Walter Schwagenscheidt

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Walter Schwagenscheidt (born January 23, 1886 in Elberfeld ; † January 16, 1968 in Kronberg im Taunus ) was a German architect and town planner from the area around New Frankfurt .

Life

Walter Schwagenscheidt completed an apprenticeship as a construction technician before starting to study architecture at the Düsseldorf School of Applied Arts . He also spent parts of his studies at the technical universities in Stuttgart and Munich .

In the early 1920s he developed his Raumstadt concept while he was still working in Theodor Veil's planning office and was an assistant at his chair at RWTH Aachen University . At the end of the 1920s he worked for Ernst May in Frankfurt am Main , and from 1927 he taught at the technical training institutes in Offenbach (today's HfG Offenbach ).

The "Brigade May" in the Soviet Union (1931)

Schwagenscheidt went to the Soviet Union with May's group from 1930 to 1933 . Since the architecture of the New Objectivity found no approval in the Soviet Union and was rejected as formalistic, the majority of the members of the group returned to Germany. Schwagenscheidt settled in Kronberg im Taunus in 1934 and lived modestly on commissions for small houses and conversions.

In the early 1950s, Schwagenscheidt again worked as a lecturer in the architecture department at what is now the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Offenbach am Main . From 1952 he ran an architecture office with Tassilo Sittmann .

In 1959 Schwagenscheidt and Sittmann took part in the urban planning competition for Frankfurt's Northwest City and achieved third place. Since this design best corresponded to the ideas of the head of planning, Hans Kampffmeyer , it was selected for implementation.

Appreciation

Walter Schwagenscheidt's most important achievement is the Frankfurt Nordweststadt , in which he was able to realize ideas from his conception of a spatial city. Schwagenscheidt and Sittmann could not implement all of their ideas in the north-west of the city, so instead of their building designs, mostly standard houses of the participating, at that time non-profit housing associations were built. The ground plan of the north-west town, however, corresponds almost completely to the design by Schwagenscheidt and Sittmann.

Walter Schwagenscheidt and Tassilo Sittmann are responsible for the loose spatial arrangement of the houses in park-like green spaces with a network of footpaths free of intersections for car traffic, as well as the external access to traffic in the north-west of the city.

In November 1954, the design of the Franz Westhoff house, Mammolshain , Am Wacholderberg, was recognized as an “exemplary building in the state of Hesse” by a jury convened by the Association of German Architects and the Hessian Minister of Finance . The jury included the following architects: Werner Hebebrand , Konrad Rühl , Sep Ruf and Ernst Zinsser .

Honors

Fonts

  • Walter Schwagenscheidt: The space city. House building and town planning for young and old, for laypeople and what is called experts. Sketches with marginal notes on a confused subject. Lambert Schneider, Heidelberg 1949. Reprint: Bauhaus University, Weimar 2001.

literature

  • Deutscher Werkbund Hessen, Wilhelm E. Opatz (Ed.): Once praised and almost forgotten, modern churches in Frankfurt a. M. 1948-1973. Niggli-Verlag, Sulgen 2012, ISBN 978-3-7212-0842-9 .
  • Elke Sohn: On the concept of nature in urban concepts based on the contributions by Hans Bernhard Reichow, Walter Schwagenscheidt and Hans Scharoun on reconstruction after 1945. LIT-Verlag, Münster 2008, ISBN 978-3-8258-9748-2 .
  • Burghard Preusler: Walter Schwagenscheidt 1886–1968. Architectural ideals in the change of social figurations. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1985, ISBN 978-3-4210-2836-5 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Award for exemplary buildings in the state of Hesse on November 6, 1954 . In: The Hessian Minister of Finance (Hrsg.): State Gazette for the State of Hesse. 1955 no. 4 , p. 70 , point 75 ( online at the information system of the Hessian state parliament [PDF; 3.6 MB ]).
personal data
SURNAME Schwagenscheidt, Walter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German architect and urban planner
DATE OF BIRTH January 23, 1886
PLACE OF BIRTH Elberfeld
DATE OF DEATH January 16, 1968
Place of death Kronberg im Taunus