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Although born in Bremen, Germany, on 20 September 1893, Hans Scharoun grew up
in the town of Bremerhaven, Germany’s major port just west of the industrial city of Hamburg. Exhibiting a fascination with machines and architecture in his earliest sketches and drawings, Scharoun took careful notice of the rapid changes he saw in the world around him, changes even more exaggerated in the activities of the port. Bremerhaven, Germany’s gateway to the world, felt the impact of cultures beyond Germany’s borders and was thus more cosmopolitan than much of the country. It was also a place in which new forms of technology and transport drove the city’s development; in this context, new theories involving space and time were not abstract but quite real, leaving an imprint on the port’s infrastructure and, consequently, the city’s architecture. As remarked by Peter Blundell-Jones, a noted scholar of Scharoun’s work, Scharoun appeared to have received the imprint of these ideas as well, for his architecture and planning ideas were anything but sentimental. From his earliest attempts at architecture and urban planning, Scharoun engaged the dynamics of economic exchange and technological development directly. Yet Scharoun’s concept for architecture, or Baukunst (at the time German architects pointedly used, after Schinkel, the term Baukunst, or “building art,” rather than “architecture” to describe their work), was not simply utilitarian but sought an expression of the Modern era. Scharoun’s vision, one he shared with several other members of his generation, espoused a kind of functionalism—although not the functionalism promoted by several of his contemporaries, including the Sachlichkeit architects Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer. Rather, Scharoun emphasized the spiritual foundation of organic form, where the formation of the interior generated the exterior form.
Scharoun was accepted as a student of architecture at the Technische Hochschule in Berlin-Charlottenburg in 1912 and became well versed in engineering technologies, the primary emphasis of the architectural course at the time. He also worked as an assistant in the Berlin office of Paul Kruchen, an assistant at the Technische Hochschule and Scharoun’s first real mentor. While on holiday from his studies, the young architect worked as a bricklayer’s apprentice. The curriculum of the Technische Hochschule did not engage his imagination; unlike contemporary architectural education, there was little focus on design in most German architectural programs at the time. Nonetheless, Scharoun took part in numerous competitions, seeing them as opportunities in which he could develop and exercise his architectural ideas. When World War I broke out, Scharoun voluntarily entered military service, where he was eventually assigned to assist Kruchen, who had by then become a military architect. His early reputation as an architect was in fact based on these competitions; in comparison with other competition entrants, Scharoun’s work was exceptionally progressive. The most significant of these was his competition entry for the planning of the cathedral area in Prenzlau, a project that led to an association with the noted Expressionist architect Bruno Taut and the architectural critic Adolf Behne, both of whom resided in Berlin. Both Taut and Behne were active in the utopian group Arbeitsrat für Kunst (Work Council for Art), an association of architects, writers, and artists founded immediately after the November 1918 revolution. The group, reflecting the burgeoning socialist sentiments of many cultural figures during the Weimar Republic, sought to recover an art that was “for the people” and vice versa, a people energized by their creative actions. In so doing, many of them not only dispensed with the past but, in utopist fashion, overlooked the difficulties of the present in favor of the possibility of future redemption. Seeing change and development as modern architecture’s foundational premise, Scharoun quickly became an associate and advocate of the group, participating in Taut’s “chain letters,” a secretive, semianonymous correspondence known as the Gläserne Kette (Glass Chain). Scharoun’s language and visionary sketches from the period, bursting with intense light, color, and contrasts and using Expressionist symbols, are infused with utopian visions shared by members of the group such as Wassily Luckhardt, Herman Finsterlin, and Walter Gropius. Typical Expressionist architectural programs, such as Volkshaus (House of the People) and Stadtkrone (Crown of the City or City’s Crown), with titles such as “Monument to Joy” and “Crystal on the Sphere” (Luckhardt) and Kultbau, or “Cult- Building” (Scharoun), exposed the underlying influences of German nature mysticism and 19th-century German Romanticism. Although interested in fantasy and longing, Scharoun’s legacy from the period centered around subtle aspects of architecture: daylighting (Lichtführung, literally “the control of daylight”) and organic form.
