Every month, Architectural Record runs a "Guess the Architect" contest. The May issue came in today's mail and the building looked familiar but I couldn't place it. The architect was identified as being known for his interest in brick and the building's shape alludes to its location in a harbor city and its ownership by a shipping company. I googled around with various things and finally put in "hamburg" as a fairly wild guess, and there it was.
The Chilehaus was completed in 1924 and designed by Fritz Höger. His Wikipedia page is linked under his name. One of the sources of information is the newspaper clipping files in the 20th Century Press Archives at the ZBW, aka the German National Library of Economics. The clippings are digitized and easily zoom in and out. We've had lots of sessions and discussions about artist files in ARLIS/NA circles. We finally got Artist files into the LC controlled vocabularies, specifically LCGFT.
The artist files were a very important part of our library resources when I worked at the Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, in the early 1990s.
By the way, when you look at the Chilehaus in context with the assistance of the little yellow guy in Google, the prow of the building is considerably less pronounced.
Bonus picture, aerial view of Chilehaus:
Quite nice.
ReplyDeleteHave you been to Hamburg? Does the Chilehaus look like a ship in person? Does the city center look like a lot of the historical fabric didn't make it past World War II?
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