Background
Paul Ludwig Troost was born on 17 August 1878 in Wuppertal-Elberfeld.
(The building intended to be a great temple for a ‘true, e...)
The building intended to be a great temple for a ‘true, eternal art of the German people'. It was a good example of the imitation of classical forms in monumental public buildings during the Third Reich, though subsequently Hitler moved away from the more restrained style of Troost, reverting to the pompous imperial grandeur that he had admired in the Vienna Ringstrasse of his youth.
1937
Paul Ludwig Troost was born on 17 August 1878 in Wuppertal-Elberfeld.
Troost belonged to a school of architects (including Peter Behrens and Walter Gropius) who even before 1914 reacted sharply against the highly ornamental Jugendstil and advocated a restrained, lean architectural approach, almost devoid of ornament.
Troost graduated from designing steamship décor before World War I and the fittings for showy trans-Atlantic liners like the Europa to a style that combined Spartan traditionalism with elements of modernity.
Although before 1933 he did not belong to the leading group of German architects, Troost’s work filled Hitler with enthusiasm and in 1930 he designed the Nazi Party’s Brown House in Munich, at the latter's request.
In the autumn of 1933 he was commissioned to rebuild and refurnish the Chancellery residence in Berlin. Along with other Nazi architects, he planned and built State and municipal edifices throughout the country, including new administrative offices, social buildings for workers and bridges across the main highways.
One of the many structures he planned before his death was the House of German Art in Munich.
Hitler's relationship to Troost was that of a pupil to an admired teacher and he would frequently visit the architect's studio in a battered backyard off the Theresienstrasse in Munich. According to Albert Speer, who later became Hitler's favourite architect, the Führer would impatiently greet Troost with the words: ‘I can't wait, Herr Professor. Is there anything new - let's see it!' The architect would then lay out his latest plans and sketches. Hitler frequently declared, according to Speer, that ‘he first learned what architecture is from Troost’.
The architect’s death on 21 March 1934, after a severe illness, was a painful blow, but Hitler remained close to his widow, whose architectural taste frequently coincided with his own which made her (in Speer's words) ‘a kind of arbiter of art in Munich’.
Physical Characteristics: An extremely tall, spare-looking, reserved Westphalian with a close-shaven head.