Work on this project at the University of Innsbruck has been completed and will be continued at the University of Stuttgart.
Duration of this project: 2021 - 2024
Project management: Christiane Weber (Innsbruck University), Alexandre Kostka (Université de Strasbourg)
Post-Doc researchers: Tobias Möllmer (Innsbruck University), Anne-Doris Meyer (Université de Strasbourg)
Project partners: Sabine Bengel (Fondation de l’Œuvre Notre-Dame), Marc C. Schurr (Université de Strasbourg)
Financing: bi-national research funding of the ANR (Agence Nationale pour la Recherche, France) and the FWF (Fund for the promotion of scientific research, Austria)
Using the example of the rescue of one of the outstanding Gothic buildings - Strasbourg Cathedral between 1907 and 1926 - this interdisciplinary co-operation project examines an important but previously neglected chapter in the history of building technology, monuments and culture. Johann Knauth (1864-1924), who was appointed master builder of the cathedral in 1905, realised in 1903 that the north tower was in danger of collapsing and, after extensive studies, initiated rescue measures that were not fully completed until 1926 by his successors Charles-Auguste Pierre (1875-1962) and Clément Dauchy (1865-1927). His tragic life (he became a victim of the rivalries between France and Germany after the First World War and died shortly after his expulsion) should not obscure the fact that the Strasbourg cathedral building workshop was also a place of technical and cultural exchange - and has remained so to this day. These issues are closely linked to the cultural and historical significance of the cathedral's building lodges; a topic that is highly topical due to the current candidature of 18 European building lodges for the inscription of ‘building lodges’ as a UNESCO intangible cultural heritage.
For a long time, both the German and French sides claimed the renovation project as a technical achievement of their respective nations. It was only in 2015 that the city of Strasbourg installed a memorial plaque opposite the cathedral to Johann Knauth, the author of the rescue campaign, thus putting an end to the ideological dispute. Our working hypothesis assumes that the technically highly innovative renovation of the tower foundation cannot be described as exclusively ‘German’ or ‘French’, but was a combination of German and French expertise. In this respect, the ‘Knauth case’ is also an invitation to reconsider the cultural-historical position of other mediators in the area of the then Reichsland Alsace-Lorraine, such as the Metz cathedral master builder Paul Tornow, or the Strasbourg professors and museum directors. The scientific analysis of the surviving sources, especially the detailed ‘construction site diary’, will reveal that the engineering and monumental achievement went beyond national rhetoric and consisted of an accumulation of technical knowledge in the field of reinforced concrete and restoration science, which was probably only possible in this form in a ‘laboratory of Europe’, Strasbourg.
Find out more about this project in French.
Work on this project at the University of Innsbruck has been completed and will be continued at the University of Stuttgart.
Project management: Univ.-Prof. Dr.-Ing. Christiane Weber (Universität Innsbruck), Prof. Dr. Andreas Putz (Technische Universität München), Prof. Dr.-Ing. Eberhard Möller (Hochschule Karlsruhe)
Participants: Dipl.-Ing. Benjamin Schmid (Universität Innsbruck); Baris Wenzel, MA (Hochschule Karlsruhe); Mareike Stöber, MA (Technische Universität München)
The project is dedicated to the last witnesses of model statics. This refers to models that were used in civil engineering to analyse, understand, literally comprehend and ultimately even design and test load-bearing structures.
In the first half of the 20th century up until the 1960s, it was extremely time-consuming to analyse the shape of cable bridges, dams and wide-span load-bearing structures such as shells and tent structures in drawings and calculate their dimensions. If the structures were too complex to be designed or analysed using mathematical methods, measurement models in the narrower sense were used, which in German-speaking countries is known as model statics.
This refers to a method in which the load-bearing structure is reconstructed using scaled, geometrically and elastically similar models in order to gain an idea of the load-bearing behaviour on the basis of these models and to determine measured values that are converted to the actual load-bearing structure using similarity mathematics in order to dimension it. This era of measurement models, which coincided with the period of high industrialisation, ended with the introduction of powerful computers in the 1970s, which were more efficient and therefore cheaper than model statics.
Engineering models differ fundamentally from architectural models, as they were rarely intended as presentation models. Measurement models in particular were created to test the load-bearing behaviour, often to the point of failure, which required ‘controlled destruction’ of the objects. The fact that engineers, unlike architects, still lack an awareness of their own history has also meant that only very rarely do measurement models find their way into archives and museums. Yet these engineering models have their own value as a store of knowledge that can be used to retrace planning and construction processes. Models are much easier to read than plans, especially for laypeople, which means that these objects would be of great interest to architecture and technology museums and academic collections, among others. Their preservation faces the challenge of a dual identity as material artefacts on the one hand and as scientific and technical apparatus on the other.
