The interview was short and simple. I had no elaborate portfolio, maybe no portfolio at all, at least not anything that is now known under this term. I think it was a Saturday and I drove up to Bidlingmaier and Egenhofer's office in Sillenbuch. We chatted a bit and after may half an hour Egenhofer said something like ok, start on Monday. Maybe it was Monday next week, I can't remember, but just like that I had a job after Zivildienst and after a three month stint in London , all after I had finished by studies. I hadn't really designed anything in the 5 years of studying architecture, nothing that would impress a man who had an artistic mind, a creative drive and skillful hands. Back then he had just won a design competition for a highschool in Reutlingen. His competition design was a deprature for him and his firm from previous design dogmas, but at the interview I didn't know that. Schools are on as unforgiving schedule. They must be done when classes start. He needed someone, and apparently I passed muster, I have no idea how. I don't fully recall why I interviewed there, I think my room-mate was the connection, Egenhofer had studio teaching hours at my university.
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| Heinz Egenhofer, 6-9-36-193 to 9-19--2026 (picture from the children's death announcement) |
Regardless, the new job would change my life. I would see a real architect in action, one with an indefatigable drive to design, draw, redesign, redraw, more or less day and night. After winning the competition he had drawn reams of sketch paper full of wall and stair sections in what would be 3/4" scale, I forgot what it would have been in metric, 1:20 probably. They were drawn in pencil with magic marker coloring. Nothing had been erased, the details were created from the design concept, straight from his head in a relentless succession of sketches until the geometry of the school had been verified and and snapped into place in all the relationships. It was my task to create working drawings.
I stared at his sketches, one after the other and then again from the beginning, until I could make some sense of it all. Of course, these were still schematic, not fully worked out details and dimensions. Soon, I discovered that Egenhofer occasionally fudged and I felt sorry for myself that I had to work this out without destroying the harmony It took me much longer to realize, that knowledgeable fudging is a prerequisite for maintaining a design concept without losing sight of the bigger idea.
Egi, as we called him, meanwhile was immersed in the next competition entry. Near the deadline he would work sometimes all night over a lot of beer. He had more stamina than anyone, in terms of beer, in terms of not sleeping and in terms of staying focussed, sketching impeccably and maintaining the main idea. The way I remember it, he won many competitions. So much so that he became a sought after juror and competition advisor as well. If things went well he had lots of patience and a good amount of curiosity. I was on the Borough Council, this was someting he didn't do and over the afternoon coffee he often queried me about some issues, eager to debate in his Suebian diversion Austrian accent. When things didn't go so well, he could get quite aggressive. "Didn't you learn anything in school" he snorted one time when I asked him what the brick dimensions were that he had assumed for his details (three bricks stacked up with joints were a nominal 25 cm). Bidlingmaier, his partner in the office couldn't be more different the Egi. He drew with hard pointed pencil if at all, his work was to keep the books, write specifications and saw to it that things remained on a straight course, financially and technical. He didn't drink and usually went home at reasonable hours. I asked him henceforth about details and specs and his patience to explain was endless.
Egi, a bit stocky, small hands, dirty blond hear he wore long, bulging eyes was no Grecian beauty, but he was a force of life able to create beauty, nevertheless, strong willed equipped with the power of imagination, curiosity and joy of life. He had no patience for small minded obstacles, especially when they came form regulations and bureaucrats. When his project became the vocational Steinbeis Schule in Stuttgart and someone from the construction group of the local department of education called, I overheard his side of the conversation in the open plan office. It ended with him barking: "Sie sind kein Bauherr, Sie sind nur ein Hindernis" (You are not the owner, you are just an obstacle).
Long after I had been fired from the firm when they were forced to massivly downsize in a recession, Egi sent me his annual hand-sketches, spiral bound together as a calendar with pencil drawn squares for the days of the month. Some were black and white copies of pencil sketches from his architecture trips, some where colred in pale watercoloring. His wife Ulla and he welcomed me often in their house any time I wanted to visit, especially when I came to Stuttgart after I had left for the US. They would make pizza in their brick pizza oven on the uppermost floor of the house which was actually level with the rear yard but three floors up from the entry door facing the street. A one of a kind rowhouse that was on a lot that had been deemed unbuildable and was therefore still available in the otherwise much sought after Sillenbuch looking over the Stuttgart bowl below. Bidlingmaier and a dentist where the other two who had enlisted on this 3-house endeavor that said so much about his idea of appropriate human habitation.
Eventually the house of so many stairs was too much for the aging couple, especially for his wife Ulla. They moved to the Hannibal highrises, Stuttgart's interpretation of Corbusian living machines, sitting in the Filder landcsape on an even bigger scale. Egenhofers lived high enough up to get a fantastic view. Egi had a little studio, still sketching, still designing. His wife, who died long before him, was also an architect. She had some assignments, too, after the two children Basti and Anne had become young adults. From my sparse insights, I theorized that wife Ulla and son Sebastian suffered from an overbearing father who always knew what was right and wrong in matters of design, even, as I would eventually find out, it wasn't all based on his own value canon. From the distance I recognized a specific Stuttgart architecture canon, strongly by architect Gutbrod and later by Guenther Behnisch with whom Egi had done an "apprenticeship".
Egi died in his last apartment in Berlin in his sleep, as his daughter Anne said. In his last days he had been accompanied by both of his children, Anne and Basti. He seemed to have selected this path himself, deciding not to eat anymore after he felt increasingly ill and frail. Egi, 90 years old, a force of nature finally had to succumb to nature, but it was on his own terms.
Klaus Philipsen, FAIA
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