Konrad Püschel
Friedrich Konrad Püschel (12 April 1907 – 20 January 1997) was a German architect, town planner and university professor who was educated at the Bauhaus design school.
His father, Urban Richard Püschel, the village pastor, had studied at Leipzig University but was from a working-class background of miners, foresters, and farmers.
[2] The family finances were badly affected by hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic, so at 16 Püschel began an apprenticeship with a master carpenter in a firm in Glauchau in May 1923, which he completed in April 1926.
There he learned a wide range of woodworking, furniture-making, and building skills, including reading the detailed architectural plans and drawings from which he had to work.
He was also taught painting by Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky and photography by László Moholy-Nagy, and he participated in Oskar Schlemmer's stage workshop.
[2] He spent his second semester at the Bauhaus, starting in April 1927, studying under Marcel Breuer in the wood sculpture workshop.
"Meyer's was a holistic approach to architecture, making no distinction between masters and students, or site managers and skilled tradesmen.
[7] Immediately upon returning to Glauchau, Püschel was interrogated for two days by the Gestapo in the basement of the town hall, and his relatives were also questioned.
He was then employed by the architect Alfred Arndt, a former student and teacher at the Bauhaus, in Probstzella, Thüringia, where his daughter Monika was born in 1938.
[2] In 1939, while he was working for Arndt, he designed the home and weaving workshop of the Bauhaus-trained weaver Margaretha Reichardt in Erfurt.
[11] In addition to his academic career during which he wrote copiously on the development possibilities for rural settlements, Püschel created many unremarkable functional buildings in the effort to rebuild war-damaged East Germany and deal with its housing shortage.
[1] From 1955 to 1962, the East German government ran a large-scale programme to reconstruct the port cities of Hamhŭng and Hŭngnam, which had been severely damaged by US air raids during the Korean War.
Called the Deutsche Arbeitsgruppe (DAG), the team consisted of city planners, architects, technical personnel, and craftsmen, who built residential and industrial areas, hospitals, schools, hotels, a concert hall, and an outdoor swimming pool.
[14][15] Püschel went to considerable trouble to contact all known living former Bauhaus students and staff (Bauhäusler) to invite them to the reopening of the restored building to which 18 of them came.
[citation needed] Püschel bequeathed 1,700 items comprising architectural drawings, studies, photographs, and correspondence to the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, which are held in its archives.
