Willi Baur

Willi Baur (born September 19, 1913 in Ebingen ; † April 19, 1978 in Stuttgart ) was a German civil engineer in the engineering office ( Leonhardt, Andrä und Partner ) of Fritz Leonhardt in Stuttgart, with whom he developed the incremental launching method in bridge construction.

Baur, the son of a municipal official in Ebingen, completed an apprenticeship as a bricklayer from 1928 to 1931 and studied architecture and then civil engineering at the Stuttgart State Building School , graduating in 1938 (during his studies internship at the construction company Karl Kübler). Then Fritz Leonhardt brought him to the construction site of the Rhine bridge in Cologne-Rodenkirchen , where he was involved in the foundation of the piers. In the Second World War he was drafted into military service from 1939 and was involved in the construction of airfields. During the war, he married in 1941. After the war, he joined Fritz Leonhardt's recently founded engineering office in 1946, where he stayed for the rest of his career and mainly worked in bridge construction.

With Leonhardt he was a pioneer of prestressed concrete in post-war Germany, which was favored by the steel shortage at the time (the engineering office's first bridge with prestressed concrete was the Elzbrücke Bleibach in 1948 in the Black Forest). Together with Leonhardt, he developed the Baur-Leonhardt Concentrated Post-Tensioning System, first used on the Elz Bridge in Emmendingen and used by Baur, for example, in 1964 on the Neckarsulm piercing bridge, and the Leoba tendon. The incremental launching method developed with Leonhardt for the bridge over the Río Caroní was first used in Germany in 1967 for the Taubertal Bridge .

literature

• Gerhard Seifried: Willi Baur, in: Klaus Stiglat, civil engineers and their work. Ernst and Son 2004, pp. 62–69