Paul Stohrer, 19091975

Paul Stohrer was born in Stuttgart in 1909 and
died there in 1975; from the 1950s to the 1970s
he was among that city’s most eminent and successful
architects.
He took advantage of rebuilding phase after
1945 for his professional development, and the
boost given by the years of the economic miracle
led to a peak in his architectural creativity. Today
his name has largely disappeared from public
memory in his field, and it is not well known that
many of his buildings made a considerable contribution
to Stuttgart’s appearance.
As he built several theatres and cinemas he
was familiar with the glamorous world of theatre
and cinema, and he created exclusive family
homes for clients on the scene at the time. In
addition to this, his commissioned repertoire included
mainly commercial, office and factory
buildings, as well as interiors for restaurants
and shops. One of his best-known works is his
house for the psychiatrist, filmmaker and collector
of contemporary art Ottomar Domnick in
Nürtingen near Stuttgart, which is now under
the aegis of the Stuttgart Staatsgalerie.
It is difficult to place Stohrer’s architectural
work within the existing categories of contemporary
building history. Stohrer follows his own
pathways with his stylistic and formal repertoire,
but the influence of Le Corbusier, and also Oscar
Niemeyer and others can be clearly discerned.
As professor of design and interior design at
the Staatsbauschule in Stuttgart (now the Hochschule
für Technik) he inspired generations of
students with his unconventional teaching approach.
Stohrer can be described as an ‚artistarchitect
‚. He saw architecture not just as an artistic
task, but was also an artist in the more limited
sense, devoting himself to painting throughout
his lifetime.