Year Zero to Economic Miracle: Hans Schwippert and Sep Ruf in Postwar West German Building Culture by Lynette Widder (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Year Zero to Economic Miracle: Hans Schwippert and Sep Ruf in Postwar West German Building Culture by Lynette Widder Philipp Nielsen Year Zero to Economic Miracle: Hans Schwippert and Sep Ruf in Postwar West German Building Culture. By Lynette Widder. Zurich: gta Verlag, 2022. Pp. 320. Cloth €52.00. ISBN 9783856764272. Lynette Widder's Year Zero to Economic Miracle charts the architectural practice of Hans Schwippert and Sep Ruf, two prominent West German architects. Widder focuses on five iconic public commissions from the late 1940s, immediately following the establishment of the Federal Republic, until the early 1960s, with Schwippert's St. Hedwig's Cathedral, completed in 1963, literally straddling the German division. Next to the cathedral, the buildings covered (in chronological order) are: the West German parliament building (Bundeshaus) in Bonn (1948–1949) by Schwippert and the Academy of the Arts in Nuremberg (1950–1954) by Ruf for the early years; the West German Pavilion at the Brussels World Fair in 1958, which both men designed together with Egon Eiermann; and the College for Public Administration (Hochschule für Verwaltungswissenschaften) in Speyer (1957–1960) by Ruf. The book is structured into four chronological sections, three of which focus on the buildings and one on theoretical debates in postwar West Germany. In addition to the historical chapters, four more personal reflection chapters conclude each section: one on job books, one on the architecture critic Ulrich Conrads, one on the Ruf family archive, and one on construction drawings. These four reflection chapters chart Widder's own growing interest in Ruf and Schwippert and in becoming an architectural historian. Here, her evocative descriptions of architectural sources and of personal encounters do more than trace a personal journey. These chapters enrich the narrative of postwar architecture and architectural history itself when Widder describes the fate of the Ruf archive or the way the workbooks for the St. Hedwig's Cathedral reveal the complicated process of building across the German-German border. Widder's book forms part of a growing interest in postwar West German—and to a lesser extent East German—architecture and its preservation, which itself follows on the heels of a new wave of historiography on the postwar period. Notably, the book keeps East and West German architectural and political history connected by including St. Hedwig's Cathedral. The architectural clearly dominates, and Widder is an expert in making the field's materiality accessible to the lay reader. The impressive [End Page 509] visual quality of the book, with its over 150 images, many of them in color, further aids Widder in bringing her arguments and the architects' work to life. Widder has two wider objectives beyond recounting the careers of Schwippert and Ruf. For one, she situates the work of the two architects within the West German postwar debate about the genealogy of modern architecture in Germany. At stake in this discussion, which took place on the pages of journals as well as in public encounters such as the Darmstädter Gespräche, a series of public debates in Darmstadt in the early 1950s, was the possibility of a modern architecture in West Germany untarnished by the Third Reich but also independent of the former Bauhaus personnel now mostly active in the United States. Next to this theoretical debate, Widder aims to provide a history of postwar architecture and especially building practices in West Germany. Here she tells a story of architects moving from improvised and individualized work in the immediate postwar period to more serialized and standardized processes and designs as the building industry reestablished itself from the mid-1950s onwards. Here, Widder's account is especially strong. Writing from her own experience as an architect, she renders the architects' plans and the materiality they envisioned and produced legible. Analyzing the archives related to Schwippert and Ruf's buildings, Widder demonstrates how the different styles of the two architects, Schwippert more collaborative and open in his demands, Ruf more exacting and precise, made the former thrive in the early period, and Ruf flourish in the later. When she moves away from their work and the specific buildings and engages with the question of longer historical lines across the...