a student project . Hannes Meyer's group of young architects implemented the Törten settlement project for the construction of the Dessau-Törten arcade houses , with Tolziner being one of the site managers. Five multi-storey residential buildings with hollow clinker bricks, reinforced concrete beams and steel windows with 18 apartments for four people each, which were handed over in the summer of 1930, were built. Tolziner also planned an expansion of the Törten settlement for Hannes Meyer by building the steel houses developed by Georg Muche and Richard Paulick , but this was no longer carried out. Tolziner completed his studies in the summer of 1930 when Hannes Meyer was dismissed for political reasons, so that Tolziner's Bauhaus diploma was signed by the new director Mies van der Rohe . Tolziner first worked in Berlin with Fred Forbát .

In 1931 Tolziner received an offer from Hannes Meyer to work with him in Moscow on the industrialization of the Soviet Union as part of the five-year plan . Tolziner accepted the invitation and became a member of Meyer's Bauhäusler Brigade Rotfront in Moscow, which also included René Mensch, Konrad Püschel , Tibor Weiner and the communists Klaus Meumann, Béla Scheffler and Antonin Urban. This Meyer Brigade was given the task of developing standardized school buildings that could be produced on an assembly line using local materials. The work of the brigade was not very successful because on the one hand there was strong competition from Russian architects and on the other hand Stalin ordered the transition to national building forms .

Tolziner now worked in the planning office for urban development (Gorstroiprojekt) under the direction of Hans Schmidt on the residential development in Orsk . When Stalin expelled the foreign specialists in 1936, Tolziner was unable to return to Germany after Hitler came to power because of his Jewish origins (like his communist Bauhaus friends) , so he and his friends applied for Soviet citizenship. In 1938, Tolziner, Meumann, Urban and Scheffler were arrested and charged with espionage during the Stalin purges . Tolziner confessed to torture, betrayed two friends he believed out of the country, and was sentenced to ten years in a labor camp. In the camp near Solikamsk , he designed log houses alongside the logging work. After his release in 1947, he stayed in Solikamsk, married a Russian woman and worked for the city's chief architect.

After the founding of the GDR , Tolziner asked the director of the GDR Building Academy Kurt Liebknecht and Edmund Collein , both of whom he knew from his time in Moscow, for help with a job in the GDR. In 1951 Tolziner moved to the Perm production and restoration workshop for monuments and developed a method for the restoration and reconstruction of ancient Russian sacred buildings on the basis of building surveys and analyzes of the historical building fabric. To this end, he developed a plan for Solikamsk with protection zones for the architectural monuments . In 1961 he returned to his previous job at the Institute for Urban Development in Moscow and built standard apartment blocks in Vladivostok .

In 1967 Tolziner retired. Only after Hannes Meyer's 100th birthday did his Bauhaus colleagues visit him in Moscow, whereupon he came to lectures in Berlin, Frankfurt am Main , Munich and Weimar . Despite his blindness, he repeatedly took the train to the Berlin Bauhaus archive, to which he gave his documents.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Astrid Volpert: A name that has disappeared returns . (accessed on November 19, 2015)
  2. ^ Bauhaus Dessau: The Steel House by Georg Muche and Richard Paulick (accessed February 27, 2016).
  3. ↑ a b c d e Central database of bequests in the Federal Archives: Tolziner, Philipp (1906–1996) (accessed on February 27, 2016).
personal data
SURNAME Tolziner, Philipp
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Тольцинер, Филипп (Russian)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Soviet architect
DATE OF BIRTH October 16, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Munich
DATE OF DEATH May 1, 1996
Place of death Moscow