Background
A member of the renowned Alsatian Koechlin family, he was born in Buhl, Haut-Rhin, the son of Jean Koechlin and his wife Anne Marie (Anaïs), née Beuck.
A member of the renowned Alsatian Koechlin family, he was born in Buhl, Haut-Rhin, the son of Jean Koechlin and his wife Anne Marie (Anaïs), née Beuck.
Maurice studied at the lycée in Mulhouse, then between 1873 and 1877 civil engineering at the Polytechnikum Zürich under Carl Culmann.
In 1870/1871 when France lost the Franco-Prussian war to Prussia the Koechlin family as a whole decided to become citizens of Switzerland and thus dropped French citizenship. After the defeat of the German Empire in 1918, however, the Koechlin family again applied for French citizenship. Much of his work was in the service of Gustave Eiffel"s company "Compagnie des établissements Eiffel", which Koechlin joined in 1879.
In 1886 Maurice married Emma Rossier (1867-1965).
Maurice Koechlin became the Managing Director of Eiffel"s company when Eiffel retired from the engineering profession in 1893. The company also then was renamed "Société de construction de Levallois-Perret".
Maurice Koechlin died in 1946 in Veytaux, Switzerland in a house built by himself in 1900. Major structural designs include: Garabit viaduct, (1880–1884).
Armature for the Statue of Liberty - in collaboration with Frédéric Bartholdi, (1884).
And Eiffel Tower, (1887–1889). Officer of the Légion d"honneur. Though named after a project of Gustave Eiffel, the Eiffel Tower – symbol of Paris – has its structural concept and form from the responsible chief engineer Maurice Koechlin.
Koechlin was an engineer of outstanding ingenuity and well versed in the structural techniques of his time.
He possessed therefore the best qualifications for evolving such technically innovative conceptions for which Eiffel and his firm were renowned.