Johann Poppe


Johann Georg Poppe, often called Johannes Poppe by English-speaking writers, was a prominent architect in Bremen during the German Gründerzeit and an influential interior designer of ocean liners for Norddeutscher Lloyd. He worked in an eclectic mixture of historical revival styles sometimes called "Bremen Baroque".

Life and career

Poppe was born in Bremen into a family with a heritage as architects; his father was also a cabinetmaker. From 1855 to 1859, he studied architecture at the Polytechnic School in Karlsruhe, forerunner of the University of Karlsruhe. From 1860 to 1861 he practised architecture in Berlin; he worked under Hermann Friedrich Waesemann on the Rotes Rathaus. But from 1863 on, he worked in Bremen. He was greatly influenced by six years of travel and studying in Italy, Greece, and especially France, where he lived for some time in Paris.
He acquired a reputation by building large public buildings, including the Bremen waterworks, library, Cotton Exchange and Rice Exchange. He was chief architect for the Nordwestdeutsche Gewerbe- und Industrieausstellung of 1890; the Festival Hall for this was later known as the Park House. In 1883 he oversaw the redesign of the upper chamber of the Town Hall of Bremen, including one of its three doors, and in 1903 designed new seats for the city councillors; like most of his work, this has been much altered since.
He also designed numerous villas and country houses for the elite of Bremen, mostly in the Horn and Oberneuland districts which at the time lay outside the city. Most of these have since been demolished. He rebuilt Villa Ichon and lived there for many years.
From 1881 to 1907, Poppe was chief interior designer for the ocean liners of Norddeutscher Lloyd, the first "lay" architect responsible for entire ships, and transformed them into floating hotels. He was responsible for the innovation of placing the first-class dining saloon in the centre of the ship, where it could be two or three decks high, lit by a giant skylight. Hired by Johann Lohmann, the director of the company, to do the interiors of the twelve Rivers class liners because of his preeminence as a designer, he first worked on the SS Elbe of 1881; only in 1906, when Poppe was seventy years old, did Lohmann's successor, Heinrich Wiegand, replace him with younger, progressive architects for some of the interiors on the, but he was still responsible for her main public rooms. When Albert Ballin commissioned the first express liner for the rival Hamburg America Line, the Augusta Victoria, he hired Poppe to design the interior. The new headquarters building he designed for NDL was at the time the largest building in Bremen.
Poppe's historicism was not favoured by younger architects, who worked in Jugendstil and reformist styles. At the end of his life he withdrew to his estate of Poppenhof on the right bank of the River Lesum in Burglesum, now part of Bremen, where he died in 1915. He is buried in the Riensberg Cemetery in Bremen.

Style

Poppe worked in an eclectic historicising style which drew most on the Renaissance and the Baroque; in the first part of his career he was greatly influenced by what he had seen in Italy and especially France. In the 1870s he began to build more in the style of the English Gothic revival. His buildings were richly ornamented inside and out; as his career progressed, he increasingly worked with large interior decorating firms, especially Bembé of Mainz, who executed his ship interiors. The result was popular with his wealthy clients; at the turn of the century he was Bremen's most prominent architect; but after fashions changed, was outmoded. Kreyenhorst Castle was demolished in the 1920s. His ship interiors have been described as "overblown, over-decorated, and dark", as "a seagoing baroque collage of high ceilings, massive pillars, gilded balustrades, trumpeting cherubs, and gigantic statuary," as "temples of high baroque, grand galleries of an aspiration so Valkeyrian that only megalomaniacs might dally there in comfort or good conscience", by Cunard executives who visited the and in 1903 as "bizarre, extravagant and crude, loud in colour and restless in form, obviously costly, and showy to the most extreme degree" and by a contemporary American as "'two of everything but the kitchen range', then gilded." The architecture critic Walter Müller-Wulckow described the Bremen Cotton Exchange, which started to shed its profuse ornamentation after exposure to the elements, as the "crassest" manifestation of "cancerous" building styles.

Selected works

Public buildings

Commercial buildings

Residences

Interior design of ocean liners