An interdisciplinary research group consisting of young scientists from the disciplines of structural engineering history, civil engineering and restoration science has set itself the goal - in close co-operation with a scientific advisory board of experienced scientists - of fundamentally recording the measurement models that still exist in German-speaking countries, researching their scientific and structural engineering historical context and identifying possibilities for the long-term preservation of this technical cultural heritage.
Find out more about this project.
Participants: Prof. Dr. habil. Alexandre Kostka (Université de Strasbourg, laboratoire SAGE); Assoc. Prof.-Ing. Volker Ziegler (ENSA Strasbourg, laboratoire AMUP); Prof. Dr. habil. Piotr Marciniak (Poznan University of Technology); Assoc Prof. Dr Hanna Brendel (Poznan University of Technology); Prof. Dr. Joaquín Medina Warmburg (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology); Assoc Prof. Malgorzata Praczyk, Adam Mickewicz (University Poznan)
Only a few cities in the Second German Empire, apart from the imperial capital Berlin, were given the privilege of being elevated to the status of a royal residence by the prestigious construction of a new imperial quarter. Significantly, all of these cities were located in border regions - including Strasbourg and Poznan. From the perspective of an ‘entangled history’, this project searches for unresolved dimensions of a history of relationships and how to deal with a difficult legacy.
The aim of the German administration in Strasbourg was not only to strengthen the city militarily, but also to increase its economic power in order to reconcile the population. The Imperial Palace (1886) was linked to the newly founded Kaiser Wilhelm University by a representative boulevard, thus architecturally representing the ‘regermanisation’ of Alsace-Lorraine.
The expansion of Poznan in West Prussia was staggered: having belonged to Prussia since the first partition, it was expanded into a fortress from 1838. It was not until 1904 that an urban expansion project entrusted to Joseph Stübben began, in the context of which the Kaiserforum was also created, which has a similar function as a hinge between the historic old town and the new neighbourhood as in Strasbourg. In Poznan, as in Strasbourg, these developments were steered by a strong city administration whose goals were not the same as those of imperial policy.
The end of the First World War did not lead to an immediate break with the architectural developments of the pre-war period, even though in Poznan the members of the municipal building authorities were almost completely replaced.
After 1945, the demolition of the imperial residences was considered in both cities, especially as both buildings were used by the Nazi administration. In the end, the buildings continued to be used for practical reasons. With the recognition of the extension of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Strasbourg to include the central part of the German city extension, the process of appropriation in Alsace is largely complete, while it is still in full swing in Poznan. In this research and exhibition project, the handling of the German cultural heritage in the sense of a ‘shared heritage’ in Alsace and Poland will be scientifically analysed under cultural and architectural-historical aspects and presented to a broader public in the context of exhibitions.
Find out more on the website of the École d'Architecture Strasbourg and the Intensive Programme of the Erasmus Mundus Master of Arts in Euroculture (IP).
Participants: Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil. Christiane Weber M.A. - Institute for Architectural History (IFAG), University of Stuttgart; Dipl.-Ing. Baris Wenzel - Institute for Architectural History (IFAG), University of Stuttgart
The building industry is facing great challenges these days because a large part of the building stock dates to the post-war period, for which there are still no model solutions for dealing with it. At the same time, current problems such as the scarcity of resources and energy must be considered, so that great importance is attached to the conservation of embodied energy. This is precisely why there are already forward-looking and innovative approaches to solving these problems in architecture and engineering, such as new digital planning methods, automated manufacturing processes, increased use of renewable building materials, etc. A large part of the Cluster of Excellence Integrative Computational Design and Construction for Architecture (IntCDC) at the University of Stuttgart is also dedicated to these solutions, but the architectural practice is bound by the legal framework conditions and standards in the building industry, so implementation is often difficult and innovation in the building industry generally progresses only very slowly.
The demand for a new light architecture in war-damaged and resource-scarce Germany in the middle of the last century can be seen as a parallel to the current necessary changes in construction and architecture. Equally comparable was the endeavour to build material-savingly and efficiently with high architectural standards, as well as the emerging computer application as a design and calculation tool comparable to today's steadily growing digital methods. Accordingly, the investigation of how industrialisation and automation in the post-war period have shaped the profession of architecture and engineering is a research desideratum, the results of which will be examined for potential transferability to current problems.