Johann Poppe

Johann Poppe in 1906
Park House, former Festival Hall of the 1900 Bremen Exhibition, on an early 20th-century postcard
First class smoking room aboard SS Kronprinzessin Cecilie

Johann Georg Poppe (12 September 1837 – 18 August 1915), often called Johannes Poppe by English-speaking writers, was a prominent architect in Bremen during the German Gründerzeit and an influential interior designer of ocean liners for Norddeutscher Lloyd. He worked in an eclectic mixture of historical revival styles sometimes called "Bremen Baroque".[1]

Life and career

Poppe was born in Bremen into a family with a heritage as architects;[2] his father was also a cabinetmaker. From 1855 to 1859, he studied architecture at the Polytechnic School in Karlsruhe, forerunner of the University of Karlsruhe. From 1860 to 1861 he practised architecture in Berlin; he worked under Hermann Friedrich Waesemann on the Rotes Rathaus.[3] But from 1863 on, he worked in Bremen. He was greatly influenced by six years of travel and studying in Italy, Greece, and especially France, where he lived for some time in Paris.[2]

He acquired a reputation by building large public buildings, including the Bremen waterworks (1873), library (1896), Cotton Exchange (1902) and Rice Exchange (1904). He was chief architect for the Nordwestdeutsche Gewerbe- und Industrieausstellung (Northwest German Trade and Industry Exhibition) of 1890; the Festival Hall for this was later known as the Park House. In 1883 he oversaw the redesign of the upper chamber of the Town Hall of Bremen,[4] including one of its three doors,[5] and in 1903 designed new seats for the city councillors; like most of his work, this has been much altered since.

He also designed numerous villas and country houses for the elite of Bremen, mostly in the Horn and Oberneuland districts which at the time lay outside the city. Most of these have since been demolished.[6] He rebuilt Villa Ichon and lived there for many years.

From 1881 to 1907,[6] Poppe was chief interior designer for the ocean liners of Norddeutscher Lloyd, the first "lay" (non-marine) architect responsible for entire ships,[7] and transformed them into floating hotels. He was responsible for the innovation of placing the first-class dining saloon in the centre of the ship, where it could be two or three decks high, lit by a giant skylight.[8][9] Hired by Johann Lohmann, the director of the company, to do the interiors of the twelve Rivers class liners because of his preeminence as a designer,[10] he first worked on the SS Elbe of 1881; only in 1906, when Poppe was seventy years old, did Lohmann's successor, Heinrich Wiegand, replace him with younger, progressive architects for some of the interiors on the SS Kronprinzessin Cecilie, but he was still responsible for her main public rooms.[11][12] When Albert Ballin commissioned the first express liner for the rival Hamburg America Line, the Augusta Victoria, he hired Poppe to design the interior.[13] The new headquarters building he designed for NDL (1901–1910) was at the time the largest building in Bremen.

Poppe's historicism was not favoured by younger architects, who worked in Jugendstil and reformist styles. At the end of his life he withdrew to his estate of Poppenhof on the right bank of the River Lesum in Burglesum, now part of Bremen, where he died in 1915.[6] He is buried in the Riensberg Cemetery in Bremen.

Style

First class dining saloon aboard SS Kronprinzessin Cecilie

Poppe worked in an eclectic historicising style which drew most on the Renaissance and the Baroque; in the first part of his career he was greatly influenced by what he had seen in Italy and especially France.[1][14] In the 1870s he began to build more in the style of the English Gothic revival.[3] His buildings were richly ornamented inside and out; as his career progressed, he increasingly worked with large interior decorating firms, especially Bembé of Mainz, who executed his ship interiors.[14][15] The result was popular with his wealthy clients; at the turn of the century he was Bremen's most prominent architect;[2] but after fashions changed, was outmoded. Kreyenhorst Castle was demolished in the 1920s. His ship interiors have been described as "overblown, over-decorated, and dark",[16] as "a seagoing baroque collage of high ceilings, massive pillars, gilded balustrades, trumpeting cherubs, and gigantic statuary,"[10] as "temples of high baroque, grand galleries of an aspiration so Valkeyrian that only megalomaniacs might dally there in comfort or good conscience",[17] by Cunard executives who visited the SS Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse and SS Kronprinz Wilhelm in 1903 as "bizarre, extravagant and crude, loud in colour and restless in form, obviously costly, and showy to the most extreme degree"[18] and by a contemporary American as "'two of everything but the kitchen range', then gilded."[10][19] The architecture critic Walter Müller-Wulckow described the Bremen Cotton Exchange, which started to shed its profuse ornamentation after exposure to the elements, as the "crassest" manifestation of "cancerous" building styles.[20]

