Rudolf Fränkel

Rudolf Fränkel, often anglicised as Rudolf or Rudolph Frankel (14 June 1901 in Neisse, Upper Silesia, now Nysa, Poland – 23 April 1974 in Cincinnati, Ohio) was a German-Jewish architect who was among the leaders of the pre-war avant-garde movement in Berlin. He later emigrated to Bucharest, London and the United States, where he became an Architecture professor at Miami University, Ohio.

Life and career Fränkel was the son of Louis Fränkel, a government architect who was in Silesia supervising the construction of a railway, and his wife Ida and grew up in a comfortably middle-class Jewish family in Berlin. After completing school Carolinum with a war emergency Abitur and serving as a volunteer in the Luftstreitkräfte (Imperial German Air Force), he studied at the Technische Hochschule in Berlin (now Technische Universität Berlin) and did his practical study with his father. the daughter of a physician.

In 1924 he opened his own office in Berlin, and in 1925 he became a member of the Deutscher Werkbund. His first large commission was the Gartenstadt Atlantic, a moderate-income housing development in Gesundbrunnen, which has been a protected landmark since 1995. The buildings were unusually brightly coloured even for modernist housing of the period: the ground floor was violet, the upper floors pale green, the entrances grey and the balcony strips yellow. This detail has not been preserved; colours were updated as part of the 2001-05 renovation. The first portion of the development to be completed was the Lichtburg cinema and its associated commercial building housing restaurants, meeting and banquet facilities, shops and a bowling alley, next to the S- and U-Bahn station. The cinema was one of the first with sound; the building as a whole won praise for its modernity and for the use of space. He went on to design other residential buildings, housing developments and places of amusement in Berlin and environs, including a block of 400 flats finished in yellow stucco over a brown brick ground floor facing the Schöneberg city park.

Fränkel's designs were recognised in the architectural press as exemplars of modernist architecture and of efficient use of space. In addition, his amusement buildings, particularly the Lichtburg, were famous examples of Architecture of the Night (Architektur der Nacht) or Light Architecture (Lichtarchitektur). In the mid-1920s Walter Gropius invited him to join the Bauhaus faculty, but he declined on grounds of lack of time.

After the Nazi seizure of power, Jews and modernists suffered increasingly from discrimination; after 1933 Jewish architects were effectively banned from working, since they could not join the Reichskulturkammer. In summer 1933, Fränkel emigrated to Bucharest, where he designed another major cinema, the Scala, and further residential buildings. While in England he became a founder member of the "Circle" Group of German and Austrian Architects and Engineers (in 1943), was a member of Architects for the Redevelopment of Distressed Areas (in 1945) and of the Royal Institute of British Architects (from 1947 to 1974: F.R.I.B.A. ). Between 1955 and 1964, Rudolf Frankel & Associates developed master plans for several cities, However, he was denied tenure on the pretext of being a foreign national, and when his programme was terminated in 1968, he resigned with regret. He continued to live in Oxford until his death in 1974. In 2006 he was posthumously made professor emeritus.

Fränkel's papers are at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. The Rudolph Frankel Memorial Award at Miami University is awarded to a graduate student who shows promise in urban design or planning.

Selected works 1924–1928: Gartenstadt Atlantic settlement, Gesundbrunnen, Berlin 1926: Residential building, Emser Straße 14-17a, Wilmersdorf, Berlin 1926–28: Country house for film director Gabriel Levy, Silberberger Straße 29a, Bad Saarow 1927: Honig settlement, Bellermannstraße 72–78, Gesundbrunnen, Berlin 1927–1929: Lichtburg cinema at Gartenstadt Atlantic, Gesundbrunnen, Berlin 1927–1930: One- and two-family houses at Gartenstadt Frohnau, Frohnau, Berlin 1932–1933: Renovation, Albert Schumann Theatre, Frankfurt am Main (destroyed in 1944, ruins demolished 1960) 1933–1934: Pop residence, Caragiale 9, Bucharest 1934: Flats for childless couples, Bucharest 1935–1937: Malaxa flats, Bucharest 1937–1938: Frankel house, Home Counties 1941: E. H. Jones (Machine Tools) Ltd. factory, sales space, canteen, Kingsbury 1946–1947: Suflex Ltd. factory 1946–1948: Sotex Ltd. nylon clothing factory, Congleton 1949: Lichfield residence, Stanmore 1950: Luralda Ltd. warehouse, London 1950: Extension, Rachwalsky residence, New York