Born in Hamburg, 1902, Konstanty Gutschow graduated from the Johanneum School of Education. After an extensive study trip through Spain, in the fall of 1921, he joined an architecture course in Danzig and later switched to the TH Stuttgart. After graduating from Stuttgart in 1926, he first practiced in the Hamburg building department under chief building director Fritz Schumacher, with whom he developed a teacher-pupil relationship. In 1928 he passed the second state examination as a government architect, but he founded his own architectural office in 1929. He made a name for himself as an architect with great organizational talent in the 1930s and acted as the city architect of Hamburg from 1942 to 1944.

While the Second World War was intensifying in 1941,  Konstanty Gutschow became head of the newly created AKE Office for War Operations. Gutschow realized an opportunity for more radical urban redevelopment after the damage caused by the bombing raids in the summer of 1943. By 1944, Gutschow and his staff created a new general development plan with the model of organic urban development. At the end of 1943, Gutschow was appointed by Albert Speer to be the organizational head of the “workforce for the reconstruction of bomb-damaged cities” and drew up reconstruction plans for Hamburg, Wilhelmshaven and Kassel.

After the German capitulation, his contract with the city was terminated by the British military government at the end of 1945. As part of the denazification process in 1949, he was banned from working for public clients. However, the works he had done influenced German post-war urban development in the sense of an organic urban landscape.

He first came to Nepal in October 1971 to visit the restoration site of the Pujarimath (presented by the government of West Germany to the people of Nepal on the occasion of the wedding of the then Crown Prince Birendra) in which his son, Niels, was involved. He returned to Nepal in March 1972 to study anionic shrines in natural settings. At the end of the year, he published a booklet with his sketches and comments under the title ‘Wasser und Bäume’ (‘Water and Trees’). Gutschow returned to Nepal in November 1973 with an assistant, Johannes Cramer, to undertake a detailed architectural survey of the Hanumanghat in Bhaktapur.

Gutschow retired from his office in 1972 and took his last breath in Hamburg in 1978.

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Pujarimath

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