Wolfgang Pehnt, the architectural historian and long-time head of the cultural department at Deutschlandfunk, has died. An obituary.
You had to drive very far out, to the far west of Cologne, to get to the house where Wolfgang Pehnt lived and wrote about architecture. Of course it was an architect’s house, designed by Wolfgang Meisenheimer in the mid-seventies, and purchased by Pehnt and his family in the early eighties. (Pehnt is the father of the writer Annette Pehnt and the energy scientist Martin Pehnt.) From the outside, this house seemed abstract and almost closed, a structure of black and white wall surfaces of different geometric shapes. Inside there is an opening to a comfortably dimensioned expanse, inside which is the scholar with his considerable library. It was difficult not to think of “Hieronymus in the Casing”, and Pehnt had certainly written something about this very architectural pictorial topos at some point and somewhere.