Expressionism’s resort to quasi-mystical (spiritual) issues and forms of nature was effectively subsumed into the development of functionalism in the 1920s. Ornament—the rendering of ideas in architecture through surface application and detail—gave way to the embrace of space and time, a shift dependent on changes in the ideas and methods of the physical and natural sciences. Accordingly, space—immaterial and implied—became the residence of Spirit (Geist), whereas form, perceived as plastic and mutable, was infused with references to organisms, growth, and change.
Scharoun’s architectural work from this period mirrored his incorporation of these influences, and his associations with certain architects and artists (several of whom exhibited an interest in the a “constructed organicist” version of the post-Dada group Neue Sachlichkeit, or New Objectivity) grew. Among his closest associates were artists Kurt Schwitters, Hans Richter, and Theo van Doesburg, all of whom worked to sublimate the mechanics and demands of persistent change and spirit in their art. Scharoun’s particular interest in painting and collage—at this time highly gestural and expressive, with a hint of attention to vernacular traditions—supported the architect’s functionalist ethic. At the time, functionalism was both a method and a philosophy (or shared faith) whereby the spirit moves from within to without; accordingly, “form” is the result of spiritual expansion and expression moving out into the world. Scharoun’s incorporation of fluid, complex forms and rhythms, coupled with his embrace of architecture’s new technologies and materials, aided and abetted his general resistance to academic form. Rather than static works resting on the landscape hidden behind an ordered facade, Scharoun’s architectural designs—his spaces and forms—remained fluid and organic, engaging the landscape directly in providing a place for the infusion of plant life within while extending space into the landscape itself.
Ironically, Hans Scharoun’s reputation and significance as an architect increased just
as political and social tensions led to the demise of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Fascism in Germany. In the mid-1920s, the “housing question” became a central focus for the development of modern architecture. Although a professor at the Kunstakademie in Breslau, Scharoun yearned for Berlin’s cosmopolitan cultural arena, finally relocating to the city in 1927–28. It was a fortuitous move professionally, and he began to obtain various commissions (his association with Berlin developer Georg Jacobowitz was particularly fruitful). Scharoun also had the good fortune of participating with several of his former Arbeitsrat colleagues, collaborating on several planning and housing developments, including both the Modern Siemensstadt living/housing project (1928–31) and a single-family dwelling for the Weissenhofsiedlung Stuttgart, a housing exhibition organized by the Deutscher Werkbund, in 1927. Both projects, manifestos of “social housing,” were “intended as...models for [a] new way of life.” However, the die had been cast portending the rise of Fascism by the late 1920s, and options for further exploration of Modern cultural and social ideas diminished substantially.
Although he did not immigrate during the period—an option taken by many of his closest friends and associates—Scharoun suffered an internal exile throughout the late 1930s and 1940s. The last building of his “Weimar years,” a house for industrialist Fritz Schminke on the border of Czechoslovakia built in 1933, showcases Scharoun’s maturing architectural vision; light, material, structure, form, space, function, furniture, and landscape are fused into a seamless, organic whole. As German Fascism increased its hold, Scharoun’s work went underground; exterior projections of his architectural ideas—formal and material play and movement—became hidden behind the mask of Nazism’s mandated, antimodern “German vernacular.” Nonetheless, Scharoun, in his design of small, residential projects, clearly maintains his developmental trajectory, exploring with even greater intensity the dynamics of interior space and light and exterior form. These projects—the Mohrmann House (1938) in Berlin-Lichtenrade and the Endell House (1939) in Berlin-Wannsee are primary examples—map the increasing internalization of his architectural work and effectively mirror Scharoun’s internal exile.
Again ironically, it was during this same period that Scharoun’s most significant intellectual relationship developed: Hugo Häring, 11 years Scharoun’s senior, became Scharoun’s principal mentor, a relationship that would continue until Häring’s death. During the 1920s, Häring was known primarily for his architectural ideas and was, according to Blundell-Jones, considered more of a contemplative (theoretical) architect than a builder. During the years of fascist rule and World War II, Häring and Scharoun developed a close relationship—like Scharoun, he was also an internal exile—with the elder man fulfilling the role of mentor, Scharoun’s “intellectual authority.” Häring’s architectural theories were quickly absorbed by Scharoun, who adopted them as explanations for his own architecture.
