Schaeffer-Heyrothsberge, Paul

Architect

born: 09.09.1891 in Dortmund

died: 28.04.1962 in Wiesbaden

After completing his schooling in Berlin, Breslau and Halberstadt, Schaeffer-Heyrothsberge studied architecture in Danzig, Karlsruhe and Braunschweig from 1911, completed his training as a government master builder in 1921 and set up his own business in Magdeburg. In the following years, he was able to realize mainly private construction contracts for industrial and administrative buildings and numerous residential buildings. At times, his office employed 120 people. The 13-storey Faber building, erected in 1930-32 according to his plans, was the first high-rise building in the city and the only one in the Weimar Republic.

During the "Third Reich", Schaeffer-Heyrothsberg designed numerous buildings, mainly housing estates, from northern to southern Germany, in Upper Silesia and Austria. After the war, he worked briefly in an arts and crafts business in Eltville before founding a new office in Wiesbaden together with Horst Niessen in 1947. It was also during this time that he officially adopted the suffix Heyrothsberge after a neighboring community of his first place of work, Magdeburg.

His best-known works in Wiesbaden include the Raiffeisenhaus on Sonnenberger Strasse (1953) and the Federal Statistical Office on Stresemannring (1956), one of the first high-rise buildings in the Federal Republic of Germany. Schaeffer-Heyrothsberge deliberately used different emphases on the vertical and horizontal without giving too much preference to one direction in the building as a means of counteracting the so-called grid façade, also referred to by him as "rasteritis", which was preferred in post-war modernism. The outer skin was also always intended to appear as a "subdivided surface". The means to achieve this were the sensitively selected materials in terms of color and sculpture, light and shadow effects.

Schaeffer-Heyrothsberge was chairman of the Wiesbaden district group of the Association of German Architects and deputy state chairman of the association. As a long-standing member of the architectural advisory board, he was committed to the architectural interests of the city. He was also an appointed member of the Academy for Urban Planning and a member of the Academy for Building Research. In 1956, Schaeffer-Heyrothsberge was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit 1st Class.