Gustav Wolf, 1887–1963, architect, civic building manager, educator.
Gustav Wolf trained as an instructor (drawing teacher certification in Breslau) and as an architect (with Theodor Fischer at the Technische Hochschule in Munich), and he had more than a dozen years experience working on public housing projects, before he became Director of Breslau’s Städtische Handwerker- und Kunstgewerbeschule in 1927. A talk he gave on February 4, 1928 before trade organizations in Breslau outlined his approach to arts and crafts education. Sensitive to the economic devastation of post World War I Germany and the increasing capabilities of industry, he sought to integrate modern needs with traditional skills. When he participated in WUWA (Wohnungs- und Werkraumausstellung), an exhibition to build economical and humane living and workspaces in Breslau in 1929, he outfitted his design for a semi-attached house (No. 32-33) with custom “furniture, lighting fixtures, curtains, upholstery fabrics, forged iron screens, as well as glass, leather and ceramic objects,” made in the teaching workshops of the school.1Urbanik, Jadwiga, Museym Architektury Breslau WUWA 1929 – 2009: the Werkbund exhibition in Wrocław — Wrocław: Muzeum Architektury we Wrocławiu, 2010, p. 188. The building proved in fact to be the most cost efficient of all the constructions.2Urbanik, Jadwiga, Museym Architektury Breslau WUWA 1929 – 2009: the Werkbund exhibition in Wrocław — Wrocław: Muzeum Architektury we Wrocławiu, 2010, p. 277.
educatingCraftsmenDSWolf left Breslau, taking a teaching position at the Staatsbauschule Berlin-Neukölln in 1934. Four years later, he was forced from his post by the Nazi regime. He settled in Münster as the county building maintenance officer and continued research he had begun in Berlin by founding an agency dedicated to publishing a multi-volume work on rural architecture. He lived to see the publication of three volumes of the work.