Research Collection Doctoral Thesis "Ist damit räumliches Bauen zu Ende": Hans Schwippert, Sep Ruf and the culture of building in german modern architecture, 1949-59 Author(s): Widder, Lynnette Publication Date: 2016 Permanent Link: https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-a-010867274 Rights / License: In Copyright - Non-Commercial Use Permitted This page was generated automatically upon download from the ETH Zurich Research Collection. For more information please consult the Terms of use. ETH Library DISS. ETH NO. 24027 'IST DAMIT RÄUMLICHES BAUEN ZU ENDE?’: HANS SCHWIPPERT, SEP RUF AND THE CULTURE OF BUILDING IN GERMAN MODERN ARCHITECTURE, 1949-59 A thesis submitted to attain the degree of DOCTOR OF SCIENCE at the ETH ZURICH (Dr. sc. ETH Zurich) presented by LYNNETTE WIDDER Master of Architecture, Columbia University born on 15.11.1963 citizen of United States of America accepted on the recommendation of Prof. Philip Ursprung, Prof. Dietrich Neumann 2016 ‘Ist damit räumliches Bauen zu Ende?’: Hans Schwippert, Sep Ruf and the Culture of Building in German Modern Architecture 1949-59 November, 2016 Lynnette Widder [email protected] Contents Page Abstract 3 Preface Initial Affinities 5 Introduction 8 Part I: 1949-51 1. Zeitgeist, Technology, Space: The Darmstädter Gespräche of 1951 21 2. Hans Schwippert’s Bundeshaus, 1949 52 3. Sep Ruf’s Akademie der Künste, 1950-54 98 Part II: 1953-57 4. Whose Modernism? German Transatlanticism: The Bauhaus Debate of 1953 135 5. Preparing for Export - SOM and Building Construction 1943-53 176 6. Sep Ruf’s American Consulate in Munich, 1955-57 216 Part III: 1956-59 7. ‘Die Welt des kleinen Mannes’: Hans Schwippert and the Agenda for the West German Pavilion at the Brussels World’s Fair of 1958 258 8. Sep Ruf’s Hochschule für Verwaltungswissenschaft, 1956-59 277 9. Hans Schwippert’s Hedwigskathedrale, 1956-63 306 Concluding Remarks 342 Acknowledgements 346 Bibliography and Footnotes 348 Curriculum Vitae Widder_Ist damit räumliches Bauen zu Ende? 2 Abstract The transformations in West German architecture between 1949 and 1959 were fast-paced and comprehensive, its idiom moving away from the light, filigree style of the early post-war period towards the robust, material expression that characterized International High Modern Architecture from the mid-1950s onwards. Despite the pace and intensity of these changes, however, they cannot be ascribed to a singular rhetorical program or movement. Instead, they represent the interplay of architectural expression and building construction developments, both influenced strongly by contemporary American precedents exported to West Germany through official and popular channels. The work of Hans Schwippert and Sep Ruf, friends and professional affiliates throughout the period studied, offers important insights into the pathways these transformations took through rhetoric, construction, reception and architecture expression. In the years between their early affinities in the podium discussion and exhibition at the Darmstädter Gespräch of 1951, and their collaboration on the West German pavilion at the 1958, however, the two architects took divergent paths. Schwippert maintained fidelity in his built work to the immediate post-war idiom he had helped to foster in his 1951 podium comments, and to the bespoke construction from which it derived. Ruf, who in 1954 took control of the project for the American Consulate in Munich from Skidmore Owings and Merrill (SOM), moved quickly towards an idiom expressive of increasing West German building industry largess and one clearly aligned with the High Modern style pioneered by American architects including SOM. The comparison of these two architects’ construction practices and architectural expression is underpinned by an analysis of three decisive documents, which describes the changing manner in which West Germany defined its self-image through architecture between 1949 and 1959. Zwischen 1949 und 1959 hat sich die westdeutsche Architektur schnell und vollständig geändert – sich entfernend vom leichten, filigranen Stil der unmittelbaren Nachkriegszeit und sich annährend zum robusten, material-intensiven Ausdruck, der sich mit dem internationalen ‚High Modernism’ der späten 50er Jahre deckt. Trotz ihrer Geschwindigkeit und Intensität ist diese Veränderung nicht einem rhetorischen Programm zuzuschreiben. Sie ist eher das Ergebnis des Dialogs zwischen einem spezifischen architektonischen Ausdruck und der von amerikanischen Vorbildern stark beeinflussten Baukonstruktion, die sowohl über die Besatzungsmacht wie auch durch die stilrichtungs-gebende Presse in Westdeutschland sich schnell Fuß fasste. Die Arbeiten von Hans Schwippert und Sep Ruf, die als Freunde und Kollegen während dieser Jahre stets in Kontakt