Rudolf Frankel
Encyclopedia
Rudolf Fränkel, often anglicised as Rudolf or Rudolph Frankel (born 14 June 1901 in Neisse, Upper Silesia
, now Nysa, Poland
, died 23 April 1974 in Oxford, Ohio
) was a German
-Jewish architect
who was among the leaders of the pre-war avant-garde
movement in Berlin
. He later emigrated to Bucharest, London and the United States, where he taught at Miami University
, Ohio.
and serving as a volunteer in the Imperial Luftwaffe
, he studied at the Royal Technical College in Charlottenburg (now the Berlin Institute of Technology) and did his practical study with his father. He served his apprenticeship from 1922 to 1924 with Richard Riemerschmid
in Munich
and then Gustav Hart in Berlin. In 1922 he married Eva Tarrasch, the daughter of a physician.
In 1924 he opened his own office in Berlin. His first large commission was the Gartenstadt Atlantic, a moderate-income housing development in Gesundbrunnen
, which has been a protected landmark since 1995. The buildings were unusually brightly coloured even for modernist housing of the period: the ground floor was violet, the upper floors pale green, the entrances grey and the balcony strips yellow. This detail has not been preserved; colours were updated as part of the 2001-05 renovation. In 1927, the development won the first prize for best housing development from the Deutscher Werkbund for inverting the concept of the garden city
into an inner-city development with internal parks, and for the holistic lifestyle made possible by the central location. The first portion of the development to be completed was the Lichtburg cinema and its associated commercial building housing restaurants, meeting and banquet facilities, shops and a bowling alley, next to the S- and U-Bahn station. The cinema was one of the first with sound; the building as a whole won praise for its modernity and for the use of space. He went on to design other residential buildings, housing developments and places of amusement in Berlin and environs, including a block of 400 flats finished in yellow stucco over a brown brick ground floor on the Schöneberg
city park. In 1925 he became a member of the Deutscher Werkbund
.
Fränkel's designs were recognised in the architectural press as exemplars of modernist architecture and of efficient use of space. In addition, his amusement buildings, particularly the Lichtburg, were famous examples of Architecture of the Night
(Architektur der Nacht) or Light Architecture (Lichtarchitektur). In the mid-1920s Walter Gropius
invited him to join the Bauhaus
faculty, but he declined on grounds of lack of time.
After the Nazi seizure of power, Jews and modernists suffered increasingly from discrimination; after 1933 Jewish architects were effectively banned from working, since they could not join the Reichskulturkammer
. In summer 1933, Fränkel emigrated to Bucharest, where he designed another major cinema, the Scala, and further residential buildings.
Bucharest also became dangerous; in 1937 Fränkel moved to London, where his brother in law was already established. In England and Wales, he designed significant industrial and residential buildings that today constitute major examples of "continental modernism". In 1938 he designed a house for himself on Stanmore Hill in Great Stanmore. While in England he became a founder member of the "Circle" Group of German and Austrian Architects and Engineers (in 1943), was a member of Architects for the Redevelopment of Distressed Areas (in 1945) and of the Royal Institute of British Architects
(from 1947 to 1974: F.R.I.B.A.). However, at the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, he was interned for a short time as an "enemy alien".
Finally, in 1950, he emigrated to the United States to teach at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He joined the American Institute of Planners and in 1954 started the Graduate Program in City Design, probably the first urban design programme at any American university; it became a two-year programme in 1966. Between 1955 and 1964, Rudolf Frankel & Associates developed master plans for several cities, including Loveland, Ohio
. He was hired to plan the repositioning of Evansville, Indiana as a city attractive to industry in the late 1950s and early 1960s. However, he was denied tenure on the pretext of being a foreign national, and when his programme was terminated in 1968, he resigned with regret. He continued to live in Oxford until his death in 1974. In 2006 he was posthumously made Professor Emeritus.
Fränkel's papers are at the Canadian Centre for Architecture
in Montreal
. The Rudolph Frankel Memorial Award at Miami University is awarded to a graduate student who shows promise in urban design or planning.
Upper Silesia
Upper Silesia is the southeastern part of the historical and geographical region of Silesia. Since the 9th century, Upper Silesia has been part of Greater Moravia, the Duchy of Bohemia, the Piast Kingdom of Poland, again of the Lands of the Bohemian Crown and the Holy Roman Empire, as well as of...
, now Nysa, Poland
Nysa, Poland
Nysa is a town in southwestern Poland on the Nysa Kłodzka river with 47,545 inhabitants , situated in the Opole Voivodeship. It is the capital of Nysa County. It comprises the urban portion of the surrounding Gmina Nysa, a mixed urban-rural commune with a total population of 60,123 inhabitants...
