Johann Georg Poppe (12 September 1837 – 18 August 1915), often called Johannes Poppe by English-language writers, was a prominent architect in Bremen during the German Gründerzeit and an influential interior designer of ocean liners for the Norddeutscher Lloyd. He worked in an eclectic mixture of historical revival styles sometimes called "Bremen Baroque".Alain Dewerpe, "Du style français. Les conventions nationales du paquebot comme produit matériel et imaginaire social, 1900–1935" in Bénédicte Zimmmermann, Claude Didry and Peter Wagner, eds., Le travail et la nation: histoire croisée de la France et de l'Allemagne, Paris: Maison des sciences de l'homme, 1999, , pp. 281–310, p. 303
Life and career Poppe was born in Bremen into a family with a heritage as architects;E. Gildemeister, "Das Wohnhaus", in Architekten- und Ingenieurverein, Bremen, Bremen und seine Bauten, Bremen: Schünemann, 1900, , pp. 408–74, p. 433. 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.Wolfgang Brönner, Die bürgerliche Villa in Deutschland, 1830–1890: unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Rheinlandes, Beiträge zu den Bau- und Kunstdenkmälern im Rheinland 29, Düsseldorf: Schwann, 1987, , p. 159 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 (1873), library (1896), Cotton Exchange (1902) and Rice Exchange (1904). He was chief architect for the Nordwestdeutsche Gewerbe- und Industrieausstellung (Northwest German Trade and Industry Exhibition) 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,Horst Karl Marschall, ed., Friedrich von Thiersch: ein Münchner Architekt des Späthistorismus 1852–1921, Materialien zur Kunst des 19. Jahrhunderts 30, Technical University of Munich, Munich: Prestel, 1982, , p. 271 including one of its three doors,H. Mänz, "Das Rathaus", in Bremen und seine Bauten, pp. 115–57, p. 152. 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.Oliver Korn, Hanseatische Gewerbeausstellungen im 19. Jahrhundert: republikanische Selbstdarstellung, regionale Wirtschaftsförderung und bürgerliches Vergnügen, Sozialwissenschaftliche Studien 37, Opladen: Leske und Budrich, 1999, , p. 143 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" (non-marine) architect responsible for entire ships,John Maxtone-Graham, Liners to the Sun, 1985, repr. Dobbs Ferry, New York: Sheridan House, 2000, , p. 203. 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.Eberhard Straub, Albert Ballin: Der Reeder des Kaisers, Berlin: Siedler, 2001, , p. 93 Frank Parker Stockbridge and Thomas R. MacMechen, "Skyscrapers of the Sea: The Modern Big Steamship a Floating Hotel, Proof against Wind, Weather and Collision", The Hampton Magazine March 1912, pp. 85–91 +, p. 87. 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,Daniel Allen Butler, The Age of Cunard: A Transatlantic History 1839–2003, Annapolis, Maryland: Lighthouse, 2003, , p. 130. 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.Anne Wealleans, Designing Liners: A History of Interior Design Afloat, London: Routledge, 2006, , p. 58.Georg Bessell, Norddeutscher Lloyd 1857–1957: Geschichte einer bremischen Reederei, Bremen: Schünemann, , , p. 97 When Albert Ballin commissioned the first express liner for the rival Hamburg America Line, the Augusta Victoria, he hired Poppe to design the interior.Straub, p. 45 The new headquarters building he designed for NDL (1901–1910) 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's designs 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.History of the North German Lloyd Steamship Company of Bremen (1898) at Gjenvik-Gjønvik Archives 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",Douglas R. Burgess Jr., Seize the Trident: The Race for Superliner Supremacy and How It Altered the Great War, Camden, Maine: International Marine/McGraw Hill, 2003, , p. 110. 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",John Malcolm Brinnin, The Sway of the Grand Saloon: A Social History of the North Atlantic, New York: Seymour Lawrence/Delacorte, 1971, , p. 311. 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"Wealleans, p. 43. and by a contemporary American as "'two of everything but the kitchen range', then gilded."Burgess, p. 34. 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.Die Bremer Baumwollbörse ist das krasseste Beispiel dieser Art, von deren Formenfülle schon kurz nach der Vollendung abblätternde Ornamente Passanten erschlagend herabstürzten und auf diese geradezu groteske Weise die Krebsschäden unserer Baupraxis gezeigt haben. - "The crassest example of this kind is the Bremen Cotton Exchange, decorations from it having peeled off beginning soon after completion, to fall and strike passersby and in this utterly grotesque manner demonstrate the cancerous lesions of our mode of building." Cited in Heinz Stoffregen, 1879–1929: Architektur zwischen Tradition und Avantgarde, ed. Nils Aschenbeck, Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1990, , p. 11.
Selected works
Public buildings Bremen Waterworks (1871–73), with Dietrich Berg as technical designer, Poppe designed Bremen's first municipal waterworks, housing it in a square red-brick Gothic revival tower with four corner turrets which emulated the form of the Grand Master's Residence in the Marienburg fortress of the Teutonic Knights in East Prussia (now Malbork Castle in Poland). Initially water was drawn from the River Weser and filtered through sand; it was pumped into two storage tanks on the upper floor, with the turrets housing chimneys for the steam pumps, piping and access.Technical details in A. Götze, "Wasserversorgung", in Bremen und seine Bauten, pp. 506–15, pp. 508–15; photograph of the building showing its original form, p. 506. The shape of the building led to the nickname umgedrehte Kommode (upside-down commode); the turrets have been shortened because of the danger of bricks falling from them. The tower has been protected as an architectural monument since 1978.Landmark listing at Landesamt für Denkmalpflege Bremen, 5 October 2011, retrieved 19 October 2011 Since the waterworks are no longer in service, the tower is to become the centrepiece of a projected residential development. Nordwestdeutsche Gewerbe- und Industrieausstellung (1890), chief designer for the largest German exposition up to that time, held jointly on 37.5 hectares of grounds in the southern part of the Bremen Bürgerpark by the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen, the Grand Duchy of Oldenburg and the Prussian Province of Hanover. Dissatisfied with the competition entries received from architects hoping to design the main buildings, the committee instead commissioned Poppe, at the time the most popular architect in Bremen, for the six main exhibit halls and the Festival Hall. These were built in only seven months, at a cost of approximately 500,000 Gold marks. All were timber, in a historical style with Baroque and Renaissance elements. After the exhibition closed in October 1890, they were demolished except for the Festival Hall, which was renamed the Park House.C. Ohrt, "Der Bürgerpark", in Bremen und seine Bauten, pp. 568–74, p. 570. It was destroyed by fire in 1907, and the five-star Parkhotel Bremen now occupies the site. City LibraryHerbert Schwarzwälder, Geschichte der freien Hansestadt Bremen Volume 2 Von der Franzosenzeit bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg, Hamburg: Christians, 1976, , p. 563 (since 1927 State Library) (1896) Poppe won the contest to design the building against 34 other entrants.H. Wagner, "Die Stadtbibliothek", in Bremen und seine Bauten, pp. 307-09, p. 307. Poppe's building was heavily ornamented, but employed a modern layout in the stacks, with metal shelving and stepladders rather than floor divisions for minimal fire risk and maximum visibility.Wagner, p. 309. It was heavily damaged in the Second World War and eventually renovated and enlarged in a simplified form with a flat roof. In 1974 it was replaced by a modern building on the campus of the university;Geschichte der SuUB, Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Bremen, 2011, retrieved 20 October 2011 , with pictures it was the home of the Übersee Museum Bremen until 1989, when it was demolished to build a multi-screen cinema.