You have to look carefully to discover something special. For example, that there are balconies in the courtyard of this apartment block, although everything should be as cheap as possible. That the lowest apartments are on the mezzanine floor despite the pressure to save. And that the stairwells are laid out in such a way that every apartment has windows to the street and also to the garden.
Here, on Klugstrasse in Gern, the “Association for the Improvement of Housing Conditions in Munich” had 360 small apartments built for the poor in the 1930s; The architect Oskar Pixis had received the order. And his credo was: Whether cheap or not, if you live here, it should be nice. The balconies in particular – a cost factor – were even featured in the architecture magazine builder worth a mention.
Oskar Pixis (1874-1946) is one of many architects who are largely forgotten today. The Zurich architecture historian Rainer Schützeichel would like to change that. Because it was architects like Pixis who built modern Munich. Not the old town with its well-known churches and palaces, but the one in Munich where the majority of Munich residents live today.
Pixis was one of the architects of urban growth, one of those whose buildings made Munich a big city. “Back then, these architects built the bulk of the city, but you don’t know them,” says Schützeichel. Because their residential buildings are hardly noticeable. “You walk past that. And that is already wrong per se,” he says. “Because where do you experience architecture more than when you live?”
Pixis’ first block of flats on Klugstrasse transformed Gern, which had previously been a village, into an urban part of Munich.
(Photo: The Builder, 1929)
Schützeichel, who also teaches at the Munich University of Applied Sciences, set out to wrest these architects from oblivion – and he started with Pixis. In the winter and summer semester of 2019/2020, he and students unearthed the work of the man from Munich. The result is an exhibition in the Faculty of Architecture at Karlstraße 6 in Maxvorstadt, which, due to the coronavirus, can only be viewed at the opening on November 24th and for a guided tour with curator Schützeichel on December 3rd – and only after registering with curator Schützeichel.
There is also a richly illustrated book (“Oskar Pixis. Residential buildings of the 1920s and 1930s in Munich”), which will be published by Deutscher Kunstverlag in November and invites you to take a closer look at everyday life. Johannes Kappler, dean of the university’s architecture faculty, has headed his foreword here “At second glance”. Schützeichenel’s own essay is called “Praise for the inconspicuous”.
Living and shopping: Oskar Pixis planned shops at the corners of the block on Klugstrasse.
(Photo: Stephan Rumpf)
It was not easy to get closer to Pixis, says Schützeichel. There are only gaps in the legacy, and the architect himself did not make it easy for posterity either. Because Pixis was involved in remarkable projects early on. For example, he helped plan the primary school on Hirschbergstrasse, one of the largest school buildings in the city, for the city of Munich.
Later he worked in Alfred Messel’s office in Berlin on his main work, at the Wertheim department store on Leipziger Strasse, on “to the Prototypes of the modern metropolitan department store “, as Schützeichel writes in his essay. Later he was again the office manager of Theodor Fischer, the creator of the Munich building regulations, which gave the city its current structure.
But Pixis was at the same time the opposite of the upper-class fisherman; he was cautious and said of himself that he was “only helping, not creating”. Schützeichenel sees it differently, of course. Architecture is always the result of a collective effort, he says. Only a few are in the limelight. But if you will, there is a pixis behind every fisherman.
Oskar Pixis wanted to live wherever he was building. The photo shows the office wing of his house next to the Laimer Schlössl with the drawing rooms around 1928.
(Photo: Pixis private archive, Munich)
Oskar Pixis once lived in the village center of Laim, which was then a suburb of Munich. Pixis’ boss Fischer lived there in the Laimer Schlössl. Pixis himself lived in a facility next door, with an office and a large garden. His grandson, the gallery owner Christian Pixis, still lives there today and runs through the house.
His grandfather moved here on purpose, he says. Other architects of his time built villas in Bogenhausen. But Pixis deliberately wanted to live where he would build. In the west of the Laimer Schlössl there were only meadows as far as Pasing, says Christian Pixis when looking out of the window. The area was to be developed, and up to 20 employees worked for fishermen in the drawing rooms next to the grandfather’s apartment.
Oskar Pixis meanwhile led a life in “hippie-like laissez-faire”, as his grandson Christian Pixis writes in an essay for Schützeichel’s book. The grandmother raised bees, the family kept goats and chickens, the children ran around naked in the open air, and there was a garden shed in the middle. It was like living in the country. The garden in the courtyard was twice as big in grandfather’s time as it is today, but at least the garden shed has been preserved.
One of the few photos taken by Oskar Pixis, here in front of his garden shed.
(Photo: Pixis private archive, Munich)
Pixis ran Fischer’s business here for decades. It wasn’t until late, at the age of 50, that he dared to take the step into self-employment – and built what he was passionate about before: residential buildings.
Pixis discovered his passion for this, including his vein of social reform, early on. By 1900 he had studied the housing shortage of workers and day laborers in the Munich problem areas of Au and Haidhausen. A year later he traveled to Capri, where he was enthusiastic about the simplicity of the houses in Anacapri.
In Munich, Pixis built both single-family houses and large blocks, for example on Klugstrasse, but also in the Neuhausen housing estate, one of the founding buildings of Gewofag. Pixis contributed the line on Balmungstrasse.
After that, of course, he was not granted a great career of his own. That was due to the National Socialists. Pixis’ blocks on Klugstrasse, for example, originally had flat roofs; today’s pitched roofs date from the 1950s when they were added. Pixis may have been inspired by Capri for the blocks; Schützeichel calls the architecture “moderately modern”. The Nazis, on the other hand, called them “Bolsheviks”.
It is possible that Pixis was also cut because he built a house on Kunigundenstrasse in 1936 for the Jewish doctor Gustav Blank, who had previously been evicted from his property in the center. In any case, Pixis hardly got any orders now. The fact that, at the urging of his family, he adopted a “more homely” style, as Christian Pixis says, did nothing to change that.
After World War II, Pixis was simply too old. When he died in 1946, the dedicated builder an obituary. It says that his work “largely took place in self-chosen anonymity”. With Pixis, this architect of urban growth, “a piece of Munichism in the best sense of the word went away”.