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Arthur Korn (architect)
Encyclopedia
- For the physicist, see Arthur KornArthur KornArthur Korn was a German-born physicist, mathematician and inventor, who was of Jewish ancestry...
(physicist).
Arthur Korn (4 June 1891 – 14 November 1978) was a German
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
Jewish architect
Architect
An architect is a person trained in the planning, design and oversight of the construction of buildings. To practice architecture means to offer or render services in connection with the design and construction of a building, or group of buildings and the space within the site surrounding the...
and urban planner
Urban planner
An urban planner or city planner is a professional who works in the field of urban planning/land use planning for the purpose of optimizing the effectiveness of a community's land use and infrastructure. They formulate plans for the development and management of urban and suburban areas, typically...
who was a proponent of modernism
Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
in Germany and the UK.
Life and career
Wroclaw
Wrocław , situated on the River Oder , is the main city of southwestern Poland.Wrocław was the historical capital of Silesia and is today the capital of the Lower Silesian Voivodeship. Over the centuries, the city has been part of either Poland, Bohemia, Austria, Prussia, or Germany, but since 1945...
) in Silesia
Silesia
Silesia is a historical region of Central Europe located mostly in Poland, with smaller parts also in the Czech Republic, and Germany.Silesia is rich in mineral and natural resources, and includes several important industrial areas. Silesia's largest city and historical capital is Wrocław...
in 1891. Between 1909 and 1911 he studied at the Königliche Kunst- und Kunstgewerbeschule
Kunstgewerbeschule
A Kunstgewerbeschule was the old name for an advanced school of applied arts in German-speaking countries. The first such schools were opened in Kassel in 1867 and Berlin and Munich in 1868 with other German towns following. They are now merged into universities....
(Royal Art and Trade School) in Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
. After World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
he worked briefly at the office of expressionist architect Erich Mendelsohn
Erich Mendelsohn
Erich Mendelsohn was a Jewish German architect, known for his expressionist architecture in the 1920s, as well as for developing a dynamic functionalism in his projects for department stores and cinemas.-Early life:...
. In the 1920s he was active in the modernist architectural movement in Berlin, and associated with Bauhaus
Bauhaus
', commonly known simply as Bauhaus, was a school in Germany that combined crafts and the fine arts, and was famous for the approach to design that it publicized and taught. It operated from 1919 to 1933. At that time the German term stood for "School of Building".The Bauhaus school was founded by...
architects such as Walter Gropius
Walter Gropius
Walter Adolph Georg Gropius was a German architect and founder of the Bauhaus School who, along with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, is widely regarded as one of the pioneering masters of modern architecture....
and Ernst May
Ernst May
Ernst May was a German architect and city planner.May successfully applied urban design techniques to the city of Frankfurt am Main during Germany's Weimar period, and in 1930 less successfully exported those ideas to Soviet Union cities, newly created under Stalinist rule...
. He was a member of Der Ring
Der Ring
Der Ring was an architectural collective founded in 1926 in Berlin. It emerged out of expressionist architecture with a functionalist agenda. Der Ring was a group of young architects, formed with the objective of promoting Modernist architecture. It took a position against the prevailing...
Berlin architectural collective. He published his influential work Glas. Im Bau und als Gebrauchsgegenstand (published in English as Glass in Modern Architecture) in 1929. After the Nazi rise to power he was forbidden to practice as an architect in Germany on account of being Jewish. He moved first to Yugoslavia
Yugoslavia
Yugoslavia refers to three political entities that existed successively on the western part of the Balkans during most of the 20th century....
, then, in 1938, to London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
. There he joined the Modern Architectural Research (MARS) Group
MARS Group
The Modern Architectural Research Group, or MARS Group, was a British architectural think tank founded in 1933 by several prominent architects and architectural critics of the time involved in the British modernist movement...
where, as chair of the town planning subcommittee, he was involved in drawing up the modernist MARS plan for post war London published in 1942. Between 1941 and 1945 he taught architecture and planning at the Oxford School of Architecture, then, from 1945 at the Architectural Association in London. He retired in 1965 before moving to Austria
Austria
Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...
in 1969.
