546 <strong>2015</strong> ¥ 6 ∂ PureInvention?–TheLamellaHallsof the Aviation Pioneer Hugo Junkers Joram Tutsch, Sven Tornack, Rainer Barthel 1 “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 2 3 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).
∂ <strong>2015</strong> ¥ 6 Discussion 547 1 View through wing of G24 airliner; braced by space-frame construction, consisting of coldformed sheet-metal members 2 Schematic diagram of Zollinger system 3 Schematic diagram of Junkers lamella system 4 Interior of Skyways House, Liverpool, with lamella roof construction from 1939, refurbished in 2006; architects: CDA 4
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