Heinrich Tessenow

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

Biography

Tessenow was born in Rostock, Mecklenburg-Schwerin. His father was a carpenter, and he studied as an apprentice before studying architecture in a building trade school in Leipzig and at the Technical University of 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.

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.

His writings

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

Heinrich Tessenow Medal

Since 1962 the Alfred Toepfer Foundation of Hamburg has awarded a periodic medal for architectural excellence, honoring Tessenow's name. Together with the medal, each year the Alfred Toepfer Foundation also awares a young architect with the Heinrich Tessenow Stipendiat, having receibed it in the past archittects like Christian Jonasse or Andrés Jaque. A list of the most recent Tessenow Medal winners include:

* 2004 Gilles Perraudin
* 2003 Mikko Heikkinen and Markku Komonen
* 2002 Peter Märkli
* 2001 Eduardo Souto de Moura
* 2000 Heinz Tesar
* 1999 David Chipperfield
* 1998 Juan Navarro Baldeweg
* 1997 Sverre Fehn
* 1996 Peter Kulka
* 1994 Kurt Ackermann
* 1993 Massimo Carmassi
* 1992 Giorgio Grassi
* 1991 Theodor Hugues
* 1990 Heinrich Kulka and Wilhelm Landzettel
* 1989 Peter Zumthor

Portrayal in the media

Heinrich Tessenow has been portrayed by the following actors in film, television and theater productions.
* Trevor Howard in the 1982 United States television production "Inside the Third Reich".cite web | url = http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084140/ | title = Inside the Third Reich (1982) (TV)| accessdate = May 8 | accessdaymonth = | accessmonthday = | accessyear = 2008 | author = | last = | first = | authorlink = | coauthors = | date = | year = | month = | format = | work = | publisher = IMDb.com | pages = | language = English | doi = | archiveurl = | archivedate = | quote = ]

References