In Stuttgart the railway station by Paul Bonatz (1877-1951) and F. E. Scholer (b. 1874) is the finest though not the largest of several built in Germany in these years. Designed in 1911, it was started only in 1914, just as the enormous and much less interesting one at Leipzig with its six parallel sheds, begun by Wilhelm Lossow (1852-1914) and M. H. Kühne in 1907, was reaching completion. That at Stuttgart was not finished until 1927 because of the interruption caused by the First World War. This structure has a rather Richardsonian flavour in its extensive unbroken wall surfaces of rock-faced ashlar and its plain round arches (Plate [152]). But the influence here came rather from the Munich architect Theodor Fischer (1862-1938). Fischer’s Romanesquoid churches, such as that of the Redeemer in Munich of 1899-1901 and the Garrison Church of 1908-11 in Ulm, were among the largest and most strikingly novel built in the opening years of the century in Germany; in the latter he even used ferro-concrete principals to carry the roof of the nave. Fischer’s Art Gallery of 1911 in Stuttgart was both more delicate in scale and rather more archaeological in its detailing; Bonatz’s Stuttgart work is bolder, simpler, and quite as admirably expressive of the traditional materials used.
With the Stuttgart Station may be contrasted the rather earlier one at Hamburg that Heinrich Reinhardt (1868-?) and Georg Süssenguth (1862-?) built in 1903-6. There the major sections—shed, concourse, etc.—designed by the engineer Medling resemble rather closely Contamin and Dutert’s Galerie des Machines at the Paris Exhibition of 1889. These great constructions of iron and glass fortunately quite overshadow the low ranges of accessory elements in masonry, with ornament still in the Meistersinger mode of the eighties, contributed by the architects. The differences between these two notable stations well illustrate that reaction towards masonry construction and a more or less traditional approach to design that was developing strength in the decade preceding the First World War. In the history of the railroad station as a type the Hamburg Hauptbahnhof represents, not a new beginning, but the end of a line descending from the great shed-dominated stations of the mid nineteenth century.
Intermediate in date between the Hamburg and Stuttgart stations was that at Karlsruhe built by August Stürzenacker in 1908-13. Although masonry construction and masonry forms dominate here as at Stuttgart, the simplification of mass and space composition throughout, and above all the elegant detailing, give evidence of the continuing leadership of Olbrich at the time of his death. Olbrich never built a station himself, but he won third place in the 1903 competition for that at Basel and second place in the 1907 competition for Darmstadt.
In other specialized fields of building a forward line of development is more evident. Two big circular halls, one in Frankfort built by Thiersch in 1907-8, the other in Breslau built by Max Berg (b. 1870) in 1910-12 (Plate [149B]), are more notable than the contemporary railway stations at Stuttgart and Karlsruhe. Like Behrens’s industrial work for the A.E.G., these structures illustrate the vital stimulus that German architects were obtaining in these generally somewhat reactionary years from the use of engineering solutions and materials other than masonry—steel at Frankfort, ferro-concrete at Breslau—to cover and enclose space. In the case of Thiersch this is the more remarkable when one remembers the ponderous traditionalism of his Neo-Baroque Palace of Justice in Munich built ten years before. While Berg on the exterior of his vast hall approaches the attenuated Classicism of Perret’s work of the next decade, the superb interior reminds one at once of Piranesi and of the much later structures of Nervi.
German architects of this generation were rarely able to carry over into the designing of more conventional structures the boldness and freshness of approach of their large-scale work. They seem to have felt no such call to regenerate architecture as Wright had imbibed from Sullivan; nor did they, like Perret, attempt to use the new materials and the new structural methods consistently for all sorts of buildings whatever their particular purpose. German production before and after the First World War, as represented in the œuvre of such then highly esteemed figures[[425]] as Oskar Kaufmann (b. 1873), German Bestelmeyer (1874-1942), and Wilhelm Kreis (b. 1873), to mention but three of the best known, shades over almost imperceptibly from industrial and semi-industrial buildings of bold and original character to a range of structures in various tasteful modes that are, in retrospect, hardly distinguishable from the traditional work of this period in other countries. This has already been noted as regards Tessenow. Characteristic examples of these men’s work were Bestelmeyer’s extensions of the University and the Technical High School in Munich, of 1906-10 and 1922 respectively, both in the local tradition of Theodor Fischer’s work. The Museum of Prehistory in Halle that Kreis built in 1916 with K. A. Jüngst was more traditional even than Bestelmeyer’s work, although Provincial-Roman rather than Romanesque in inspiration.
