Rudolf Hillebrecht

Why this artist matters now

Rudolf Hillebrecht was a German architect and city planner. In 1948, against an impressive list of rival candidates, he succeeded in obtaining appointment as city planning officer for his home city of Hannover, with a mandate to rebuild a city that had suffered massive bomb damage between 1942 and 1945. He approached his task with evangelical zeal. His ideas for post-war Hanover aligned with the prevailing spirit of the "Wirtschaftswunder" years, and by 1959 it was possible to boast that Hannover was the only city in West Germany with its own network of city motorways, while Hillebrecht had probably become the only man alive in Hannover with an international reputation. Urban developments during the next twenty years repeatedly demonstrated the extent of Hillebrand's influence across and beyond western Europe. His redevelopment of Hannover was nevertheless not uncontroversial even at the time. A large number of historical buildings that had somehow survived Anglo-American bombing were now destroyed out of deference to a larger plan: some of the Hilebrecht plans involving wholesale destruction and replacement of entire districts of the city were indeed never implemented. Hillebrecht himself later conceded that the destruction, during the early 1960s, of Hannover's striking neo-Renaissance "Flusswasserkunst" had been a mistake.

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