waren, bieten wichtige Erkenntnisse für das Zusammenspiel von Rhetorik, Widder_Ist damit räumliches Bauen zu Ende? 3 Konstruktion, Rezeption und architektonischem Ausdruck in diesem Wirkungsraum. Trotz ihrer frühen Affinitäten, sowohl in der Diskussion und in der Ausstellung bei der 1951 Darmstädter Gespräche wie auch in ihrer Zusammenarbeit am Pavillon der Bundesrepublik Deutschland für die 1958 Brüsseler Weltausstellung, gingen ihre Wege auseinander. Schwippert blieb in seiner Architektur dem Ausdruck treu, den er schon in Darmstädter Gesprächen definiert hatte und der einer maßgeschneiderten Konstruktion entsprang. Ruf, der 1954 die Bauausführung des amerikanischen Konsulats in München vom New Yorker Architekturbüro Skidmore Owings & Merrill (SOM) übernommen hatte, bewegte sich stattdessen schnell in Richtung einer Architektur, die die Stärken einer heranwachsenden westdeutschen Bauindustrie zur Schau stellte und die dadurch in die Reihe der von SOM und anderen amerikanischen Architekten propagierten ‚High Modernist’-Architektur einzuordnen wäre. Der Vergleich dieser diskrepanten Haltungen wird durch fünf ausgewählten Bauten von Schwippert und Ruf erläutert und durch die Analyse von drei entscheidenden Dokumenten unterstützt, die die Transformation Westdeutschlands in Hinsicht auf der Bildung eines architektonischen Selbstverständnisses zwischen 1949 und 1959 deutlich macht. Widder_Ist damit räumliches Bauen zu Ende? 4 Preface Initial Affinities The architectural trajectories of Sep Ruf and Hans Schwippert make for an unlikely comparison. Their ease with each other shows in the photographs in Schwippert’s archive of the smoke filled room in which, in front of a site plan of the Brussels World’s Fair, it is easy to imagine that the finer points of Ruf and Eiermann’s authorship of the pavilion representing the young Bundesrepublik were developed.1 Their intellectual commonalities are evident in the fact that they were the only architect participants of the 1951 Darmstädter Gespräche to return for the fourth Gespräche in 1953.2 Whatever their personal affinities, it is their intellectual kinship that seems most unexpected. Schwippert, a pensive and theoretically inclined architectural thinker whose post-war production in architecture was balanced against his activities as an advocate for German design, seems temperamentally utterly different from Ruf, the decisive and prolific practitioner. Both architects were, however, deeply invested in the act of construction and its detailing. Their immediate post-war work was directly confronted by the material challenges, which mirrored the existential challenges of realizing sophisticated Modern construction amidst post-war shortages. The way in which they articulated the implications of those challenges is the initial affinity upon which this study builds: the second Darmstädter Gespräche marked one of the few occasions on which Ruf, prompted by Schwippert, discussed publicly his more abstract thinking about architecture as cultural enterprise. For all their affinities, both professional and, apparently, interpersonal, the development of their built work in the relatively short period between the 1951 Darmstädter Gespräche and its accompanying exhibition and the two projects with which this study ends was increasingly divergent. The thinly-dimensioned window mullions, attenuated glazing proportions and simply stucco’d surfaces that both favored in the early fifties developed in Ruf’s case to a far more robustly dimensioned palette of elements realized in a far greater variety of surface finishes. In contrast, Schwippert’s St. Hedwig’s Cathedral, a public building realized on the eastern side of the Berlin wall in 1963, retains much that had characterized his immediate post war work. This shift in idiom is not unique to Ruf’s work in this period; it bespeaks roughly a periodization of Modern architecture identifiable as ‘fifties’ as opposed to ‘sixties’.3 Ruf’s particular case is compelling because it included direct interaction with the construction methods of the American Widder_Ist damit räumliches Bauen zu Ende? 5 architecture firm Skidmore Owings and Merrill (SOM) in West Germany – a kind of ‘smoking gun’ for his turn to an International Modern style that could only otherwise be interpolated from manufacturers’ information, periodical publications and the built work itself. Schwippert’s built work offers a counterpoint or baseline for comparison. Amidst the changes in building industry, construction products and even taste that occurred around him, he maintained the idiom with which he had launched his post-war career in the construction of the new Bundeshaus (1949). Bespoke, labor intensive, filigree – by the time the Hedwigskathedrale was being built, this manner of building