Selected works

Bremen City Library (1896)
Bremen Cotton Exchange, on a 1908 postcard

Public buildings

Norddeutscher Lloyd Headquarters, 1911 painting reproduced on a postcard

Commercial buildings

Kreyenhorst Castle in 1900
Villa Ichon, Goetheplatz façade

Residences

Smoking room aboard SS Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse
First class reading and writing room aboard SS Kronprinz Wilhelm

Interior design of ocean liners

References

  1. 1 2 3 Alain Dewerpe, "Du style français. Les conventions nationales du paquebot comme produit matériel et imaginaire social, 1900–1935" in Bénédicte Zimmmermann, Claude Didry and Peter Wagner, eds., Le travail et la nation: histoire croisée de la France et de l'Allemagne, Paris: Maison des sciences de l'homme, 1999, ISBN 978-2-7351-0823-7, pp. 281–310, p. 303 (French)
  2. 1 2 3 E. Gildemeister, "Das Wohnhaus", in Architekten- und Ingenieurverein, Bremen, Bremen und seine Bauten, Bremen: Schünemann, 1900, OCLC 1050620 (German), pp. 408–74, p. 433.
  3. 1 2 Wolfgang Brönner, Die bürgerliche Villa in Deutschland, 1830–1890: unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Rheinlandes, Beiträge zu den Bau- und Kunstdenkmälern im Rheinland 29, Düsseldorf: Schwann, 1987, ISBN 978-3-491-29029-7, p. 159 (German)
  4. ↑ Horst Karl Marschall, ed., Friedrich von Thiersch: ein Münchner Architekt des Späthistorismus 1852–1921, Materialien zur Kunst des 19. Jahrhunderts 30, Technical University of Munich, Munich: Prestel, 1982, ISBN 978-3-7913-0548-6, p. 271 (German)
  5. ↑ H. Mänz, "Das Rathaus", in Bremen und seine Bauten, pp. 115–57, p. 152.
  6. 1 2 3 4 Oliver Korn, Hanseatische Gewerbeausstellungen im 19. Jahrhundert: republikanische Selbstdarstellung, regionale Wirtschaftsförderung und bürgerliches Vergnügen, Sozialwissenschaftliche Studien 37, Opladen: Leske und Budrich, 1999, ISBN 978-3-8100-2348-3, p. 143 (German)
  7. ↑ John Maxtone-Graham, Liners to the Sun, 1985, repr. Dobbs Ferry, New York: Sheridan House, 2000, ISBN 978-1-57409-108-3, p. 203.
  8. ↑ Eberhard Straub, Albert Ballin: Der Reeder des Kaisers, Berlin: Siedler, 2001, ISBN 978-3-88680-677-5, p. 93 (German)
  9. ↑ Frank Parker Stockbridge and Thomas R. MacMechen, "Skyscrapers of the Sea: The Modern Big Steamship a Floating Hotel, Proof against Wind, Weather and Collision", The Hampton Magazine March 1912, pp. 85–91 +, p. 87.
  10. 1 2 3 Daniel Allen Butler, The Age of Cunard: A Transatlantic History 1839–2003, Annapolis, Maryland: Lighthouse, 2003, ISBN 978-1-57785-348-0, p. 130.
  11. ↑ Anne Wealleans, Designing Liners: A History of Interior Design Afloat, London: Routledge, 2006, ISBN 978-0-415-37468-2, p. 58.
  12. ↑ Georg Bessell, Norddeutscher Lloyd 1857–1957: Geschichte einer bremischen Reederei, Bremen: Schünemann, [1957], OCLC 3187889, p. 97 (German)
  13. 1 2 Straub, p. 45 (German)
  14. 1 2 3 Gildemeister, p. 435.
  15. ↑ History of the North German Lloyd Steamship Company of Bremen (1898) at Gjenvik-Gjønvik Archives
  16. ↑ Douglas R. Burgess Jr., Seize the Trident: The Race for Superliner Supremacy and How It Altered the Great War, Camden, Maine: International Marine/McGraw Hill, 2003, ISBN 978-0-07-143009-8, p. 110.
