Kurt Spielmann

Kurt Spielmann was a German architect who greatly contributed to German modern architecture in Czechoslovakia. His buildings combine the monumental modernism of the housing complexes of the so-called Red Vienna, the circle of Viennese avant-garde architects represented mainly by Josef Frank, the architecture of the Bauhaus circle and the local tradition.
 

Spielmann studied at the German Technical University in Brno and then in Vienna under the tutelage of architects Siegfried Theiße, Franz Krauß and Leopold Simona. In the mid-1920s, he returned to Czechoslovakia, settling in Prague, where his more famous uncle Max Spielmann was working at the time, designing representative mansions in the style of modern baroque.
 

In the late 1920s, together with Alfred Teller, Kurt Spielmann designed an apartment complex in Vienna, which developed the older concept of the so-called dorfs, semi-open housing complexes that formed a transition between the bustling city and smaller communities. His design of Josef Martínek’s villa in Barrandov, on today’s Pod Habrovou Street, dates from 1931. In 1932 he met a couple of important German textile industrialists from the town of Dvůr Králové – Paul Deutsch and Ernst Mautner. He built representative family houses for both of them in Dvůr Králové. In the case of Paul Deutsch’s villa, he combined a traditional country villa and avant-garde principles of a flowing living hall with French windows or a glass wall facing the garden. In many ways, these houses follow Ernst Wiesner’s designs of residential architecture in Brno in both form and internal layout. For Ernst’s younger brother, Spielmann designed a country house in Třebechovice pod Orebem. Unlike other country houses that Spielmann had designed up to that time, this one had a completely different concept. The ground-floor house with an almost square floor plan is based on the prototypical Haus am Horn designed by Georg Much and Walter Gropius in Weimar. Spielmann has broken the regularity of the nine-year-old model with several different levels of the living hall and the other parts of the house surrounding it, and with a terrace to which the hall opens through a glass wall. In the original design, the house was to have a roof terrace, but this idea was probably abandoned. The large plot also included a swimming pool for summer fun.
 

Spielmann developed these attempts to design an efficient and modern dwelling, which would be both sufficiently variable and representative, with spectacular spatial solutions, in the villa of Karel and Malči Fuchs. A glass wall separates the living hall facing the garden from the sunroom accessed by a window in the raised lounge. Two flights of stairs led from the service and representative part of the house met at one end on the first floor.
 

The purely functionalist principles without any signs of grandeur and symmetry in the street façade are developed in Seger’s villa in Teplice whose double entrance – to both the lowered and raised ground floor – separates the operational and residential/representational functions, resembling the concept of the villa as a ‘living machine’. Spielmann’s work was prematurely concluded by the project of the reconstruction and extension of Otakar Smetana’s house for in Kukleny, a family house in Hlubočepy and a tenement house at 2067 Klimentská Street in Prague with travertine tiles in the parterre, in the distinctive window chambranle jambs and in the spandrels.
  

Spielmann’s broad horizons and ability to combine often contradictory traditions and architectural innovations convinced his clients and could be described as follows: “As the examples of the Třebechovice Lufthaus (an elevated library with a study) and the Fuchs’ villa (a window between the elevated living room and the sunroom), the spectacular level differences as well as the choice of luxurious cladding materials in wood and marble and the integration of built-in furniture articulating the space show, Spielmann was one of the Viennese admirers of the Loos school. His effort to connect the living space and the garden with glass walls with sliding doors, strip windows and an adjoining terrace, conveniences such as the patented window opening mechanism designed for the Karlík villa in Prague–Barrandov, and the design of very progressive, rationally laid out kitchens with modern fittings again prove that Spielmann knew the principles of European avant-garde architecture.” [2] Architectural historian Iris Meder also characterizes Spielmann’s architectural designs as an example of the Viennese modern grammar and the international style. [3]
 

After a few months in the Terezín Jewish ghetto (Theresienstadt), Kurt Spielmann was transported, presumably to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp, where he became one of the approximately six million Jewish victims of the Shoah.

 

LZL

 

Notes
 

[1] Ladislav Zikmund-Lender, Vídeňská gramatika se setkává s internacionální funkcionalitou: Architekt Kurt Spielmann na Královéhradecku, in: Coll., Královéhradecko, 2019, vol. 10, p. 383–403, cit. p. 385–386 a 389–391
 

[2] Ladislav Zikmund-Lender, Vídeňská gramatika se setkává s internacionální funkcionalitou: Architekt Kurt Spielmann na Královéhradecku, in: Coll., Královéhradecko, 2019, vol. 10, p. 383–403, cit. p. 392
 

[3] Iris Meder, Offene Welten: Die Wiener Schule im Einfamilienhausbau 1910–1938. dissertation, Institut für Kunstgeschichte der Universität Stuttgart, 2003, p. 360