Detail english 2015-11-12

546 2015 ¥ 6 ∂
PureInvention?–TheLamellaHallsof
the Aviation Pioneer Hugo Junkers
Joram Tutsch, Sven Tornack, Rainer Barthel
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“In our day and age, I see the central issue
of building in the industrialization of construction,”
and this process “is a question of
materials”, Mies van der Rohe wrote in 1924.
With these words, he formulated an issue
that Hugo Junkers had resolved in aircraft
construction ten years earlier. In contrast to
what was standard practice in those days,
Junkers did not build with wood, a natural
material that was unpredictable from an engineer’s
point of view. Instead, he opted
systematically for aeroplanes made entirely
of metal. As early as 1925, Junkers had experimented
in his own building developments
with industrial forms of construction,
and there, too, he chose metal rather than
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concrete. With the reform building department
of the Junkers works, he attempted, by
means of a cooperation between the various
company sections, to produce a prefabricated
building that could be assembled according
to serial principles. The basic findings
he had made in the field of aircraft construction
he now applied to engineering
structures, and over the years, scientific
building research was implemented in the
Junkers plant under the laboratory conditions
of the aircraft industry.
Aesthetic and formal considerations took a
back seat behind physical and technical requirements.
His most successful buildingengineering
achievement, the so-called
“Junkers lamella hall”, was developed, marketed
and propagated by the department
for steel construction. The constructional
history of this hall will be considered in the
following paper.
Hugo Junkers, the person
Only when he was 50 years old did the qualified
engineer Hugo Junkers turn to aircraft
construction, a discipline in which he was
ultimately to gain international renown.
At that point in his life, he was the father of
seven children; he had already developed
the first two-stroke opposed-piston gas engine
and the calorimeter (an apparatus for
measuring the amount of heat generated in
chemical reactions); he had founded six
companies (with more than 20 further ones
to follow); and he had a full professorship for
thermodynamics at the prestigious University
of Technology in Aachen. There, he was
motivated by his colleague Hans Reissner to
take an interest in aviation.
In 1910, he had already patented the socalled
“thick wing”, and only five years later,
he succeeded with a pioneering construction
in creating the first all-metal plane –
something which, up to that time, had been
regarded as impossible. Animated by an irrepressible
urge to participate in research
and aided by the economic development of
the Junkers works, more than 30 different
aircraft models were developed and constructed
during his lifetime, the best-known
of which were the Junkers F13 and Junkers
Ju52, nicknamed “Tante Ju”. These were the
most successful passenger planes of the
1920s and 30s.
In 1919, Junkers initiated the first air route
between Dessau and Weimar and played a
participatory role in a number of airlines.
The company Junkers-Luftverkehr AG,
founded in 1921, merged with Deutscher
Aero Lloyd in 1926 to become the German
Lufthansa.
In the 1920s, other spin-off and start-up
companies were founded in Germany as
well as in the Soviet Union, the US, Sweden
and Turkey. The concern retained its base
in Dessau, however, which at that time can
be seen as a Mecca for engineers and technicians.
When the Bauhaus was invited to
establish itself in that prosperous city in
1925 – with strong support from Junkers –
the company increasingly applied itself to
the industrialization of building construction.
In 1924, under the direction of the architect
Ottokar Paulssen, the steel construction department
of the Junkers plant applied for its
first patent: for the so-called “bar grid”. In the
following years, a civil-law dispute developed
with the Zollbau Syndicate on account of allegations
of a strong similarity between the
Junkers system and that of Zollinger. This
was settled only in 1928. Before the Junkers
concern was caught up in the world economic
crisis as well, Junkers himself managed to
develop the lamella hall into a successful
product and to market it worldwide.
A tragic turn of events for Hugo Junkers
and his consortium was the seizure of
power in Germany by the Nazis, whose intrigues
and threats he felt as early as 1930.
Within a few months, Junkers was first dispossessed,
then ousted from Dessau and
finally, on 3 February 1934, his 75th birthday,
placed under house arrest in his holiday
home in Bayrischzell. Exactly one year
later, Junkers died in Gauting near Munich.
Ten years after the end of the Second
World War, the journal “Münchner Illustrierte”
published a six-part series with the
title “Die Junkers Tragödie” (The Junkers
Tragedy).