The Kugelhaus stood at the north-eastern corner of Dresden’s Grosser Garten from 1928 to 1938. The building’s architect, Peter Birkenholz who would claim to be ‘the inventor of the world’s first spherical building’ promoted the practical advantages of the form in an article “Warum nicht Kugelhaüser?” (Why not Spherical Houses?) in the Münchner Illustrierte Presse. He showed illustrations of towns made of spherical structures and described the practical advantages of the form: lower wind-loads, greater volume to surface area, more room for vehicles at street level. The archives show Birkenholz fixed on this single idea, protective of what he saw as his intellectual property and suspicious of imitators(1). His spherical designs can be first seen in a proposal for a building at the head of a suspension bridge in Cologne and in an entry to the competition to design a new headquarters for the League of Nations (2) in Geneva in 1927. He continued to produce proposals for spherical buildings: hotels, boxing stadia, schools, a pavilion at the 1939 New York world fair, and in the 1950s for a spherical carpark as an answer to Munich’s parking problem. None of these proposal were realised. Dresden’s Kugelhaus, a five-storey, steel framed, metal clad, spherical structure was built in less than five months by MAN Maschinenfabrik Augsburg–Nuremberg and was ready, externally at least, for the opening of the exhibition ‘The Technical City’. The Sächsische Volkszeitung would report on the exhibition’s opening in May 1928.
“. . all the innovations of the latest technology a new style of spherical building never seen before not even in America. Surely there will be voices that do not approve of such an experiment. But we live in the age of technology, and no one will be able to presume to recognise its limits today. It was not that long ago that Count Zeppelin’s brilliant work was called madness.”
The building housed retail and exhibition spaces, a hairdressers and a café on the top floor. In its first year, the exhibition attracted over a million visitors and the building became a popular backdrop for photographs.Demolished in 1938, in its absence the building has been interpreted in different and competing ways and its story variously told as a bold future vision, a comic oddity and as a tragic failure. Nevertheless, the building seems to persist in the memory of Dresdeners and its spherical form reappears, quoted in new buildings in the contemporary city(3).
Absence and latency are at the centre of my PhD investigation and research into the way the past comes to be told as heritage. The Kugelhaus is of interest because it shows a threefold absence: of the building itself, the absence of the everyday experiences of its visitors and occupants in the official record, and the absence and gaps in the way it comes to be told as a story.
The institutional archives(4) relating to the Kugelhaus contain a record of its design, technical drawings, contracts and correspondence between the exhibition management, architect and building contractors. My research project seeks to establish an alternative collection of images from domestic and everyday sources; what could be called ‘snaps’. As this collection developed one particular medium emerged, the photocard. Individual photographs were printed as postcards, they had a divided back with space for a message, address and postage stamp. Cameras with postcard format negatives were popular in the early part of the twentieth century. Many of the photocards in this collection I assembled have been written and posted. Although they represent just one side of a conversation, there are no replies, and these were seldom a private communication act, postcards were always sent in the knowledge that they would be read by others. Transcribed and translated, these photo-postcards form the basis of the collection that can be seen at www.fictoheritage.com
(1). It is unlikely that Birkenholz would have been acquainted with earlier, now canonical, precedents for proposals for spherical buildings. According to Susanne von Falkenhausen (2008), it was Viennese art historian Emile Kaufman (1929; 1933) who rediscovered the work of eighteenth century French architects Etienne Boullée’s Cenotaph for Isaac Newton (1785) and Ledoux’s House for a Forrester (1789) and brought them back into the public sphere. Kaufman made the connection between French revolutionary classicism and early twentieth century modernism. It is also unlikely that Birkenholz would have had knowledge of Iwan Leonidow’s unbuilt diploma project for the Lenin Institute and library (1927) exhibited in Moscow. Leonidow used a light bulb for the model of spherical auditorium/planetarium and was first described in 1929 Germany by Robert Mallet Stevens. Birkenholz’s papers do show he was made aware of other spherical structures, such as Timken Tank a pressurised steel spherical sanatorium in Ohio and the fifty-metre diameter globe at the Paris World exhibition of 1900, but he is dismissive of any similarity between them and his building.
Emile Kaufman, Architectktonische Entwürfe der frazöschischen Revolution (Zeitschrift der Bildener Kunst,1929, pp. 38-46 and Von Ledoux zu Le Corbusier: Ursprung and Entwicklung der Autonome Architecture, Vienna, Leipzig 1933.
Susanne von Falkenhausen, Kugelbau Visionen Kulturgeschichte einer Bauform von der Französischen Revolution bis zum Medienzeitalter, Bielefeld, Transcript Verlag 2008
Robert Mallet Stevens Wasmuths Monatshefte für Baukunst , March1929, Volume 3
(2). The competition for the design for a headquarters of the League of
Nations (1927) dragged into arguments and a legal dispute. It can be seen to represent a clash of traditional and modernist architectural positions as well as their political supporters: Pitting Corbusier and his brother-in-law Jeanette against the competition organisers. A compromise resulted in an international team of five architects managing the construction a classical stone facade‚ cladding a concrete structure. See Martin Steinmann, Der Völkerbundpalast: eine ‘‘chronique scandaleuse’’, Archithese 1998, Vol. 65 Issues 23-24 p,28-31
(3). The spherical form is quoted in the Volkswagen’s manufacturing plant near the site of the original building (Henn Architekten, 2001) and Cafe Kugelhaus am Weiner Platz (Heinle, Wischer und Partner, Langner Hatzfeldt, 2004). There is a proposal to rebuild a facsimile Kugelhaus as an office and hotel (Stuhr Architekten, 2019). See https://www.stuhrarchitekten.de/index.php?id=190
(4). The institutional sources for this project are the Deutsches Kunstarchiv in Nuremberg and the archive of the MAN Engineering Group, Augsburg.