Siegfried Reitz

Siegfried Reitz (born January 22, 1910 in Lennep , Rhine Province ; † 1999 ) was a German architect and urban planner .

Life

After elementary school, Reitz worked in the architecture office of the government master builder Ernst Stahl in Düsseldorf . In the summer of 1926 and 1927, he completed an internship at the construction company Josef Zingraf und Sohn, also in Düsseldorf. He perfected his schooling by attending evening school. After he had passed his matriculation examination at the provincial school college in Krefeld in 1929 , he began to study architecture in the summer semester of 1929 at the RWTH Aachen University, where he passed his intermediate diploma with distinction in 1930. In the 1930 summer semester, he moved to the Technical University of Munich . There he joined the National Socialist German Workers' Party on September 1, 1931 . During the lecture-free time he worked as a technical assistant in Duisburg with the architect Hermann Rieck and again in Düsseldorf with Ernst Stahl. He graduated from the Technical University of Stuttgart in 1933 with a degree from his studies, which made him a representative of homeland security architecture .

From January to May 1934, Reitz was briefly employed at the new building department of the city of Remscheid , before he returned to RWTH Aachen University the following year to become a full-time assistant to the university professor and dean René von Schöfer at the chair there. In the time that followed, he worked on the Wurmrevier settlement works and participated with von Schöfer, the founder of the Aachen School , in the redevelopment of Peterstrasse in Aachen. In 1938 he took part in a study trip to Denmark and Sweden under the direction of RWTH teacher Hans Mehrtens . In 1938 or 1939 Reitz took over the management of the special planning office of the city of Aachen , which had been set up to connect the Reichsautobahn Aachen – Cologne (today federal autobahn 544 ) on Jülicher Strasse to the urban traffic and urban area of ​​Aachen. This activity ended in March 1940 when Reitz was called up for military service. After he was stationed as an infantryman in Quedlinburg until October 1940 , he was used in various ranks at an army construction site in Oslo until the end of World War II . With the surrender, Reitz was first interned in a POW camp in Norway and transferred to a camp in France in the summer of 1945, where he stayed until October 1947.

Building of the Kreissparkasse Aachen

House of Coal

Released from captivity, von Schöfer employed him in his architectural office. At his own expense, he also used him as an assistant at his RWTH chair. With the support of Schöfers and the advocacy of RWTH teacher Anton Wendling , Reitz was found fit for appointment by the denazification committee of the Aachen district in the summer of 1948 and was able to work as a scheduled assistant at Schöfers' chair on November 1, 1948. Reitz gave up this position on November 31, 1950, after opening and building up his own architecture office in Laurensberg near Aachen, parallel to his university activities and collaboration on Schöfers' projects . During this time he won 2nd prize in the competition for the construction of the new Erkelenz grammar school (1949) and 1st prize in the competition for the construction of the elementary school in Hückelhoven - Ratheim . Reitz, who now designed in the forms of post-war modernism , quickly gained a reputation as a specialist in school buildings in the 1950s, but he also worked on other construction tasks. In 1951 he won the competition to build a TBC hospital in Aachen. In 1952 he built a morgue in Laurensberg, and in 1953 the new building of the Kreissparkasse Aachen on Friedrich-Wilhelm-Platz. In 1964 Reitz designed the House of Coal as the administrative headquarters of the Eschweiler Mining Association on Ursulinenstrasse, on the historic site of the Roman Büchelthermen .

Around 1950 Reitz began with urban planning tasks, especially land use planning , by developing master plans for Laurensberg (around 1951), probably also Richterich , and Heinsberg (from 1952) . For Hückelhoven he took on the task of revising the master plan around 1958, and also worked out "partial implementation plans" for individual areas of this city. The revision of Aldenhoven's master plan also fell during this time, all of which were planning tasks that Reitz took over for communities in the successor to Schöfers. Together with the architect and town planner Peter Poelzig , Reitz designed the miners' satellite town in Alsdorf - Ofden in 1952 , which was financed with funds from the Marshall Plan . Both of them repeated their cooperation in 1954 when planning an MSA settlement in Dortmund - Derne . A special planning task at the beginning of the 1950s was the construction of a "clearing settlement" in Vossenack , an urban and landscape planning design task that Reitz worked on with the garden architect Carl Ludwig Schreiber .

literature

• Moritz Wild: The Aachen architect Siegfried Reitz - From homeland security to post-war modernism . In: Landschaftsverband Rheinland (Hrsg.): Preservation of monuments in the Rhineland . 35th volume (2018), No. 3, pp. 111–117.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Ulrich Kalkmann: The Technical University of Aachen in the Third Reich (1933-1945) . Wissenschaftsverlag Mainz, Aachen 2003, ISBN 3-86130-181-4 , p. 375, footnote 3
2. ↑ Baumeister , 62nd year (1965), p. 962 ff.
3. ^ Siegfried Reitz: The large housing estate as an element of the growing city . In: Helmut Eckert (Hrsg.): Alsdorf - growing city . 1956, p. 36
4. ↑ Heinz-Gerd Karhausen: Miners' housing in the Aachen and South Limburg coal areas, a comparison 1875-1975 . Dissertation, RWTH Aachen, 2011, p. 76 ( PDF )
5. ^ Alois Giefer , Franz Sales Meyer , Joachim Beinlich: Planning and building in the new Germany . Westdeutscher Verlag, Cologne and Opladen 1960, p. 559