  17. 1 2 John Malcolm Brinnin, The Sway of the Grand Saloon: A Social History of the North Atlantic, New York: Seymour Lawrence/Delacorte, 1971, OCLC 205451, p. 311.
  18. ↑ Wealleans, p. 43.
  19. ↑ Burgess, p. 34.
  20. ↑ Die Bremer Baumwollbörse ist das krasseste Beispiel dieser Art, von deren Formenfülle schon kurz nach der Vollendung abblätternde Ornamente Passanten erschlagend herabstürzten und auf diese geradezu groteske Weise die Krebsschäden unserer Baupraxis gezeigt haben. - "The crassest example of this kind is the Bremen Cotton Exchange, decorations from it having peeled off beginning soon after completion, to fall and strike passersby and in this utterly grotesque manner demonstrate the cancerous lesions of our mode of building." Cited in Heinz Stoffregen, 1879–1929: Architektur zwischen Tradition und Avantgarde, ed. Nils Aschenbeck, Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1990, ISBN 978-3-528-08746-3, p. 11.
  21. ↑ Technical details in A. Götze, "Wasserversorgung", in Bremen und seine Bauten, pp. 506–15, pp. 508–15; photograph of the building showing its original form, p. 506.
  22. ↑ Landmark listing at Landesamt für Denkmalpflege Bremen, 5 October 2011, retrieved 19 October 2011 (German)
  23. ↑ C. Ohrt, "Der Bürgerpark", in Bremen und seine Bauten, pp. 568–74, p. 570.
  24. 1 2 Herbert Schwarzwälder, Geschichte der freien Hansestadt Bremen Volume 2 Von der Franzosenzeit bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg, Hamburg: Christians, 1976, OCLC 310462235, p. 563 (German)
  25. ↑ H. Wagner, "Die Stadtbibliothek", in Bremen und seine Bauten, pp. 307–09, p. 307.
  26. ↑ Wagner, p. 309.
  27. ↑ Geschichte der SuUB, Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Bremen, 2011, retrieved 20 October 2011 (German), with pictures
  28. ↑ Landmark listing at Landesamt für Denkmalpflege Bremen, 5 October 2011, retrieved 18 October 2011 (German)
  29. ↑ J. Andresen, "Bankgebäude und Sparkassen", in Bremen und seine Bauten, pp. 370–89, pp. 381–82.
  30. ↑ Bessell, p. 98, describing it as "[ein] riesig[er] Prachtbau" (a gigantic prestige building) and a last triumph for Poppe.
  31. ↑ The Ballin era, History, HAPAG-Lloyd, describing it as a "Neo-Renaissance fortress . . . almost completely covered by ornamentation".
  32. ↑ Schwarzwälder, p. 564.
  33. ↑ Michael Koppel, Rickmers Park, Chronik Horn-Lehe (German)
  34. ↑ Interior and exterior photographs and plan, Gildemeister, pp. 437–39.
  35. ↑ Gildemeister, p. 439.
  36. ↑ Landmark listing at Landesamt für Denkmalpflege Bremen, 5 October 2011, retrieved 18 October 2011 (German)
  37. ↑ Gildemeister, pp. 442–43.
  38. ↑ Stephen Fox, Transatlantic: Samuel Cunard, Isambard Brunel, and the Great Atlantic Steamships, New York/London: HarperCollins, 2003, ISBN 978-0-06-019595-3, p. 371.
  39. ↑ Pictures at Johannes Gerhardt, Albert Ballin, Mäzene für Wissenschaft, Hamburg: Hamburg University, 2009, ISBN 978-3-937816-67-8, pp. 32, 33 (pdf pp. 34, 35).
  40. ↑ Brinnin, p. 316. See also Plate 24, describing the grand saloon of an unnamed ship as "Deutschland über Alles: the triumph of Johannes Poppe".
  41. ↑ Burgess, p. 101.
  42. ↑ Wealleans, p. 37.
  43. ↑ Wealleans, p. 38.
  44. ↑ Burgess, p. 44.

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