Hans Scharoun, Neues Bauen, and the Chinese Werkbund: The Search for Post-perspectival Space

DISSERTATION

The dissertation investigates the role that Chinese architecture, urbanism, and cultural history played in shaping Hans Scharoun’s design thinking and postwar practice. Influenced by Hugo Häring’s organic building agenda and profound interest in East Asian architecture, Scharoun began engaging with the Chinese architectural tradition in the mid-1930s. Then, from October 1941 to May 1942, Scharoun participated in an organization called the Chinese Werkbund initiated by Häring. Thanks to those meeting—but sadly, no visit to China—Scharoun developed his unique understanding of organic buildings as well as strikingly original urbanist ideas and spatial concepts including Stadtlandschaft, “a-perspectival” space, and Raum der Mitte. All these concepts borrowed and adapted Chinese architecture and town-planning principles. This research argues that Scharoun’s turn toward Chinese precedents—wholly removed from European examples tainted by the National Socialist distortions of the tradition—provided him with an opportunity for rethinking the fundamentals of architectural and urban order.

Liyang Ding