Richard Paulick

His father, also named Richard Paulick (1876-1952), was a trades unionist employed, as a young man, at the KPM (porcelain) factory in Berlin, about an hour to the north-east by train.

Richard Paulick, the father, wrote for the Anhalter Volksblatt, a local newspaper, and later became increasingly engaged as a regional List of members of the Landtag (Free State of Anhalt) (7th legislative period).

Richard Paulick (7 November 1903 – 4 March 1979) was a German architect with political connections.

He had a younger brother, Rudolf Paulick, born in 1908, who would also become an architect.

Between 1910 and 1923 Paulick attended the "Fridericianum", a primary and secondary school in Dessau.

After successfully completing the necessary exams he was ready for university, where he was keen to study art history.

He was persuaded by his father to study architecture, however.

With this in mind, he enrolled at the Technical University (as it was known at that time) in Dresden, where the architecture teaching was under the powerful influence of Hans Poelzig, who taught there.

Paulick later switched to Berlin, where he was taught by Martin Dülfer and Oswin Hempel, both of whom were highly influential in terms of Paulick's later work.

During his student years he became well networked with several of the more innovative members of Germany's architectural establishment.

In 1925, when the Bauhaus School relocated to Dessau, Richard Paulick took a job with them, employed according to one source as a "city guide" for the "Bauhaus masters" of the city in which he had spent his school years.

Meanwhile, six months after starting work at Bauhaus Dessau, he enrolled again at the Technical University of Berlin, where he studied between August 1925 and June 1927, now accepted into the "master class" of Hans Poelzig.

He undertook his studies at Berlin in parallel with his continuing work with Bauhaus Dessau.

Directly after completing his course at Berlin he was rehired, now joining the team in the private architecture studio of Walter Gropius himself.

Projects on which he worked included a second, greatly expanded phase for the Törten Steel House development, which now became a residential housing estate rather than a single "building".

He was also assigned to work on an implausibly large building (subsequently repurposed) for a new employment office Dessau.

During this time he developed close friendships and professional alliances with, in particular, Marcel Breuer and Georg Muche, with whom he co-designed the pioneering Steel House, built during 1926/27 in Törten.

During 1928 Gropius had to leave Dessau under circumstances which seem to have involved a certain level of fractious politics both inside and outside the Dessau office.

At this stage Paulick remained at Dessau, taking responsibility for managing the office and for overseeing the completion of jobs which Gropius had hitherto been directing.

In June 1929 Paulick followed Gropius to Berlin which by this point, for most purposes, was replacing Dessau as the headquarters for the Bauhaus movement in Germany.

The economic backwash from the Wall Street crash hit Germany badly, with major bank collapses and unemployment levels reaching record levels.

There was very little work in the pipeline for architects.

In 1930 Gropius found himself obliged by the dire economic situation to release Paulick from his employment.

Paulick set up his own architecture practice in Berlin which continued to exist for three years, active both in Berlin and in Dessau.

A small number of projects was undertaken and completed, but in the context of the continuing economic problems that the country was experiencing, commercial success eluded him during this period.

The enforced shortage of professional work during the early 1930s evidently left Paulick with more spare time for political involvement, but he had already been involved, while still a child, in his father's political activity in Rosslau, and had joined the Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands / SPD) in his early 20s, back in 1925 (or 1927: sources differ.) Under the acute social pressure following military defeat and economic collapse, politics became increasingly polarised during the 1920s, with more voters favouring the Communists or Hitler's National Socialists rather than the parties of political moderation.

By 1930 the political polarisation was spilling onto the streets and threatening to deadlock the parliament – which was precisely what happened in 1932.

In 1930 Paulick switched his political allegiance, becoming a founder member of the short-lived Socialist Workers' Party (Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands / SAP), committed to promoting political co-operation between the Communist Party and the centre-left SPD in order to avert the risk of a take-over by extremists from the right.

This involved relocating to Shanghai, which during the 1930s experienced a remarkable and sustained building boom.

In professional terms his most productive period, frequently overlooked in western sources, may have been the time he spent in Shanghai between 1933 and 1949.

He has been described as the "father of East-German Plattenbau" (construction).

In the eyes of admirers he was nevertheless able to bring an element of "humanisation" to the economics-driven low-cost high-density post-war reconstruction of East Germany.

Richard Paulick was born at Roßlau, a small manufacturing town near Dessau (with which, more recently, it has been merged for administrative purposes) some 40 km / 25 miles north of Leipzig.

By 1933 Paulick was identified as an SAP party official, though the nature and extent of his political activism are hard to pin down.

It was during 1933 that the Hitler government took power Machtergreifung and Germany was transformed from a democracy to a one-party dictatorship.

The SAP, along with other political parties, was outlawed.

Paulick's record of non-Hitlerite political activism and the continuing inactivity in the German construction sector both pointed towards the potential advantages of emigration.

In the summer of 1933 Paulick received and accepted what amounted to a job offer from his friend, former flatmate and Dresden student contemporary, Rudolf Hamburger.

In contrast to the situation in Europe, in Shanghai, where he arrived in June 1933, there was an abundance of work for architects.

His wife Else Bongers did not accompany him, however, and the marriage later ended through divorce.