Heinrich Tessenow
b. Rostock, 1876;
d. Berlin, 1950.

Heinrich Tessenow, an Influential German famous architect and teacher whose simple, modern classical work brought Dresden-Hellerau Garden City to international attention. Coming from a construction background - his father was a contractor - he began his career as an apprentice carpenter before entering the School of Building, Leipzig, and eventually the famous Technical High School in Munich, where he studied under Von Tiersch (1901-2). Up to 1910, when he began his initial work in Hellerau, he held a number of teaching posts. In the years 1913-18 he taught in Vienna, returning to Hellerau for a further two years before his much longer stint as a professor at the Technical High School in Berlin, where he stayed until his eventual retirement. It was in the period just before and after the First World War that Tessenow made his mark. In the first period at Hellerau he worked closely with the Eurhythmist and dance teacher Jacques Dalcroze, designing the Theatre and Institute Dalcroze worked in (1910-11). His simple, traditional, Arts & Crafts, humanistic approach, welded to a more severe Germanic Greek Hellenistic monumental style, proved a happy conjunction. When conveyed through his beautiful open line drawings it made a significant contribution to the Garden City movement, to the extent that Louis de Soissons, one of the British movement’s chief architects, adopted similar forms for Welwyn Garden City in the mid-1920s. As a teacher Tessenow became well-known internationally, influencing Le Corbusier to a limited degree and producing many generations of students who followed his precepts. He has enjoyed a revival of interest recently in Italy and Germany.

Major buildings / works:
Houses and the Dalcroze Institute and Theatre, Dresden-Hellerau, 1909-11.
Saxony County School, Dresden-Klotzsche (with O. Kramer), 1925-7.
School, Kassel, 1927-30.
Swimming Pool, Berlin, 1927-9.

Bibliography:
Heinrich Tessenow, Der Wohnhausbau, Munich 1909.
Heinrich Tessenow, Hausbau and dergleichen, Berlin, 1917.
Heinrich Tessenow, Handwerk and Kleinstadt, Berlin, 1919.
G. Wangerin and G. Weiss, Heinrich Tessenow: em Baumeister 1876-1950, Essen, 1976 (includes a full bibliography).
J. Posener, “Two Masters, Hans Poelzig and Heinrich Tessenow…”, in Lotus International 16, 1977.