Rudolf Tönnies


Rudolf Tönnies was an Austro-Hungarian and Yugoslav architect and politician, son of the famous Swedish industrialist Gustav Tönnies.
Together with the Czeck Josip Pospišil and the Austrian Ernst Lichtblau, who had all studied at the Art Academy in Vienna with Karl von Hasenauer and Otto Wagner, Tönnies is considered one of the proponents of the "Bosnian style" as a step towards architectural modernism in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as opposed to Moorish Revival style

Biography

Rudolf Tönnies studied construction and civil engineering and worked for the Croatian government in Zagreb, then as lead architect for the Government of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo, where he left among the most notable residential and mixed buildings in Vienna Secession style in town. In 1918 he returned to Ljubljana, obtained a trade concession and joined his brothers. In Ljubljana he built around 1923 the Credit Bank and at the same time the Ljubljana yard.
In 1898 he married Paula Faller ; they had a daughter, Frigga Tönnies.
Tönnies also contributed to the Bosnian style in architecture, which can be compared with Scandinavian National Romanticism. The Bosnian Style was championed by a younger generation of architects, like Czech architect Josip Pospošil, Slovene architect Rudolf Tönnies, and Austrian architect Ernst Lichtblau, who all studied at the Art Academy in Vienna with Karl von Hasenauer and Otto Wagner. The style was, however, named by Sarajevo's senior architect, Josip Vancaš, for whom many of these younger architects worked.

Works