Martin Wagner (1885 - 1957) was a German architect, city planner, and author, best known as the driving force behind the construction of modernist housing projects in interwar
BerlinBerlin is the capital city and one of sixteen states of Germany. With a population of 3.4 million within its city limits, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city and the eighth most populous urban area in the European Union...
.
Tall, angular, loyally Socialist, and uncompromising in his opinions, Wagner was educated at the
Technical University of BerlinThe Technical University of Berlin is located in Berlin, Germany....
and worked as draftsman in the office of planner
Hermann MuthesiusAdam Gottlieb Hermann Muthesius , known as Hermann Muthesius, was a German architect, author and diplomat, perhaps best known for promoting many of the ideas of the English Arts and Crafts movement within Germany and for his subsequent influence on early pioneers of German architectural modernism...
, before being appointed the City Building Commissioner for
SchönebergSchöneberg 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....
in 1918 (now an inner-city area of Berlin).
He served as the chief city planner of Berlin from 1925, and most of Berlin's
Modernist Housing EstatesBerlin Modernism Housing Estates consists of six subsidized housing estates that testify to innovative housing policies from 1910 to 1933, especially during the Weimar Republic, when the city of Berlin was particularly progressive socially, politically and culturally...
, now recognized as a
UNESCOThe United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations established on 16 November 1945...
World Heritage SiteA UNESCO World Heritage Site is a site that is on the list that is maintained by the international World Heritage Programme administered by the UNESCO World Heritage Committee, composed of 21 state parties which are elected by their General Assembly for a four-year term.A World Heritage Site is a...
, were constructed under his leadership.
Martin Wagner (1885 - 1957) was a German architect, city planner, and author, best known as the driving force behind the construction of modernist housing projects in interwar
BerlinBerlin is the capital city and one of sixteen states of Germany. With a population of 3.4 million within its city limits, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city and the eighth most populous urban area in the European Union...
.
Germany
Tall, angular, loyally Socialist, and uncompromising in his opinions, Wagner was educated at the
Technical University of BerlinThe Technical University of Berlin is located in Berlin, Germany....
and worked as draftsman in the office of planner
Hermann MuthesiusAdam Gottlieb Hermann Muthesius , known as Hermann Muthesius, was a German architect, author and diplomat, perhaps best known for promoting many of the ideas of the English Arts and Crafts movement within Germany and for his subsequent influence on early pioneers of German architectural modernism...
, before being appointed the City Building Commissioner for
SchönebergSchöneberg 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....
in 1918 (now an inner-city area of Berlin).
He served as the chief city planner of Berlin from 1925, and most of Berlin's
Modernist Housing EstatesBerlin Modernism Housing Estates consists of six subsidized housing estates that testify to innovative housing policies from 1910 to 1933, especially during the Weimar Republic, when the city of Berlin was particularly progressive socially, politically and culturally...
, now recognized as a
UNESCOThe United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations established on 16 November 1945...
World Heritage SiteA UNESCO World Heritage Site is a site that is on the list that is maintained by the international World Heritage Programme administered by the UNESCO World Heritage Committee, composed of 21 state parties which are elected by their General Assembly for a four-year term.A World Heritage Site is a...
, were constructed under his leadership. In 1924 he founded the building society Gehag, which was responsible for seventy percent of Berlin's housing built from 1924 through 1933, amounting to many thousands of residential units.
Wagner was more planner than design-architect, and few individual building designs are directly attributable to him. His role was parallel to
Ernst MayErnst 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...
's role in Frankfurt-am-Main: the leader of a large-scale effort to standardize building requirements, rationalize construction practice, organize industrial suppliers and labor unions, all in the effort to mass-produce housing.
In his German projects Wagner was a frequent collaborator with German landscape architect
Leberecht MiggeLeberecht Migge was a German landscape architect, regional planner and polemical writer, best known for the incorporation of social gardening principles in the Siedlungswesen movement during the Weimar Republic...
.
As the Nazis came to power through the early 1930s, Wagner fell under increasing pressure and suspicion as a committed Social Democrat and longtime member of the
SPDThe Social Democratic Party of Germany is Germany's oldest political party. The party governed at the federal level in a grand coalition with the Christian Democratic Union and the Christian Social Union until conceding defeat in the federal election of September 2009...
. He was expelled from the
Deutscher WerkbundThe 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...
in 1933 and decided to leave the country. He spent three years in Turkey in exile. His work there included the city plan for
AnkaraAnkara is the capital of Turkey and the country's second largest city after Istanbul. The city has a mean elevation of , and as of 2007 the city had a population of 4,751,360, which includes eight districts under the city's administration...
, and a brief reunion with colleague
Bruno TautBruno Julius Florian Taut , was a prolific German architect, urban planner and author active in the Weimar period....
.
United States
In 1938 Wagner took a position teaching city planning at the
Harvard Graduate School of DesignThe Harvard Graduate School of Design is a graduate school at Harvard University offering degrees in Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Planning and Design.-History:...
, his immigration to the United States assisted by his colleague
Walter GropiusWalter 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....
. Among Wagner's students at the GSD were
William WursterWilliam Wilson Wurster was an influential American architect and architectural teacher at the University of California, Berkeley and at MIT....
and Catherine Bauer.
But already by 1940, his relationship with Gropius was strained. Wagner complained of Gropius abandoning the underlying social principles of modernism, and practicing modernism only as a style. On the other hand, Wagner's purism may not have been serving him well: in 1944 he produced a new city plan for
BostonBoston is the capital and largest city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is considered the economic and cultural center of the region and is sometimes regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England"...
which called for a complete razing and restructuring of the city's entire downtown area.
Wagner took American citizenship in 1944; he served as professor at the GSD until retirement in 1951. Wagner's son Bernard Wagner was also an architect.
External links
(in German)
- Houser, by H. Peter Oberlander, Eva Newbrun, Martin Meyerson