Producing heritage: the city planning of Gustavo Giovannoni and Theodor Fischer in Italy and Germany between 1889 and 1929

• Applicant: Dr.-Ing. Carmen Maria Enss
• Subject Area: Architecture, Building and Construction History, Construction Research, Sustainable Building Technology
• Term: from 2015 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 274897226

The modern conservation movement is currently seen as a response to industrialization and demolition of historic monuments (Miles Glendinning: The Conservation Movement, 2013). This reaction lead to the implementation of authorities for the preservation and conservation of listed historic buildings. It lead on the other hand to a town-planning practice, which respected historic buildings and the shapes of certain streets and squares, at least in some cases. The proposed project seeks to examine the latter. Gustavo Giovannoni acted from Rome as a pioneer of a way of city planning, which used the built heritage as a key of conducting a redevelopment process within a historic urban quarter. Using his planning instrument diradamento he aspired to combine the restoration of historic buildings with town planning seen as an art on the one hand and town planning regarded as engineering and construction practice on the other hand. As an architect he pursued to develop the city by carrying the city s character from the old parts to new quarters of the city. In the same period, Theodor Fischer was head of Munich s city extension office. He perceived city extensions, similar to Giovannoni, just as that: extensions of the existing city (Helen Meller: European cities 1890-1930s, 2001). Fischer was part of the German modern conservation movement. His Staffelbauplan for Munich was shown at town planning exhibitions worldwide. Like Gustavo Giovannoni he was an influential teacher of architecture and city planning and gave lectures at the Universities for Technology in Stuttgart and Munich. The most important communality between the two architects is their interest in thinking across disciplines. Yet, research on their work was often restricted by boundaries of Architectural History, Planning History or Conservation Sciences. The research project wants to analyze the tradition of urban heritage as a planning approach on the basis of Theodor Fischer s and Gustavo Giovannoni s city plannings for the redevelopment of inner city quarters. Which parts of the built environment were selected by Giovannoni and Fischer as heritage and which design techniques were used to accentuate buildings and sites as monuments or historic districts? Italy and Germany are bound by a history of highly elaborate heritage debates, especially respecting the city planning context. This fact has been underestimated in the international debate. The applicant hopes to be able to re-write parts of Europe s history of urban preservation by using an international perspective and simultaneously provide new insights for future planning of the historic city.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants