A new documentary film is cementing the rediscovery of architect Sep Ruf as a major protagonist of modernist architecture in early West Germany. The film highlights how Ruf masterfully combined Southern German pragmatism with the pioneering spirit of the 1960s, establishing him as a key figure in post-war German architectural identity.
After the pragmatic years of reconstruction, when addressing the housing shortage and restoring infrastructure consumed all resources of the construction industry and architectural community, West Germany quickly found an elegant and sophisticated architectural expression of its national identity. The progressive forces in the young democracy clearly demonstrated their will to break ostentatiously with the architectural legacy of National Socialism and present themselves to the world as modern and therefore reformed.
Few people embodied this zeitgeist and its associated aesthetic of understatement more prominently than Sep Ruf. He gained access to the country's leading figures, designing a bungalow completed in 1954 for Ludwig Erhard in Gmund am Tegernsee. Ruf later applied the design principles developed there on a grand scale when he collaborated with Egon Eiermann to design the German steel-and-glass pavilion at the 1958 Brussels Expo, which despite its short existence became a key building of the young state.
When Erhard became Federal Chancellor, Ruf received the commission to build a residential and reception building for the government leader in Bonn. However, the transparent architecture of the Chancellor's bungalow, completed in 1964, also faced massive criticism after its completion, with many feeling it was not representative enough. The triumph of modern architecture did not proceed without setbacks and hostilities.
Similar to the recent case of Cologne church architect Gottfried Böhm, a documentary film is currently intensifying the already rising interest in Ruf's work. The film "Sep Ruf - Architect of Modernism" by Munich filmmaker Johann Betz, currently showing in select art-house cinemas, impressively demonstrates how skillfully Ruf combined Southern German down-to-earth practicality with the pioneering spirit of the sixties.
In Nuremberg's city center, he chose a predominantly stone, dark facade for the reconstruction of the Bavarian State Bank (1949-1951) that blended into the surroundings. However, he gave Munich two slender, bright large buildings with the apartment complex on Theresienstrasse and the Neue Maxburg, which down to the last detail expressed a moderate, friendly modernism.
Ruf left behind no significant writings or theories and did not see himself as an intellectual, although he associated with intellectual giants of his time like Romano Guardini, was friends since youth with Golo Mann and Werner Heisenberg, and also had an interest in contemporary art. The film about Ruf's work therefore contents itself with favorably presenting the cheerful lightness of buildings like the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg.
The Sep Ruf Society, based in Munich, has played a major role in the Ruf revival. Founded in 2016 following the model of already existing societies for Eiermann and Ernst May, it does not see itself as a fan club of the architect but as a lobby group for research, preservation, and dissemination of his work.
For Munich architectural historian Winfried Nerdinger, who is himself a member of the Ruf Society, the new interest in the architect represents a deserved and overdue rehabilitation after the humiliations he had to endure from Konrad Adenauer and others. Nerdinger attributes the fact that many Ruf buildings have been placed under monument protection since around 2010 to the founding of the society on the occasion of the architect's hundredth birthday, which was also celebrated with an exhibition and publication by Irene Meissner.
Attention to Ruf's work received another boost in 2014 when the representative part of the Chancellor's bungalow was built into the German Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale at a one-to-one scale. In the pavilion from 1938, the architecture of the sixties building came into particularly strong focus through the means of contrast. This dialogue between two generations of German architectural history received international attention.
Ruf came to play his special state-supporting role partly through the course of history: four of the defining German architects from the early period of modernism were either dead by the late 1940s (Bruno Taut) or showed no inclination to return to their German homeland. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius were doing well in the United States, and Erich Mendelsohn had made his way to California via Palestine. Hans Scharoun was considered too exuberant by some clients, while Paul Baumgarten was seen as too strict. A moderately modern architect like Ruf came at just the right time.
The Ruf film, like the previous film about Gottfried Böhm, provides little architectural-historical context and completely dispenses with critical examination of the work. In its view of Ruf's work, it is also quite Munich-heavy. Ruf's groundbreaking bungalows in Berlin's Hansaviertel, for example, are not mentioned at all, although they prove that the architect did not let himself be infected by the candy-color fashion of his contemporaries in the fifties and preferred to rely on pleasantly high-quality materials like wood and clinker brick.
The American Embassy in Bonn is also not mentioned in the film. However, the circular church of St. Johann von Capistran from 1958 can be credited to the film as a rediscovery: achieving so much expressiveness with such simple and appealing geometric means has probably only been accomplished by Ruf and Timo and Tuomo Suomalainen with their Rock Church in Helsinki.
The film expresses an overdue late appreciation of Mid-Century Modernism in Germany during the time of the Economic Miracle and thereafter. In the eighties, Günter Behnisch became the leading architect of the Bonn Republic following Ruf, before I.M. Pei, Norman Foster, and Axel Schultes architecturally shaped the new face of the reunified country and its new capital Berlin. Since then, the federal government as a client of outstanding buildings at home, at world exhibitions, and in embassy construction has contented itself with mediocre solutions at best. The search for original solutions to building tasks has apparently become too laborious and politically risky for the state.
