excursions to buildings of Ludwig Leo
May, 5th, 12.30 pm: Student housing Eichkamp and DLRG headquarter
May, 12th, 8.30 am: Kinder garden Loschmidtstraße and Gymnasium Charlottenburg
July, 21st, 2011 2:30pm: his famous circulation tank on the Landwehrkanal island in Tiergarten.
Ludwig Leo
Ludwig Leo, born in 1924 in Rostock, is a unique Berlin architect.
Deeply modest and hardly published, his work is quite unknown, but so different people like Peter Cook, Rob Krier, Norman Foster, Dieter Hoffmann-Axthelm, Heinrich Klotz, Ernst Giesel, John Hejduk speak of him with tremendous admiration.
He started to work with Ungers, the Luckhardt brothers, Baumgarten and Kleihues, and taught at what now is called UdK. Hoffmann-Axthelm called him a radical functionalist, but poetic utilitarist seems more appropriate to me. He built houses where you can use railings in 5 different ways, where you can turn a dinning room into a lecture hall into an operating theatre, stair landings turn to beds, to benches, boats drive into one of his houses, corners move up and cover a cinema. And if you think he’s high-tech, no: it’s low-tech, all is done with few manoeuvres with your hands. I think he saw some projects of the Soviet Avantgarde.
The archives of the Academy of Art keeps his unpublished treasures.
He was called a radical functionalist, but that's true just in the sense that his major ambition was to make the buildings as usuable as possible. He was far away from single-use definition of space, things turn into something else, a canteen turns into a lecture hall turns into an operating theatre.
He was deeply involved as an architect in the reformation process of the German school system, especially with his study of the Laborschule Bielefeld and the Landschulheim am Solling in Holzminden, but also his competition for the French High School and a school's gymnasium in Berlin.
Most of his work is an investigation into institutional changes.
He's a Protestant answer to brutalism, in particular James Stirling, and gives different answers to the phenomenons of the time like structuralism, High-Tech, Pop, Neo-constructivism, Rationalism, and the Postmodern.
The most famous of his buildings is the Umströmtank of the TU, Berlin's technical university, it’s on an island in the Landwehrkanal. It’s a blue box on a pink tube and some call it elephant. It’s a testing device for water streaming physics from the time before they found out, that water models work basically in 1:1. It’s difficult to visit, especially with large groups, but if there is bigger interest I would try.
The other major, and his real built masterpiece is the HQ of the DLRG, the German Society of Life Savers.
He built few houses more in West-Berlin (and just one one-family house outside this city) including the post-office, a washhouse and residential blocks of the Märkisches Viertel, that all went through bigger changes.
The project is a cooperation of Büro Schwimmer and
architectureinberlin.
