Erich Schelling
German architect (1904–1986)
Erich Schelling (11 September 1904 Wiesloch – 14 November 1986 Karlsruhe) was a German architect.
He was born in Wiesloch near Heidelberg and studied at the State Technical College (later the Fachhochschule) in Karlsruhe from 1924 to 1928 and the Technical University (today the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology), until May 1933.
In 1933 and 1934, Schelling joined several Nazi organizations, notably the Sturmabteilung (SA) paramilitary organization and the Reich Chamber of Culture (in its Reich Chamber of Fine Arts subdivision), which had just been founded to repress all art that did not support Nazi ideals. He remained active in all of these organizations until the Nazi state fell in 1945, and was promoted in the SA three times.
He was made head of the architectural office at Hermann Alker before leaving to set up his own office in Karlsruhe in 1937. Later that year he was appointed Professor of Architecture at the State Technical College. His first major commission was the conversion of a Karlsruhe building slated to be a Nazi publishing house in 1939. In 1942 he opened a second office in Strasbourg, where he was commissioned to construct a new administrative building and to redesign the Senate Council Chamber for the University of Strasbourg.
After the war he worked on the reconstruction of industry, particularly on the FAG Kugelfischer factories in Schweinfurt.
His major achievement, in collaboration with the engineer Ulrich Finsterwalder, was the design and construction in 1953 of the Schwarzwaldhalle in Karlsruhe, which has the first hanging paraboloid roof in reinforced concrete to be constructed in Europe.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1353135. VIAF identifies the subject as 52494680. The Library of Congress control number is nr95012467. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1904, 1986, 1924 and 1928.
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This entry incorporates text from “Erich Schelling” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.