On the second day of Christmas I received the message that my friend of 43 years, Joerg Aldinger, died of a brain cancer a condition he dealt with for a bit more than a year through all stages of optimism, resignation and acceptance.
He spent his last few months in hospice care knowing death was near and inevitable. His wife Irmgard on his side as much as she could with their young son still going to high school and her own business needing attention as well. The adult children of his first marriage and many friends accompanied his journey that also included one last trip to Scandinavia in late August. He wrote "magical for our family to travel again. Full of impressions and super happy".
Joerg was foremost a friend, a colleague, my boss for a while and my remaining lifelines to the old hometown Stuttgart. Over a glass of wine on Route 66 in Pasadena and as a sign of affection he quoted Humphrey Bogart's last words in the film Casablanca referring to a great friendship.
Friends like Joerg are rare and he keeps a place in my heart because of his unfailing kindness, his versatile interests and the many layers of our relationship. He was great when he employed me in a for me very difficult time, he was great when I visited his home or when we met for lunch, just the two of us or he and his wife or with my father who he integrated into the communication without a problem. We ate a few times at La Piazza, "dem Italiener" in the Stuttgart complex designed by the architect Gutbrod. He visited me in the US and we met in Berlin where he renovated a condo in the Corbusier Haus as a second domicile. I knew him as the husband and father of four children in his first marriage in his first house he had designed from scratch. Later in his second marriage with Irmgard, he had found the perfect match. They both had another child.
I worked for him when his father transitioned the suburban office to him as the co-owner. Our transformational project was a large two story showroom for local company making and selling designer furniture which he had designed followed by a social housing project. I was the project manager and he gave me so much freedom that I felt like a true partner. This collaboration ended with my emigration to the US. Gradually is firm morphed from being the locally well connected solid Suebian architect of firehouses, schools and town halls to a more design-oriented studio winning work through design competitions. He moved the office to Stuttgart into the former doctor's practice of his first wife's father. Joerg advanced not only into the Stuttgart architecture establishment but also became Dean of architecture at the Hochschule in Biberach where he invited me once to be a studio critic and give a lecture.
He remained curious and open. For a year or so he was a guest lecturer at California State Polytechnic University in LA. His ability to direct the office through the storm when divorce forced him to start over, maintain success while overseas, and teaching as a Dean, was based on his trust in his people allowing him delegation of tasks and a knack to focus on what mattered the most. His office received many design awards. He was a sought after juror for design competitions across Germany which, in turn, led to being nominated to design advisory panels (Gestaltungsbeiraeten) in several German cities. Our ties had many side bars. My son spent a summer working in his firm in Stuttgart, my brother collaborated with him on local juries in his hometown of Herrenberg and my cousin invited him to speak in his Architecture school near Bonn, Germany. In 2016 we tried our hand at a German-American project, a high school on the Spangdahlem air base in Germany in which my company contributed a little to the interiors and furniture concepts. My only ever transatlantic project.
Even though Joerg was five years younger than I, I looked up to him for his ability to sketch out ideas, his superior design skills and his impeccable taste in fashion, architecture, furniture and food. For years he sent artful self designed Christmas cards. In his first marriage he cultivated a somewhat elitist lifestyle. But that wore off over the years and was always balanced by a progressive view of society, technology and his open mind and accepting demeanor. Most of his projects had a social function and where environmentally conscious which his special interest in wood as a construction material. We never had any argument over values or politics.
His design approach to his 2007 project of the hospice care facility St Martin (in which he was transferred at the end of his life journey) was deeply thoughtful and humanist in his anticipation what a terminally ill guest would need. In an obituary this week printed in the regional section of the Stuttgart Zeitung the headline described him as Vermittler and Menschenfreund (Intermediary and philanthropist). His impulse for good design was not classist but driven by the human need for shelter and an environment that is open to human dialogue not achieved through cheap popular frills but rather on a fundamental level of function, space, material, lighting, the very essence of architecture. The many buildings he designed are not recognizable by a certain "handwriting" but are of their places and the needs derived from the program. They share a certain austerity and minimalism that had its roots in modernism but never become the cold isolated objects that gave modernism a bad reputation.
His death ended a steady stream of production that his office partners will find difficult to sustain without Joerg as the spiritus rector that he remained even when the studio had grown in size.
In his new year message of 2024 he wrote to me: "Friendships are important, they anchor us and give the feel of familiarity and security. For us two it is like that, we rarely see each other but are still not far, in my perception." I miss you dearly, my friend!
Klaus Philipsen, FAIA
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