Emil Thormählen
Emil Thormählen (24 May 1859 – 1 April 1941) was a German architect who also worked as a teacher at several technical schools.
Biography
Emil Thormählen was born in Moorhusen, Steinburg. He grew up in Holstein and went to school in Hamburg where he attended the school for building craftsmen in 1876/1877. He studied architecture at the Hanover Higher Vocational College from 1877 and then transferred to the Royal Technical Academy of Berlin. In Hanover, he became a member of the fraternity Ostfalia Corps in 1882.
In 1881 he worked in the office of the royal building inspector Haesecke and was involved there with work on the Berlin city train stations Alexanderplatz and Friedrichstraße. In addition, he gave drawing lessons at the construction school of the Berlin Craftsmen's Association. From 1883 he was a teacher at the State Drawing Academy in Hanau. In 1889, he also took over as director of the Hanau industrial training school. In 1897 he was appointed director of the Magdeburg School of Arts and Crafts. Under his leadership, the Magdeburg institute became a "reform school" in the sense of the Deutscher Werkbund, of which he had been a member since 1907. Collaborators included the architects Albin Müller and Rudolf Rütschi, the painters Max Köppen, Paul Lang, Paul Bürck and Ferdinand Nigg, and the ceramists Hans and Fritz von Heider.
Due to his good reputation, he was called to Cologne in 1910 and appointed director of the Cologne Art and Craft Schools (later the Cologne Academy of Fine and Applied Arts).
In 1919, he retired and moved with his family to the vineyard of his wife Else (née Altenkirch), an arts and crafts teacher and sister of Alexe Altenkirch, in Bad Kreuznach on the Nahe. There he worked as a winemaker until his death. The sculptor and art historian Ludwig Thormaehlen and the inventor Klaus Thormaehlen were his sons. His daughter Dora Thormählen was a talented art bookbinder and student of Franz Weisse. She died in 1921 at the age of 29.
References
- Matthias Puhle, ed., Norbert Eiseold: Die Kunstgewerbe- und Handwerkerschule Magdeburg 1793–1963. Magdeburg: Magdeburger Museen (1993), p. 52.