Glass in Modern Architecture
Influenced by the principles of the Die Neue Sachlichkeit (New ObjectivityNew Objectivity
The New Objectivity is a term used to characterize the attitude of public life in Weimar Germany as well as the art, literature, music, and architecture created to adapt to it...
), Glass in Modern Architecture, published in 1929, has been described by Raymond McGrath
Raymond McGrath
Raymond McGrath was an Australian-born architect and interior designer who for the greater part of his career was Principal Architect for the Office of Public Works in Ireland.-Life:...
as a 'prophetic book'. As well as visually presenting possibilities of glass, for instance, in the exterior walls of buildings, for the first time, it presents a pictorial history of the new architecture of the 1920s, including the early work of Mies Van der Rohe, the Bauhaus at Dessau
Dessau
Dessau is a town in Germany on the junction of the rivers Mulde and Elbe, in the Bundesland of Saxony-Anhalt. Since 1 July 2007, it is part of the merged town Dessau-Roßlau. Population of Dessau proper: 77,973 .-Geography:...
and the Weissenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart.
The written part of the book is limited, consisting of an introduction and some writing on material and techniques, omitted from later editions. Something of Korn's enthusiasm for the new architectural possibilities of the material is conveyed. Glass, he claims ist da, und es ist nicht da , it is 'noticeable yet not quite visible ...the great membrane, full of mystery, delicate yet tough'.
The MARS Plan for London
- "The plan for London issued by the Mars Group (the English wing of CIAM) and prepared by their Town Planning Committee was a marked contrast to anything that had gone before and, one might add, anything produced subsequently. It was frankly Utopian and Socialistic in concept." Dennis Sharp, 1971.
Influenced by the pan European CIAM (Congres Internationeaux d'Architecture Moderne)
Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne
The Congrès internationaux d'architecture moderne – CIAM was an organization founded in 1928 and disbanded in 1959, responsible for a series of events and congresses arranged around the world by the most prominent architects of the time, with the objective of spreading the principles of the Modern...
, the MARS (Modern Architectural Research) Group were interested in applying the ideas of the modernist movement in Britain, most notably in a post war plan for London. As chair of the plan's governing committee at MARS, Arthur Korn worked with what was described as a 'small and devoted' group including architects Arthur Ling and Maxwell Fry
Maxwell Fry
Edwin Maxwell Fry, CBE, RA, FRIBA, FRTPI, known as Maxwell Fry , was an English modernist architect of the middle and late 20th century, known for his buildings in Britain, Africa and India....
, the latter who worked as secretary, and fellow Jewish emigre, engineer Felix Samuely
Felix Samuely
Felix James Samuely was a Structural engineer.Born in Vienna, he immigrated to Britain in 1933. Worked with Erich Mendelsohn on the De la Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea , the British Pavilion for the Brussels World’s Fair and on various parts of the Festival of Britain. Published MARS plan for...
. Korn is described as having been 'the main spring of the enterprise' and as providing an 'infectious enthusiasm' that drove the project forward. Influenced by the Soviet urbanist Miliutin, the plan essentially conceived the centre of the city remaining much the same but with a series of linear forms or tongues extending from the Thames, described as like a herring bone, composed of social units and based around the rail network. Habitation in each social unit was to consist mainly of flats and owed much to Le Corbusier
Le Corbusier
Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier , was a Swiss-born French architect, designer, urbanist, writer and painter, famous for being one of the pioneers of what now is called modern architecture. He was born in Switzerland and became a French citizen in 1930...
's notion of the unite d'habitation
Unité d'Habitation
The Unité d'Habitation is the name of a modernist residential housing design principle developed by Le Corbusier, with the collaboration of painter-architect Nadir Afonso...
. Described as 'unworkable' by Dennis Sharp
Dennis Sharp
Dennis Sharp was a British architect, professor, curator, historian, author and editor.Dennis Sharp studied at Bedford Modern School and at Luton School of Art...