, died 23 April 1974 in Oxford, Ohio
Oxford, Ohio
Oxford is a city in northwestern Butler County, Ohio, United States, in the southwestern portion of the state. It lies in Oxford Township, originally called the College Township. The population was 21,943 at the 2000 census. This college town was founded as a home for Miami University. Oxford...
) 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...
who was among the leaders of the pre-war avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
movement 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...
. He later emigrated to Bucharest, London and the United States, where he taught at Miami University
Miami University
Miami University is a coeducational public research university located in Oxford, Ohio, United States. Founded in 1809, it is the 10th oldest public university in the United States and the second oldest university in Ohio, founded four years after Ohio University. In its 2012 edition, U.S...
, Ohio.
Life and career
Fränkel was the son of Louis Fränkel, a government architect who was in Silesia supervising the construction of a railway, and his wife Ida and grew up in a comfortably middle-class Jewish family in Berlin. After completing school with a war emergency AbiturAbitur
Abitur is a designation used in Germany, Finland and Estonia for final exams that pupils take at the end of their secondary education, usually after 12 or 13 years of schooling, see also for Germany Abitur after twelve years.The Zeugnis der Allgemeinen Hochschulreife, often referred to as...
and serving as a volunteer in the Imperial Luftwaffe
Luftwaffe
Luftwaffe is a generic German term for an air force. It is also the official name for two of the four historic German air forces, the Wehrmacht air arm founded in 1935 and disbanded in 1946; and the current Bundeswehr air arm founded in 1956....
, he studied at the Royal Technical College in Charlottenburg (now the Berlin Institute of Technology) and did his practical study with his father. He served his apprenticeship from 1922 to 1924 with Richard Riemerschmid
Richard Riemerschmid
Richard Riemerschmid was a German architect, painter, designer and city planner from Munich. He was a major figure in Jugendstil, the German form of Art Nouveau, and a founder of architecture in the style...
in Munich
Munich
Munich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...
and then Gustav Hart in Berlin. In 1922 he married Eva Tarrasch, the daughter of a physician.
In 1924 he opened his own office in Berlin. His first large commission was the Gartenstadt Atlantic, a moderate-income housing development in Gesundbrunnen
Gesundbrunnen
Gesundbrunnen is a locality of Berlin in the borough of Mitte. It was created as a separate entity by the 2001 administrative reform, formerly the eastern half of the former Wedding district and locality...
, which has been a protected landmark since 1995. The buildings were unusually brightly coloured even for modernist housing of the period: the ground floor was violet, the upper floors pale green, the entrances grey and the balcony strips yellow. This detail has not been preserved; colours were updated as part of the 2001-05 renovation. In 1927, the development won the first prize for best housing development from the Deutscher Werkbund for inverting the concept of the garden city
Garden City
- Places :Australia:*Toowoomba, Queensland, nicknamed "Garden City"*Garden City, a locality within Port Melbourne, Victoria* Westfield Garden City, a Westfield shopping centre in Upper Mount Gravatt, Brisbane...
into an inner-city development with internal parks, and for the holistic lifestyle made possible by the central location. The first portion of the development to be completed was the Lichtburg cinema and its associated commercial building housing restaurants, meeting and banquet facilities, shops and a bowling alley, next to the S- and U-Bahn station. The cinema was one of the first with sound; the building as a whole won praise for its modernity and for the use of space. He went on to design other residential buildings, housing developments and places of amusement in Berlin and environs, including a block of 400 flats finished in yellow stucco over a brown brick ground floor on the Schöneberg
Schöneberg
Schöneberg is a locality of Berlin, Germany. Until Berlin's 2001 administrative reform it was a separate borough including the locality of Friedenau. Together with the former borough of Tempelhof it is now part of the new borough of Tempelhof-Schöneberg....
city park. In 1925 he became a member of the Deutscher Werkbund
Deutscher Werkbund
The Deutscher Werkbund was a German association of artists, architects, designers, and industrialists. The Werkbund was to become an important event in the development of modern architecture and industrial design, particularly in the later creation of the Bauhaus school of design...
.
Fränkel's designs were recognised in the architectural press as exemplars of modernist architecture and of efficient use of space. In addition, his amusement buildings, particularly the Lichtburg, were famous examples of Architecture of the Night
Architecture of the night
Architecture of the night or nocturnal architecture, also referred to as illuminated architecture and, particularly in German, light architecture, is architecture designed to maximize the effect of night lighting, which may include lights from within the building, lights on the facade or outlining...
