Lehr, Johann Wilhelm

Architect

Born: 30.03.1893 in Wiesbaden

died: 06.12.1971 in Oberseelbach im Taunus

Lehr completed his training at the Königliche Baugewerkschule Idstein in 1909-12 and gained his first professional experience in the office of Wiesbaden architects Horst and Stallforth. Nevertheless, he tended towards painting after the war and attended the Staatliche Kunstgewerbeschule in Mainz in 1919/20 and Willy Mulot's painting school in the early 1920s. In 1921, he took part in an exhibition at the Museum Wiesbaden. Only then did he turn increasingly to architecture.

On January 11, 1921, he opened an office as an "architect and painter" at Schwalbacher Straße 42. In 1927, he completed his first major building project for a factory owner from Essen, the Villa Hoffmann in Herzogstraße, in which all the programmatic demands of the Swiss architect Le Corbusier for new architecture were realized.

A short time later, Ernst May brought the young architect to Frankfurt, where Lehr built his most important work in 1928, the "Volksstimme" print shop building, whose steel skeleton construction and ceramic façade cladding also attracted a great deal of attention abroad. He became famous in one fell swoop and shortly afterwards was accepted into the exclusive architects' association "Der Ring", to which the most capable master builders of the 1920s belonged. Lehr worked on May's Goldstein Garden City housing project, which was not realized due to financing problems, and followed him to the Soviet Union in 1931. He returned just one year later and settled in Wiesbaden again.

After the war, Lehr founded a joint architectural practice in Wiesbaden with Heinz E. Mohri (1908-1997). In 1949, he created the first modern commercial building in the city center, the Sporthaus Schäfer in Langgasse. The construction of detached houses and villas in Frankfurt, Cologne and Wiesbaden, including the Kampschulte House in 1959/60, which incorporated all the design elements developed by Lehr, is representative of his late work.

The Johann Wilhelm Lehr Plaque, which the BDA Group Wiesbaden awards every five years for outstanding works of architecture as part of the BDA Architecture Prize "Big Houses, Small Houses - Outstanding Architecture in Hesse", was named after Lehr.