, in his 1971 essay on the plan, he concedes it 'was not a concrete scheme but a concept that would by its very nature produce interpretations'. Marmaras and Sutcliffe argue the plan 'saw London almost entirely in terms of movement ...[being] presented primarily as a centre of exchange and communications'. Moughtin and Shirley (1995) note that one of the aims of the plan was to promote public transport, where with railways integral to planning, the 'need for cars will be few'. . Korn's initial chairmanship of the plan was interrupted by his 18 month internship in the Isle of Man
Isle of Man
The Isle of Man , otherwise known simply as Mann , is a self-governing British Crown Dependency, located in the Irish Sea between the islands of Great Britain and Ireland, within the British Isles. The head of state is Queen Elizabeth II, who holds the title of Lord of Mann. The Lord of Mann is...
from 1939, on account of his German citizenship and perceived Communist sympathies, the period during which work on the plan fissled out. On his release, in 1941, work recommenced, an exhibition of the plan was organised and a 'description and analysis' was published under the joint authorship of Arthur Korn and Felix Samuely in the Architectural Association journal in 1942.
Teaching years at the Architectural Association
Arthur Korn taught at the Architectural Association in London, from 1945, for over 20 years . A year after his retirement a collection of essays was published, edited by Dennis Sharp, to mark his time spent there. Sharp's preface referred to Korn's 'quiet achievement in influencing generations of architects and planners', through his work and his teaching. Edward Carter's introduction writes of Korn as teacher, who, at this best, gave the impression of 'a great performance', and describes how:- "The widening of his exposition from some explicit detail to a comprehensive view of life as a whole, illustrated with athletic gesture and by drawings which extended exuberantly across the blackboard to comprehend in one diagram a whole wealth of ideas, and all the time the flow of his emotive, witty multilingual words…".
Influenced by the unitary aesthetic of the Bauhaus, Arthur Korn was described as someone whose vision of architecture spanned the 'whole range of scales from town to teaspoon'. In his teaching, as in his work in England, he was concerned with the relationship between architecture and planning, how, through these forms, we can express the 'uniqueness of modern life' and overcome the problems it presents.
Whilst contributing to a retrospective analysis of the MARS plan for London, in 1971, Korn describes architecture as something in which:
- "The battle between the machine-man and the analytical artist, between the collective and the individual, putting itself in order like the voice of music - free and according to mystic laws - repeats the ascension from the necessity of the constructive-analytical to the intuitive-artistic reality.".
Whilst praised for his passion and willingness to accept 'paper plans' and 'Utopian projects', he could sometimes be uncompromising and frank. On a visit to a newly built block of flats in Portsmouth, he is known to have exclaimed to those present, many of whom were ex-students of his:
'You have built these chicken-coops, these rabbit hutches! You?'.
Buildings
- 1922-1924: Large house for Jeanette Goldstein, later "House of German gymnasia". Demolished in West BerlinWest BerlinWest Berlin was a political exclave that existed between 1949 and 1990. It comprised the western regions of Berlin, which were bordered by East Berlin and parts of East Germany. West Berlin consisted of the American, British, and French occupation sectors, which had been established in 1945...
, Arysallee / Sensburger Avenue (c. 1935). - 1923: Kruger residence in Berlin-Westend.
- 1924: Benda residence in Berlin-Westend.
- 1924: Factory Building the Hermann Guiard & Co. shoe factory in Burg bei Magdeburg, Blumenthaler highway.
- 1924: Residence for Dr. Krojanker in Burg, near Magdeburg.
- 1924: Goldstein House, Berlin-Westend, (with Siegfried Weitzmann).
- 1924: House for Fritz Wasservogel in Berlin-Westend, Länderallee / Bayernallee (Demolished in 1970).
- 1926: Reconstruction of the office building of the Berlin guard and Schließgesellschaft in Berlin.
- 1927-1928: House of Dr. Martin Abraham, in Berlin-Zehlendorf, Berry Street.
- 1928: Shop of the company Kopp & Joseph in Berlin.
- 1930-1931: new buildings, the rubber factory Julius FrommJulius FrommJulius Fromm was a Polish-Jewish entrepreneur, chemist, and inventor of a process for making condoms from liquified rubber.-Biography:...
in Berlin-Köpenick, Friedrichshagener Street.
Books
Glas. Im Bau und als Gebrauchsgegenstand. (Glass in Modern Architecture) (Berlin: 1929)History Builds the Town. (London: Lund, Humphries, 1953)