As in England in the late nineteenth century, individual idiosyncrasies were much cultivated, and architects tended to specialize in particular types of buildings. Kaufmann, for example, had a very personal Neo-Rococo manner, delicate and frivolous, that he employed with real appropriateness in various Berlin theatres, notably the remodelling of the Kroll Oper and the Komödie, both carried out in 1924. But Behrens remains on the whole the most interesting and accomplished architect of this generation, whose opportunities for building were often to be even greater under the Weimar Republic in the early twenties than they had been under the Kaiser.
No very great change is observable in Behrens’s work after the First World War. The terrace-houses that he built in 1918 for A.E.G. workers at Hennigsdorf, and the semi-detached dwellings of a low-cost housing estate for which he was responsible at Othmarschen near Altona in 1920 are simple and solid in construction, quite like those of before the war but more conservative in design. However, at this point comes a characteristic, though brief, change of phase that illustrates his ready response to influences from the new painting and sculpture of the day. In the big complex erected for the I. G. Farben Company in 1920-4 at Höchst Behrens gave up the direct expression of new industrial building methods characteristic of his A.E.G. factories of 1909-11. The exterior was massive and almost medievalizing, even though the ranges of arches were of the unconventional parabolic form that seems to have appealed especially to Expressionist taste. In the tall glass-roofed court inside the angular forms of Expressionism were most strikingly evident; but he also introduced wholly abstract wall paintings and a few rather Constructivist lighting fixtures elsewhere in the reception rooms and offices. The result was, to say the least, ambiguous and incoherent, although the exterior was not unimpressive in its general effect.
Expressionist influence had first appeared a little earlier than this in the work of other German architects, but it reached a peak in these years of the early twenties. In his pre-war industrial work Hans Poelzig (1869-1936) was not yet Expressionist. The chemical works that he built at Luban near Posen in 1911-12 rivalled in size and even in directness of expression—though not in distinction—Behrens’s factories for the A.E.G. After the war, however, Poelzig became a principal exponent of Expressionism in architecture. One of the earliest and most striking examples of Expressionist design on a large scale was his remodelling of the Grosses Schauspielhaus in Berlin in 1919. Here the cavernous, stalactite-ceilinged interior round the central circular stage was itself like an Expressionist stage-set and the planning implied a major revolution in dramatic presentation that never, in fact, quite came off. Yet his industrial work of the early twenties soon became much more straightforward again, and he later reverted to something very comparable to the stripped monumentality of Behrens’s Düsseldorf and Hanover office buildings. The most prominent extant example of this is the enormous I.G. Farben Company headquarters that he built in 1930 in Frankfort.
One can hardly leave the subject of Expressionism in German architecture, largely confined though its more extreme manifestations were to a very short post-war period of three or four years, without mentioning two more names, those of Fritz Höger (1877-1949) and Dominikus Böhm (1880-1955).
The twenties saw a few skyscrapers erected in Germany, none of them of the great height then current in America, but sometimes as conspicuous above the existing skyline as the first skyscrapers in New York had been in the seventies. The largest, though not the tallest, and certainly the most impressive was the Chilehaus, built by Höger in Hamburg in 1923, with its Schumacher-like piers of patterned brickwork and its upper three storeys receding behind narrow terraces (Plate [153A]). A large and irregular site encouraged the employment of a long double curve on the right-hand side of the hollow block, and the sharp angle at that end produced automatically a silhouette of the shrillest Expressionist order. Actually, however, Höger like other German architects was already returning by this time from earlier and wilder Expressionist adventures. To what extent he was aware of the skyscrapers of Sullivan is uncertain. The emphatically vertical scheme of design he used here, with arches linking the brick piers together below slab cornices, certainly suggests some knowledge of them, even though they were by this time all but forgotten in America.