Teaching the History of Architecture in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland: "Architekturgeschichte" vs. "Bauforschung"

Abstract

In 1934, Walter Gropius took surprised young architect, Rudolf Hillebrecht, to the Pergamon Museum in Berlin and proudly explained to him at length the models of the ancient cities of Milet and Priene, details of their architecture, the proportions of city squares, and spatial urban relationships. At that moment, you opened my eyes, Hillebrecht recalled decades later, as city planner in postwar Hannover, in letter to Gropius. This little incident touches upon the historical contradictions and complex parameters that have shaped the teaching of architectural history in Germany and its German-speaking neighbors to this day.1 When the two men met, the Nazis had been in power for almost year, and the Berlin Bauhaus had been closed. We do not know if Gropius's enthusiasm for classical architecture had anything to do with the recent political changes, but in any case, he probably knew what he was talking about. As an architecture student in Munich, he had attended August Thiersch's famously charismatic lectures on classical architecture, which were purportedly as moving as a church service.2 Architectural training was still almost synonymous with the teaching of historical styles at that point, but in Munich, Gropius also witnessed emerging tendencies to move architectural education toward construction, materials, and other practical matters, which directly informed his Bauhaus manifesto of April 1919.3 The separation and marginalization of architectural history within an architect's education that came with the end of historicism has lasted to the present. Berlin's Pergamon Museum, where the two men went, had just been opened in 1930 to present treasures that German archaeologists and especially architects had excavated, documented, reconstructed, and acquired (often under circumstances that would not hold up to scrutiny today) at Pergamon, Milet, Priene, and Babylon since the mid-nineteenth century. Despite the changes brought about by Gropius and others, substantial group of architectural historians in schools of architecture continues the methods and traditions formed at these excavations to this day. In the early 1960s, when Hillebrecht recalls Gropius's lesson, the rebuilding of the devastated German cities began to face emerging d ubts about the radical modern dogma. Hannover had suffered extensive damage in World War II, and the rban rebuilding efforts afterward (since 1948 under Hillebrecht) were among the most uncompromising in their applicatio of modernist, traffic-oriented planning parameters ha fully mbraced the suggestions of Gropius and others.4 The considerable loss of historical structures since the war led to an intensified debate about historic preservati n, its introduction as subject at many universities, and eventually to the well-funded federal and state organizations that now provide many positions for art and architectural historians.5