Stuttgart School (architecture)
The Stuttgart School is the name given to styles in architecture that were taught and represented by the architecture department of the Technical University of Stuttgart . The “first” Stuttgart School is related to the Dutch Delft School , which is part of the traditionalist architectural trend.
The best-known representatives of the "first" Stuttgart school between the two world wars were Paul Schmitthenner , professor of building construction and design from 1918, and Paul Bonatz , known for his designs for the Stuttgart main station and the barrages on the Neckar, as well as Wilhelm Tiedje , Heinz Wetzel , Martin Elsaesser , Carl Kersten and Hugo Keuerleber .
This school rejected historicism , but still represented a classic and conservative style of construction. The shape of a building should result from the construction of a material and work-appropriate construction, carried out in craft traditions and with natural materials. The architects could not make friends with the architectural concept of the Bauhaus, which was reflected, for example, in the severe criticism of the Weißenhofsiedlung . As a counter-model to the Weißenhofsiedlung, several members of the group built the Kochhofsiedlung in Stuttgart in 1933 .
After 1945 there was talk of the “second” Stuttgart school, represented by the generation around Richard Döcker , Rolf Gutbrod , Rolf Gutbier and Ludwig Schweizer , later Hans Kammerer , Peter C. von Seidlein , Jürgen Joedicke and Klaus Humpert . However, the biographies of some of the architects at the second Stuttgart school show that the student body does not mean seamlessly continuing the tradition of the technical university. With Hans Volkart , Rolf Gutbier (1903–1992), Werner Gabriel (1906–1998), Günter Wilhelm (1908–2004), Paul Stohrer and Rolf Gutbrod (1910–1999) there are personalities who asserted themselves independently and later themselves in academically worked in Stuttgart. All of them studied at the Technical University, were assistants to Paul Bonatz or worked in his office. But each of these master builders defined an individual path for a second modernism in the period after 1945. This development can be clearly traced in the work of Hans Volkart. While his early buildings, such as the Hedelfinger Kreuzkirche from 1929, are still committed to the New Building, he first falls back on American models with the Stuttgart University Library from 1961: open shelves, gallery floors and a free support grid are the libraries from Washington and Philadelphia borrowed which he had visited during a research trip. With the playhouse on Eckensee in the Upper Palace Gardens, he finally succeeded in finding a free form in 1962 with a honeycomb basic figure for the two-story foyer with gallery. The American model can also be felt in Werner Gabriel's late work.
Web links
literature
- Hammerbacher, Valerie / Krämer, Anja: Stuttgart Architecture of the 20th and 21st Century: 22 City Walks, Karlsruhe 2013, ISBN 978-3765086120