Immediately after the end of World War II, Scharoun was asked to help with the planning and rebuilding of Berlin and was appointed Berlin city architect until the city elections in 1946. Housing was a critical issue, and Scharoun began to work on numerous city-planning and apartment projects, including those associated with the Planungs- Kollektiv. His work in this area exhibited a concern for the entire built environment and its future viability. Incorporating the necessary functions of daily life within his planning schemes, Scharoun added public buildings, shopping areas, parks, schools, kindergartens, administrative offices, and cultural and recreational elements, including crafts workshops and spaces for weekly markets and provisions for small-scale industry and future growth. In addition, his intro-duction of a wide range of transportation systems (with pedestrian access being the most important) underlined Scharoun’s attention to the human dimension of architecture.
Scharoun was able to build many of his designs after the war, including apartment complexes, schools, and theaters—all building programs that directly engaged issues pertaining to the human dimension and, even more specifically, the quality of life. As one of the remaining architects of his generation still active in West Germany, Scharoun continued to explore architectural themes that had governed his work throughout his career: fluid space and change, program flexibility, technological advances, the primacy of the interior uses as a determinant of form, the dynamic interaction of landscape and form, and contextual response. Although there are numerous examples, notable housing projects include his design for apartments in Berlin, his “Romeo and Juliet” housing project (1954–59) in Stuttgart, Charlottenburg-Nord (1950s–1960s), and the Böblingen Flats (1965) near Stuttgart. Scharoun was extremely interested in the relationship between architectural program, order, form, space, and light and the learning processes associated with educational programs, and he designed several schools, such as the Geschwister Scholl (1958–62) in Lünen, where he adopted an aggressive color program, and the Volksschule (1960–71) at Marl in Westphalia. Scharoun’s theaters included the Kässel (1952), Mannheim (1953), and Zürich (1964) theater projects. The Wolfsburg Theatre (1965–1973), completed after Scharoun’s death on 25 November 1972, absorbs the energy of the earlier projects and stands today as a testament to Scharoun’s architectural genius. This is also the case in his design for the German Maritime Museum (1969–75), a project commissioned by the State of West Germany and located in Bremerhaven, where his earliest visions for a new architecture first took root. Likewise, his most famous building, the Berlin Philharmonie (begun in 1968 and completed in 1987), sublates many of the ideas found in his earliest architectural work, becoming something of a refined exemplar of Expressionist architecture. The programs for the Philharmonie and the later Chamber Music Hall appear as instruments themselves—fluid arrangements of myriad systems that lend themselves to Scharoun’s improvisational approach to the making of form.
Among Scharoun’s last projects, a State Library (1964–79) and a Musical Instruments Museum and Institute for Musical Research (1969–84), both sited immediately adjacent to both the Berlin Philharmonie and Mies van der Rohe’s masterful National Gallery in Berlin, display the full range of Scharoun’s vision. The created context is thoughtfully nuanced, with the grouping of buildings open and responsive not only to one another but to the entire city of (West) Berlin as well—a studied contrast in the closed conditions presented by the city’s isolated context at the time. Completed after Scharoun’s death, they represent not only the sum of one architect’s vision but also, in returning to the opening themes of the 1910s and 1920s, the culmination of a generation’s vision, a generation that, from the beginning, saw architecture as a form of redemption, a form of life that engaged and affirmed the dynamics of social interaction. As an architect, Scharoun was prolific. The number of projects designed amounts to more than 300, the majority (238) of which were built despite the intervening years of Fascist rule and the post-World War II economic difficulties. Scharoun’s insistence on a dynamic, “organic” architecture, in particular an architecture fully engaged in the rhythms of daily life, exhibits his concern for architecture as a form of life (Lebensform). This idea encapsulates the sense of play and the use of fluid ordering systems in Scharoun’s work; architecture did not exist as an object but rather functioned as an organism, a viable, developmental, and flexible network of associations and interrelationships.
ELIZABETH BURNS GAMARD
Sennott R.S. Encyclopedia of twentieth century architecture, Vol.3. Fitzroy Dearborn., 2005.
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