(Architektur der Nacht) or Light Architecture (Lichtarchitektur). In the mid-1920s 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....
invited him to join the 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...
faculty, but he declined on grounds of lack of time.
After the Nazi seizure of power, Jews and modernists suffered increasingly from discrimination; after 1933 Jewish architects were effectively banned from working, since they could not join the Reichskulturkammer
Reichskulturkammer
The Reichskulturkammer was an institution of Nazi Germany. It was established by law on 22 September 1933 in the course of the Gleichschaltung process at the instigation of Reich Minister Joseph Goebbels as a professional organization of all German creative artists...
. In summer 1933, Fränkel emigrated to Bucharest, where he designed another major cinema, the Scala, and further residential buildings.
Bucharest also became dangerous; in 1937 Fränkel moved to London, where his brother in law was already established. In England and Wales, he designed significant industrial and residential buildings that today constitute major examples of "continental modernism". In 1938 he designed a house for himself on Stanmore Hill in Great Stanmore. While in England he became a founder member of the "Circle" Group of German and Austrian Architects and Engineers (in 1943), was a member of Architects for the Redevelopment of Distressed Areas (in 1945) and of the Royal Institute of British Architects
Royal Institute of British Architects
The Royal Institute of British Architects is a professional body for architects primarily in the United Kingdom, but also internationally.-History:...
(from 1947 to 1974: F.R.I.B.A.). However, at the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, he was interned for a short time as an "enemy alien".
Finally, in 1950, he emigrated to the United States to teach at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He joined the American Institute of Planners and in 1954 started the Graduate Program in City Design, probably the first urban design programme at any American university; it became a two-year programme in 1966. Between 1955 and 1964, Rudolf Frankel & Associates developed master plans for several cities, including Loveland, Ohio
Loveland, Ohio
Loveland is a city in Hamilton, Clermont, and Warren counties in the southwestern part of the U.S. state of Ohio. Considered part of the Greater Cincinnati area, Loveland is located near exit 52 off Interstate 275, about northeast of the Cincinnati city limits. It borders Symmes, Miami and...
. He was hired to plan the repositioning of Evansville, Indiana as a city attractive to industry in the late 1950s and early 1960s. However, he was denied tenure on the pretext of being a foreign national, and when his programme was terminated in 1968, he resigned with regret. He continued to live in Oxford until his death in 1974. In 2006 he was posthumously made Professor Emeritus.
Fränkel's papers are at the Canadian Centre for Architecture
Canadian Centre for Architecture
The Canadian Centre for Architecture is a museum of architecture and research centre in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Phyllis Lambert is the Founding Director and Chair of the Board of Trustees, and Mirko Zardini is the Director and Chief Curator....
in Montreal
Montreal
Montreal is a city in Canada. It is the largest city in the province of Quebec, the second-largest city in Canada and the seventh largest in North America...
. The Rudolph Frankel Memorial Award at Miami University is awarded to a graduate student who shows promise in urban design or planning.
Selected Works
- 1924–1928: Gartenstadt Atlantic settlement, Gesundbrunnen, Berlin
- 1926: Residential building, Emser Straße 14-17a, WilmersdorfWilmersdorfWilmersdorf is an inner city locality of Berlin, formerly a borough by itself but since Berlin's 2001 administrative reform a part of the new borough of Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf.-History:...
, Berlin - 1926–28: Country house for film director Gabriel Levy, Silberberger Straße 29a, Bad SaarowBad SaarowBad Saarow is a municipality in the Oder-Spree district, in Brandenburg, Germany....
- 1927: Honig settlement, Bellermannstraße 72-78, Gesundbrunnen, Berlin
- 1927–1929: Lichtburg cinema at Gartenstadt Atlantic, Gesundbrunnen, Berlin
- 1927–1930: One- and two-family houses at Gartenstadt Frohnau, FrohnauFrohnauFrohnau is a locality in the Reinickendorf borough of Berlin, Germany. It lies in the extreme northern part of the city.- History :Founded in 1910, Frohnau was created whole as a planned community, corresponding to the early twentieth century idea of a Garden City...
, Berlin - 1928: Bridge over the River Ruhr in Westhofen, SchwerteSchwerteSchwerte is a town in the district of Unna, in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany.-Geography:Schwerte is situated in the Ruhr valley, at the south-east border of the Ruhr Area...
