Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
constitute ever larger systems and finally the whole.
45
His ultimate goal was
“the dissolution of the metropolis, in order to make our people be settled
again, to give them again their roots in the soil.” “The reincorporation
of the metropolitan populations into the rhythm of the German land-
scape,” he asserted, “is one of the principal tasks of the National Socialist
government.”
46
REINVENTING SALZGITTER: HERBERT RIMPL
Nazi resettlement and environmental ideologies converged and crystallized
in the planning for Salzgitter, one of the Reich's most ambitious attempts
to design an environment integrating industry and agriculture, town and
country. Awarded the contract for the overall planning of the Salzgitter
Werke
and of the housing and administrative facilities was Herbert Rimpl,
Hitler's chief industrial architect and, after Albert Speer, the leading Ger-
man architect of the Nazi era. Rimpl's company employed some 700 archi-
tects and had branches all over the Reich.
47
He had worked often for
Göring, building installations for the Luftwaffe chief; Salzgitter was to be
one of his biggest commissions.
Rimpl as yet has no biographer, but we know something of his thinking
from his published reflections on architectural theory and practice, writ-
ten in the philosophical mode often affected by celebrated architects.
48
His writings reveal a love of nature reminiscent of the romantic fanta-
sies of Goethe and Rousseau. “Yearning for nature” [
Natursehnsucht
], he
wrote,“logically follows technology”—an assertion that echoed Nazi anti-
industrial sentiments.
49
“Already in 1905, after the epoch of the crassest
materialism, the Garden City of Letchworth was built as a logical reaction.”
Rimpl's admiration for Letchworth, Ebenezer Howard's original new city,
revealed his debt to the British Garden City movement. He praised the new
domestic styles from England, where the house “is oriented toward the sun
and bound with nature” and “the garden is a part of the house, whose inner
spaces it extends outward, over terraces or meadows, over flower or veg-
etable gardens.” He belived that “the basis for the rise of this kind of
dwelling was the hated industrial city.” Rimpl's love for nature verged on
worship: “The inclusion of the breadth of landscape in cities, the opening
up to nature afforded by glass houses, the yearning for green, for gardens,
the sun, water, the mountains, undisturbed forests, all of these are visible
signs of the embodiment of a pantheistic point of view.”
