DHis man is an open skeptic. He does not believe that “in the long run, Homo sapiens has the ability to make the world he lives in smarter, more livable and more economical”. This is what Wolfgang Pehnt mentioned in the preface of his great work “German Architecture Since 1900” published in 2005. In the next 16 years, almost nothing happened that could make architectural historians and critics make mistakes. At this time, architects’ desire for utopia has grown again, especially in this country, a fact that hardly challenges him. In his nine years of life, he has seen too many great plans fail because of this.
Suspicion makes Pehnt a sarcasm, but not a cynic. He has repeatedly intervened in debates about architecture, urban development, and preservation of historical sites. For example, whether the interior of St. Paul’s Church in Frankfurt should be redesigned in a historic way in accordance with the proposal of Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and the support of political scientist Herfried Minkler. In disputeNo one is required to expose the historical oblivion of this method, because he may be the best connoisseur of Rudolf Schwartz’s work. According to his design, the Paul’s Church, which was destroyed in the war, was rebuilt into its current simplicity and sublime. Form, the only ruthless one can deny aura. In this case, Pehnt’s intervention is also clear. Out of a reasonable understanding of the weight of discourse, he has repeatedly pursued results and does not shy away from controversy. However, he never crossed the boundaries of participating in radicalism.
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In addition to Schwarz, Pehnt has written numerous monographs for Hans Poelzig, Gottfried Böhm, and Karljosef Schattner. In this choice, Pehnt’s own ideal emerged: he prefers architects who are committed to modernity, but they know how to eliminate the danger of freezing in a functionalist corset in a very different way through traditional awareness and stubbornness. It may not be a coincidence that Pehnt’s three favorite people, Schwarz, Böhm, and Schattner, are closely related to the Catholic Church. Critics value educated builders with strong language, such as compatriot Oswald Mathias Ungers from Cologne. In 2011, he became the first critic to hold his own exhibition at the Frankfurt Architectural Museum. Its title is “Rules and Exceptions”. This is again the subject of tension between “ingenuity as a sign of creative achievement” and “intelligent use of known forms”.
Construction and reconstruction
Since 1974, Pehnt has led the Deutschlandfunk literature and art department for more than two decades, and on a part-time basis has presented his impressive list of architectural publications-including classics of expressionist history; he also regularly Write for this newspaper. Like others, he has a talent for making complex buildings appear in front of readers in elegant, easy-to-understand terms, and classifying them in a large historical context. Some collections of essays describe this point. In the preface quoted above, he described his work as an architectural historian as a process of “building and reconstruction” because the narrator is not only a reporter but also an inventor. Needless to say, Pehnt is only prepared to accept the reconstruction of the architectural world under the strictest guidelines.
In 1995, Pehnt retired from his daily work. Julius Posner died the following year, and no one in the guild would question who was the only one who had the right to inherit the throne of the German architectural critic Nestor. Since then, he has been a ruler of work rather than a representative, until 2009 as a professor at the University of Bochum. Today, the great architect Wolfgang Pehnt in the history of architecture is celebrating his 90th birthday.