(destroyed) - 1929: Two-family house, Warnemünder Straße 28a and b, DahlemDahlem (Berlin)Dahlem is a locality of the Steglitz-Zehlendorf borough in southwestern Berlin. Until Berlin's 2001 administrative reform it was a part of the former borough of Zehlendorf. Dahlem is one of the most affluent parts of the city and home to the main campus of the Free University of Berlin with the...
, Berlin - 1929–32: Lange House (complex for the elderly including theatre, cinema and clinic), Bad Saarow
- 1930: Flats on Grieser Platz, HalenseeHalenseeHalensee is a locality of Berlin in the district of Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf. Until 2004 the former neighbourhood established about 1880 was part of the Wilmersdorf locality, and until 2001 of the same-named former borough...
, Berlin - 1930–1931: Leuchtturm Restaurant, Friedrichstraße 138, MitteMitteMitte is the first and most central borough of Berlin. It was created in Berlin's 2001 administrative reform by the merger of the former districts of Mitte proper, Tiergarten and Wedding; the resulting borough retained the name Mitte. It is one of the two boroughs which comprises former West and...
, Berlin - 1930–31: Four-storey residential buildings at the Schlosspark, PankowPankowPankow is the third borough of Berlin. In Berlin's 2001 administrative reform it was merged with the former boroughs of Prenzlauer Berg and Weißensee; the resulting borough retained the name Pankow.- Overview :...
, Berlin - 1930–1932: Housing on the Stadtpark Schöneberg, Schöneberg, Berlin
- 1931–1932: Stern residence, SchmolzSmolecSmolec is a village in the administrative district of Gmina Kąty Wrocławskie, within Wrocław County, Lower Silesian Voivodeship, in south-western Poland. Prior to 1945 it was Schmolz, Germany....
, near Breslau - 1932–1933: Renovation, Albert Schumann Theatre, Frankfurt am Main (destroyed in 1944, ruins demolished 1960)
- 1933–1934: Pop residence, Caragiale 9, Bucharest
- 1934: Flats for childless couples, Bucharest
- 1934: Resita steel plant, Oţelu RoşuOtelu RosuOţelu Roşu is a town in southwestern Caraş-Severin County, Romania, in the Bistra Valley. It is situated on the national road 68, between Caransebeş and Haţeg...
- 1933–1935: Adriatica Asigurarea building, Bucharest
- 1934–1936: Silk-weaving factory near Bucharest (Velvet Textile Mill)
- 1935–1936: Teatrul de Comedie, Bucharest
- 1935–1937: Malaxa flats, Bucharest
- 1935–1937: Scala cinema, Bucharest
- 1936–1937: Villa Flavian, str. Serg Gheorghe Militaru and Soseaua Kisseleff, Bucharest
- 1937–1938: Rachwalsky residence, Home Counties, for his sister and her husband Max
- 1937–1938: Frankel house, Outer London, now a Grade II listed building
- 1941: E. H. Jones (Machine Tools) Ltd. factory, sales space, canteen, KingsburyKingsburyKingsbury is an area in the London Borough of Brent, northwest London. The name Kingsbury means "The King's Manor".-History:Kingsbury was historically a small parish in the Hundred of Gore and county of Middlesex. Until the nineteenth century it was largely rural with only scattered settlements....
- 1946–1947: Suflex Ltd. factory
- 1946–1948: Sotex Ltd. nylon clothing factory, CongletonCongletonCongleton is a town and civil parish in the unitary authority of Cheshire East and the ceremonial county of Cheshire, England, on the banks of the River Dane, to the west of the Macclesfield Canal and 21 miles south of Manchester. It has a population of 25,750.-History:The first settlements in...
- 1949: Lichfield residence, Stanmore
- 1950: Luralda Ltd. warehouse, London
- 1950: Extension, Rachwalsky residence, New York
Sources
- Julius Rosenthal. The Work of Rudolf Frankel: A Monograph on Slides. Chicago, 1955
- Christina Thomson. "Hauptstadtarchitekten: Erwin Gutkind und Rudolf Fränkel". In: Sylvia Claus, Harold Hammer-Schenk and Ulrich Maximilian Schumann (eds.). Architektur und Assimilation. Die jüdischen Baumeister Berlins. Zurich, 2007.
- Gerardo Brown-Manrique. Rudolf Fränkel and Neues Bauen: Works in Germany, Romania and the United Kingdom. Tübingen: Wasmuth, 2009. ISBN 9783803006950
External links
- Rudolf Fränkel/Rudolf Frankel at ArchINFORMArchINFORMArchINFORM is an online database for international architecture, originally emerging from records of interesting building projects from architecture students from the University of Karlsruhe, Germany....
- Gartenstadt Atlantic