Werner Taesler

Werner Taesler 1960

Werner Taesler (born November 5, 1907 in Teupitz near Berlin ; † March 2, 1994 in Örebro , Sweden ) was a German architect .

Life

Taesler's signature 1955.

Werner Taesler graduated from high school in Strausberg in 1927 and gained practical experience as a painter in Berlin before studying sculpture and architecture at the Kassel Art Academy from 1928 . In 1929 he moved to the Bauhaus Dessau , where he studied furniture design and architecture. From 1929 to 1931 he studied at the Technical University of Berlin , where he enrolled in architecture.

In Berlin he was involved in the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) , studied the poor housing situation in the city with Bruno Taut (1880–1938), and in 1931 organized a proletarian building exhibition under Arthur Korn (1881–1978). From 1931 to 1935 Taesler worked under the city planner Ernst May (1886-1970) in the Soviet Union , where he was a member of the “Maybrigade” for the planning and construction of residential buildings in the new industrial centers of the first five-year plan (including Kuznetsk , Magnitogorsk , Kemerovo ). Since Taesler was on the wanted list of the Gestapo in Germany and was disappointed by the bureaucratic socialism in the Soviet Union, he and his Odessa- born wife Irene Wurster went into exile in Sweden in 1935. However, he was only able to acquire Swedish citizenship in 1947, as he was under surveillance by the Swedish police as a socialist and had been placed on a death list by the Comintern , which was directed against Trotskyists .

In Sweden Taesler temporarily worked for important representatives of Swedish functionalism, who had come together in the group acceptera (including Sven Markelius (1889–1972) and Wolter Gahn (1890–1985)). At the end of the 1930s he worked in the architectural office of Kooperativa Förbundet , later with Nils Gustav Brink (1912–1983), until he set up in 1951 in the Swedish city of Örebro . Towards the end of the war, Taesler had considered the reconstruction of the destroyed German cities and in 1944, together with his friend, architect and city planner Fred Forbát (1897–1972), organized the first conference of the international group of architects to study reconstruction problems in Stockholm.

In the later years of his life, Taesler turned to nature conservation and the design of sustainable tourism in Sweden in his writings. His historical and architectural-historical notes, in which he also described his extensive travels through the Asian part of the Soviet Union, appeared in print in 2019.

Buildings (selection)

Triangle House, Stockholm Fruängen (1957), photo Ekkehard Henschke

• Triangle house for settlement and residential buildings in Sweden (competition 1951)
• Triangle house in Stockholm Fruängen (1955), culturally and historically valuable
• Ånnaboda holiday complex near Örebro (around 1960)
• Engineering and vocational school in Karlskoga (around 1965)

Fonts

• Werner Taesler, refugee in three countries. A Bauhaus architect and socialist in Germany, the Soviet Union and Sweden. Ed. U. comment u. with an afterword vers. by Ekkehard Henschke. Stuttgart 2019. ISBN 978-3-95612-108-1
• Werner Taesler, Hur land blev landskap [How landscape emerged from land]. Malmö 1985. ISBN 913-861-371-9 [2008 as audio book].
• Werner Taesler, Jordbrukarnas bostäder och arbetsplatser i Sovjetunionen [apartments and workplaces of farmers in the Soviet Union]. In: Byggmästaren, 1935, No. 20, pp. 112-120.
• Werner Taesler, Sjukhusbyggandet i Sovjetunionen [hospital construction in the Soviet Union]. In: Arkitektur och samhälle. No. 1, Vol. 4, 1935, pp. 33-52.
• Werner Taesler, Bostadsbyggandet i Sovjetunionen [Housing in the Soviet Union]. In: Byggmästaren, 1936, pp. 213-226.

literature

• Anne E. Dünzelmann: Stockholm walks. On the trail of German exiles 1933–1945. book on demand , Norderstedt 2017, ISBN 978-3-7448-8399-3 .
• Helmut Müssener: Exile in Sweden. Political and cultural emigration after 1933. (= Stockholm German Research , Volume 14.) Munich 1974, ISBN 978-3-446-11850-8 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Lectures given at the first meeting of the “International Group of Architects for the Study of Reconstruction Problems” in Stockholm, 8.-9. October 1944. Stockholm 1944 . Stockholm 1944.

Web links

Commons : Werner Taesler  - Collection of images, videos and audio files