DesignerGermanb.1904–d.1970
Egon Eiermann
1 active items
When Egon Eiermann presented his design for the new Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin in 1959, public opinion was running sharply against him. Many Berliners wanted the bombed-out ruin of the old church demolished entirely; Eiermann wanted to keep the broken spire and surround it with two new hexagonal and octagonal volumes clad in honeycomb concrete panels set with blue stained glass. He held his position. The finished complex, completed in 1963, became one of the most visited sites in the city - a meditation on rupture and continuity that Eiermann built from glass and exposed concrete rather than sentiment.
Born in 1904 in Neuendorf bei Potsdam, Eiermann studied architecture at the Technische Universitat Berlin and from 1925 to 1928 worked as a master student under Hans Poelzig. He practiced independently from 1931, initially building housing in Berlin, then navigating the constraints of the Nazi period without producing the kind of monumental work that would mark later careers as compromised. After 1945 he joined the faculty of the Technische Hochschule Karlsruhe, where he taught from 1947 until his death and shaped a generation of West German architects. In 1950 he traveled to the United States and met Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, and Konrad Wachsmann in Boston; in 1956 he met Mies van der Rohe. These encounters confirmed rather than changed his direction.
His architecture is characterised by transparency, the honest expression of steel structure, and a precise calibration of interior and exterior. He designed the Blumberg textile mill (1951), the West German Pavilion at the Brussels World's Fair with Sep Ruf (1958), the West German Embassy in Washington D.C. (1958-64), and the Bundestag high-rise in Bonn (1965-69). Contemporaries described him as a rationalist with a humanist temperament - someone who believed clarity of structure was itself an ethical position, not merely an aesthetic one.
Parallel to the architecture, Eiermann produced furniture from 1949 onwards in collaboration with Wilde and Spieth that has outlasted most of his buildings in day-to-day use. The SE 42 chair (1949) in moulded beech plywood, the SE 18 folding chair (1952) in tubular steel and canvas, the SE 68 stackable chair (1952), and the Eiermann 1 table frame (1953) all entered serial production and became fixtures of postwar German institutional spaces - schools, churches, offices. The SE 18 entered the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The SE 121, designed for the interior of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, is still produced today. He received the Grand Prize of the BDA in 1968 and the Grand Federal Cross of Merit the same year, and was admitted to the Order Pour le Merite for Science and Arts shortly before his death in Baden-Baden on 19 July 1970.
On Auctionist, Eiermann appears across 13 lots with one currently active. His furniture circulates primarily through German auction houses - Quittenbaum in Munich leads with four lots - as well as the Scandinavian market at Stockholms Auktionsverk in Hamburg and Bukowskis. Top realized prices cluster in the EUR 850-1,800 range for individual chairs and small tables, consistent with the vintage design market for postwar German midcentury pieces. The Eiermann 2 desk frame for Richard Lampert appears in several Swedish listings, reflecting the continued production of his designs.