Heinrich Tessenow

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Heinrich Tessenow (April 7, 1876 in Rostock, Germany - November 1, 1950 in Berlin, Germany) was a German architect, professor, and urban planner active in the Weimar era.

[edit] Biography

Tessenow's father was a carpenter, and he studied as an apprentice before studying architecture in a building trade school in Leipzig and at the Technical High School in Munich, where he later taught.

Tessenow and fellow architects Hermann Muthesius and Richard Riemerschmid are credited with the 1908 Gartenstadt Hellerau, near Dresden, a housing project that was the first tangible result of the influence of the English garden city movement in Germany.

Hellerau, Festspielhaus (2003)

This particular strain of humane, functionalist urban planning would eventually lead to the extensive German housing projects of Ernst May and Bruno Taut in the 1920s, May's plans for Magnitogorsk and other Russian cities, and then widespread influence through Tessenow's student Otto Koeningsberger, an urban planner who worked in Asia, Latin America, Africa and particularly India, for instance the 1948 plan for the Indian city of Bhubaneswar.

Tessenow is now best known through his student and one-time assistant, Nazi architect Albert Speer. Tessenow taught Speer at the Institute of Technology in Berlin-Charlottenburg in 1925 (after Speer had been rejected from Hans Poelzig's class for bad drawing technique), and Speer became Tessenow's assistant in 1927 at the very early age of 23. Speer's memoirs describe Tessenow's personal, discursive, informal teaching style, and his preference for architecture that expressed national culture and simplified forms. He was known for the saying, "The simplest form is not always the best, but the best is always simple."

Although Tessenow repudiated National Socialism, and one source identifies him as Jewish, unlike a score of his colleagues he remained in Germany through the course of World War II, protected by his former student. Speer intervened with the Minister of Education on Tessenow's behalf to preserve his academic position. Tessenow verified this on his deathbed in 1950.

[edit] His writings

Housebuilding and Such Things (written in 1916, but translated in English in 1989)

[edit] Heinrich Tessenow Medal

Since 1962 the Alfred Toepfer Foundation of Hamburg has awarded a periodic medal for architectural excellence, honoring Tessenow's name. A list of the most recent winners include: