The Modern Movement in Germany
James Dunnett reports on two Docomomo UK trips to Germany and Poland.
First published Summer 2010
Mendelsohn Petesdorff store Wroclaw
The central role of Germany in the development of the Modern Movement is universally acknowledged, but the language barrier among other factors long restricted my own ability to relate to it. Over the last decade however, thanks in large part to our late co-chair Dennis Sharp, a dedicated Germanist who had been inspired by his émigré teacher at the Architectural Association Arthur Korn, I have become increasingly fascinated.
Dennis organised a DOCOMOMO-UK trip to Frankfurt in 2004 - an eye-opener both regarding the truly Neues Bauen housing estates of Ernst May (a particular interest of Dennis’ due to May’s later East African career) and the Expressionist works of Poelzig and Behrens. In 2007 Dennis organised a further trip to Vienna - not Germany perhaps, but Germanophone, and another eye-opener. In 2008 I visited Trier and Cologne myself – an opportunity to see Peter Zumthor’s Kolumba Museum – and met Alex Dill of Karlsruhe University at the Rotterdam conference (Dennis was absent due to the onset of ill-health). Alex invited both Dennis and me to lecture in Karlsruhe in the Architecture School’s and DOCOMOMO-Germany’s planned ‘British Day’ the following January in succession to a ‘French Day’ the previous year and a ‘Russian day’ this year.
Dennis found the strength to do this supported by Yasmin and, following our lecturing duties and hospitality in excellent restaurants, we spent a day visiting sights in the city in the bitterest cold, primarily Gropius’ Dammerstock housing estate, a commission he won in competition in 1928. With its long parallel blocks it looked on paper like the purest example of a zeilenbau layout, and one feared monotony. But in practice the spaciousness, lightness and varied planting dispelled any such fears. We also visited an Expressionist church designed by Alkar in the 1920s and recently restored by former AA student Hans Hiegel, who showed us round.
Karlsruhe was famously panned by Le Corbusier in Vers Une Architecture for its baroque radial plan with every street focused on the Palace of the Margraves of Wurttemburg – a classic ‘paper’ pattern in LC’s view because you could not appreciate the radial plan in reality. It is certainly a rigid and slightly absurd plan, but it seems to me that the Y-shaped plan of the palace, whose angled facets impressively catch the sun and shade as seen from the spacious park around it, may have inspired the similar pate d’oie plan of Le Corbusier’s Cartesian skyscraper.
From the western edge of Germany to its former eastern edge - Breslau in Silesia, now Wroclaw, a major city with impressive mediaeval origins whose entire German population was expelled after World War II when Silesia was transferred to Poland, and repopulated with Poles from their major city of Lvov, from which they had been in turn expelled by the Russians. A feeling of unease persists despite the recognition by West German Chancellor Willy Brandt in 1970 of the Oder-Neisse frontier imposed by Stalin, which effected the transfer. So the Poles are left in charge of conserving the architectural heritage of their former opponents, including the impressive German MoMo heritage of Max Berg, Poelzig, Mendelssohn, and Scharoun.
Petersdorf Store
The DOCOMOMO Technical Conference in Wroclaw which I attended in October 2009 focused on conserving the concrete of Berg’s stunning Jahrhunderthalle (Centenary Hall) of 1912, once the largest column-free covered space in the world, and allowed an opportunity to see the impressive results. The conference was held, typically, in the cloister of a medieval monastery now converted into an architecture museum, but lunch was served under Berg’s awe-inspiring ‘dome’, its ribs reminiscent of the legs of a giant spider. Not only is the original yellow colour of the concrete being restored, but the glass in the strips of glazing ringing the ‘dome’ is being replaced for the first time in the yellow colour originally intended by Berg. The link between the Jarhunderthalle and the Stadtkrone beloved of Expressionists such as Bruno Taut and Scharoun will become clearer.
Jahrhunderthalle
Poelzig, who headed the school of architecture in Breslau, which was something of a model and later a rival for the Bauhaus, worked with Berg and was responsible for the remarkable heavyweight office building on the Junkernstrasse of 1911-2 – which we saw, together with Mendelsohn’s dazzling Petersdorff department store of 1926-7, one of his most dramatic designs but one which is in fact only a skin-deep addition to a pre-existing structure. It far outclasses the contemporary Art Deco Wertheim store by a local architect – recently restored as far as its exterior is concerned, but gutted internally – which we were also lovingly shown.
Finally we saw Scharoun’s WuWA (Wohnung und Werkraum Austellung) housing block of 1929, built as part of a Werkbund ‘Housing and Workplaces exhibition’, a successor in eastern Germany to the more famous Stuttgart Weissenhof of two years earlier (where Scharoun had also built a house). The WuWa block is like Wells Coates’ Lawn Road flats but double the size and five years earlier, and incorporating one wing of larger flats intended for married couples, all with communal dining and sitting rooms. It has a ‘3-2’ section such as Coates was to incorporate in his Palace Gate flats of 1937-9. Straddling a pine forest like an ocean liner on the sea, its angled layout and response to its setting also recall Aalto’s Paimio Sanatorium completed three years later, which it perhaps inspired. A gradual process of restoration is in progress, including the recapture of the striking original internal colour, though the original windows have been lost.
All these buildings were written up by Dennis in his pioneering book Modern Architecture and Expressionism of 1966 (except WuWA which was after his period), which he was urged to write by Reyner Banham, so it is doubly to be regretted that he was too ill to come to Wroclaw and in fact never saw them.