(b Rostock, 7 April 1876; d Berlin, 1 Nov 1950). German architect and writer. When poor health forced him to abandon his training as a teacher (1892–3), he went to work for his father’s joinery firm. After two years as a joiner’s apprentice, which instilled in him a lasting love for craftsmanship, exact detail and clear construction, he studied building in Neustadt, Mecklenburg (1896), and at Leipzig (1897), before attending the Technische Hochschule, Munich (1900–01), where he studied architecture under Friedrich von Thiersch and Karl Hocheder. Brief teaching appointments at building schools in Sternberg (1902) and Lüchow (1903) were followed by an unsettled year at the Saalecker Werkstätten, newly founded by Paul Schultze-Naumburg. In 1905 Tessenow moved his family to Trier, with the commission to develop the old crafts school into a school of building, following Hermann Muthesius’s national initiative on design education. In his first significant book, Der Wohnhausbau (1909), Tessenow proposed that the principal task of domestic architecture was to satisfy the fundamental needs of life, using all practical means available. To this end he patented a system of wall construction in 1909, in which vernacular simplicity was combined with progressive constructional techniques. Even at this stage he adopted a conciliatory position between the opposing camps of traditionalism and Modernism.

• Tessenow, Heinrich
  • collaboration
    • Dresden, §I, 3: History and urban development, after 1763
  • groups and movements
    • Arbeitsrat für Kunst
    • Deutscher Werkbund
    • Deutscher Werkbund, §3: Dissolution and re-formation, after 1930
    • Ring, Der
  • pupils
    • Schuster, Franz
    • Speer, Albert
    • Wachsmann, Konrad
  • works
    • Deutsche Gartenstadtgesellschaft
    • Germany, §II, 7(i): Architecture, 1900–39
    • Germany, §V, 5: Interior decoration, after c 1900
    • Hellerau
    • Theatre, §III, 4(ii)(a): Western world: 20th-century architecture