Lynnette Widder
Abstract
West German architecture underwent a phase of intense productivity between 1949 and 1964. In the immediate postwar years, as drastic privation still hampered construction, architects attempted to confront the stylistic legacy of Nazism. As industrial production recovered and a middle-class nation emerged, so too did a new architecture influenced by the American International Style model. By focusing on two architects at the center of these transformations, Hans Schwippert and Sep Ruf, Lynnette Widder uses construction details and other technical documents to consider how architectural practice aspired to calibrate social, material, and political norms through design.
Personal Bio
Lynnette Widder is the author of Year Zero to Economic Miracle: Hans Schwippert and Sep Ruf in Postwar West German Building Culture. She is educated as both architect and architectural historian; has practiced architecture in New York, Berlin, Basel and Zurich; and has taught at universities in the US, Canada and Switzerland. Currently she is Associate Professor of Professional Practice at Columbia University, where she teaches sustainable built environment courses. She is the co-author of two books on architecture and architectural education, as well as author of numerous journal articles and book chapters on architectural history and sustainable building practices.