(b Berlin, 30 April 1869; d Berlin, 14 June 1936). German architect, designer and teacher. He was the father-figure of the Expressionist group of the Deutscher Werkbund, his vision and practical genius representing a link between the English Arts and Crafts Movement and later stages of Jugendstil and the fervour of the emerging Modern Movement after World War I. Poelzig studied architecture (1889-94) at the Technische Hochschule, Berlin, under Carl Sch?fer, a neo-Gothicist. After military service and a period in the Prussian Office of Works, he left Berlin in 1900 to take a teaching post in the K?nigliche Kunst- und Kunstgewerbeschule, Breslau (now Wroclaw), becoming its director from 1903 to 1916. There he introduced workshop-based courses that influenced the later teaching policy of Walter Gropius at the Bauhaus. Poelzig's early buildings included two houses, one at an exhibition of applied art (1904) in Breslau and his own house (1906) at Leerbeutel, near Breslau. Both are examples of the influence in Germany at that time of English Arts and Crafts houses. Rough-cast rendering divided into rectilinear panels by smooth bands characterized his own house and also appeared in his evangelical church (1906) at Maltsch, Silesia. An element that later became a hallmark of his work, the semicircular thermal window, appeared in his contemporary extension to the town hall in L?wenberg (now Lw?wek Slaski), which, like the church, is closely related in character to the houses. Thermal windows also appear as an important element of his four-storey block of flats (1908-12) on the Menzelstrasse, Breslau, a panelled brick building with shallow pilasters and entablature string courses that anticipates the geometrical Novecentismo architecture of Giovanni Muzio by some two decades. His five-storey office building (1911-12) on the Junkernstrasse, Breslau, on the other hand, was prophetic of post-war Expressionism. It was built in reinforced concrete with over-sailing floors and continuous window spandrels that sweep majestically around the angle of the corner site.
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