Hermann Finsterlin was a visionary architect

Visionary architecture

Visionary architecture is the name given to architecture which exists only on paper or which has visionary qualities. While the term ‘visionary’ suggests the idea of an idealistic, impractical or Utopian notion, it also depicts a mental picture produced by the imagination...

, painter, poet, essayist, toymaker and composer. He played an influential role in the German expressionist architecture

Expressionist architecture

Expressionist architecture was an architectural movement that developed in Europe during the first decades of the 20th century in parallel with the expressionist visual and performing arts....

 movement of the early 20th century but due to the harsh economic climate realised none of his projects. By 1922, Finsterlin had withdrawn from the circle of expressionist architects as they moved towards the New Objectivity

New Objectivity

The New Objectivity is a term used to characterize the attitude of public life in Weimar Germany as well as the art, literature, music, and architecture created to adapt to it...

 movement, he moved to Stuttgart

Stuttgart

Stuttgart is the capital of the state of Baden-Württemberg in southern Germany. The sixth-largest city in Germany, Stuttgart has a population of 600,038 while the metropolitan area has a population of 5.3 million ....

 to concentrate on painting and writing.

Life

Finsterlin originally studied medicine, physics and chemistry, and then later, philosophy and painting in Munich. In 1919 he assisted Walter Gropius

Walter Gropius

Walter Adolph Georg Gropius was a German architect and founder of the Bauhaus School who, along with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, is widely regarded as one of the pioneering masters of modern architecture....

 in organising the "Exhibition for Unknown architects" for the Arbeitsrat für Kunst

Arbeitsrat für Kunst

The Arbeitsrat für Kunst was a union of architects, painters, sculptors and art writers, who were based in Berlin from 1918 to 1921...

 and contributed to Bruno Taut

Bruno Taut

Bruno Julius Florian Taut , was a prolific German architect, urban planner and author active during the Weimar period....

's Glass Chain

Glass Chain

The Glass Chain or Crystal Chain sometimes known as the "Utopian Correspondence" was a chain letter that took place between November 1919 and December 1920. It was a correspondence of architects that formed a basis of expressionist architecture in Germany. It was initiated by Bruno Taut.-Names,...

 letters under the pseudonym Prometh.

Finsterlin had a curious career: he was an architect who "never built a permanent structure." Under the Nazi

Nazi Germany

Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...

 regime in the 1930s, Finsterlin was commissioned to produce official portraits and frescoes in state buildings "through a misunderstanding...." Finsterlin dodged the responsibility through feigned illness as long as he could, and supplied his art to the Nazis only under threat of concentration camp incarceration. In 1944 his house was bombed and much of his life work was demolished — though he was able to regenerate some of his past work in the 1960s.

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