Walther Schmidt (architect)

Walther Schmidt (born November 17, 1899 in Hammelburg ; † April 24, 1993 in Munich ) was a German architect and construction clerk .

Life

From 1919 to 1923 he studied architecture at the Technical University of Munich . Then he worked on Robert Vorhoelzer in Postbauschule , the construction division, the main post office in Munich. From 1926 to 1936 Schmidt was a government master builder and post office building officer at the Oberpostdirektion Munich . From 1936 to 1945 he moved to the Reichspostministerium in Berlin as a ministerial advisor . In this role he realized numerous large-scale Nazi projects, including the Dobl broadcaster .

After the Second World War he worked as a freelance architect in Lindau and from 1951 to 1967 city planning officer in Augsburg , where he mainly dealt with the reconstruction of the destroyed city. His conception of the reconstruction relied on a "creative reconstruction" of the old one, but with clear interventions in the urban structure.

He was also the publisher of the magazine Bauen und Wohnen in 1949 and from 1958 to 1974 chairman of the Bavarian regional group at the Academy for Urban Development and Regional Planning in Munich. In 1969 he was made an honorary doctorate from the Technical University of Hanover .

Walther Schmidt, together with Robert Vorhoelzer, is one of the founders of the “Upper Bavarian Post Building School ”, which was responsible for numerous post buildings in the New Building style, especially in the 1920s . Numerous official buildings in the New Objectivity style in Munich and Augsburg were planned and realized by Schmidt.

plant

• 1924–1926: Parcel delivery office on Arnulfstrasse in Munich (together with Robert Vorhoelzer)
• 1927: Kraftpost stop in Munich
• 1928/1929: Trial settlement of the Bavarian Post and Telegraph Association in Munich
• 1929–1932: Post office and residential building on Goetheplatz in Munich (together with Franz Holzhammer )
• 1933/1934: Telegraph and telephone district building (together with Franz Holzhammer and Max Delefant )
• 1935: Telephone district building Berchtesgaden (together with Franz Holzhammer)
• 1936/1937: Post Office Berchtesgaden (together with Franz Holzhammer and Hans Schnetzer )
• 1950–1952: House of German Crafts in Frankfurt am Main (destroyed)
• 1954–1956: Administration building of Stadtwerke Augsburg
• 1954–1956: Reconstruction of the Augsburg city theater
• 1958: Extension to the House of German Crafts in Frankfurt am Main (demolished in 2012)

Awards

In November 1954, an exhibition building for German handicrafts on the exhibition grounds in Frankfurt am Main was named 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 . In addition to Walther Schmidt, the architects Gottlob Schaupp and Boris von Bodisco were involved in the construction.

Fonts

• An architect walks across the field. Building design considerations. Ravensburg 1947.
• Official buildings designed from operational processes, shown using the example of the Bavarian post office buildings. Ravensburg 1949.
• Building with ruins. Design issues when integrating ruins of important old buildings destroyed in the war into new building contexts. Ravensburg 1949.
• New building in Augsburg. Augsburg 1955.
• Old towns in danger. Munich 1975

literature

• Winfried Nerdinger (Ed.): Walther Schmidt 1899–1993. From the Post Building School to the City Planning Council of Augsburg. Reimer, Berlin 2008, ISBN 3-496-01383-4 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Walther Schmidt in the catalog of the German National Library

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 ]).