Walter Curt Behrendt (December 16, 1884 – April 26, 1945) was a

German-American German Americans (german: Deutschamerikaner, ) are Americans who have full or partial German ancestry. With an estimated size of approximately 43 million in 2019, German Americans are the largest of the self-reported ancestry groups by the Unite ...

architect An architect is a person who plans, designs and oversees the construction of buildings. To practice architecture means to provide services in connection with the design of buildings and the space within the site surrounding the buildings that h ...

and active advocate of German modernism. He was an authority on

city planning Urban planning, also known as town planning, city planning, regional planning, or rural planning, is a technical and political process that is focused on the development and design of land use and the built environment, including air, water, ...

and

housing Housing, or more generally, living spaces, refers to the construction and assigned usage of houses or buildings individually or collectively, for the purpose of shelter. Housing ensures that members of society have a place to live, whether it ...

, editor of ''Die Form'', and author of ''The Victory of the New Building Style'' among many other works. Behrendt was born in

Metz Metz ( , , lat, Divodurum Mediomatricorum, then ) is a city in northeast France located at the confluence of the Moselle and the Seille rivers. Metz is the prefecture of the Moselle department and the seat of the parliament of the Grand E ...

, emigrated to the U.S. in 1934 to teach at

Dartmouth College Dartmouth College (; ) is a private research university in Hanover, New Hampshire. Established in 1769 by Eleazar Wheelock, it is one of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution. Although founded to educate Native A ...

through the help of his friend

Lewis Mumford Lewis Mumford (October 19, 1895 – January 26, 1990) was an American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and literary critic. Particularly noted for his study of cities and urban architecture, he had a broad career as a wr ...

, and died in

Norwich Norwich () is a cathedral city and district of Norfolk, England, of which it is the county town. Norwich is by the River Wensum, about north-east of London, north of Ipswich and east of Peterborough. As the seat of the See of Norwich, with ...

Vermont Vermont () is a state in the northeast New England region of the United States. Vermont is bordered by the states of Massachusetts to the south, New Hampshire to the east, and New York to the west, and the Canadian province of Quebec to ...

Selected literary works

* ''Alfred Messel'', intro. Karl Scheffler. Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1911. Reprint: Gebr.Mann, Berlin 1998. * ''Die einheitliche Blockfront als Raumelement im Stadtbau''. Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1911. * ''Der Kampf um den Stil im Kunstgewerbe und in der Architektur''. Stuttgart/Berlin: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1920. * ''Der Sieg des neuen Baustils''. Stuttgart: Akademischer Verlag Dr. Fritz Wedekind & Co., 1927. Translated as: ''The Victory of the New Building Style'', intro. Detlef Mertins, trans. Harry F. Mallgrave. Texts & Documents. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2000. * ''Modern Building. Its Nature, Problems, and Forms''. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1937.

References

* Mertins, Detlef. "Introduction," in Behrendt, The Victory of the New Building Style, pp. 1–84. * Samson, Miles David. "

, Walter Curt Behrendt, and the Modern Movement in Germany," Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 55, no. 2 (May 1996): 126–139. * Gutschow, Kai Konstanty. "Revising the Paradigm: German Modernism as the Search for a National Architecture in the Writings of Walter Curt Behrendt." (M.Arch) Thesis, University of California at Berkeley, 1993. * Scalvini, Maria-Luisa and Maria G. Sandri. L'immagine storiografica dell'architettura contemporanea da Platz a Giedion. Rome: Officina Edizione, 1984.

External links

*
Walter Curt Behrendt papers, 1910–1945
* ttp://www.sah.org/oldsite06012004/aame/biob.html SAH.org – Society of Architectural Historiansat www.sah.org (short biography) 1884 births 1945 deaths 20th-century German architects 20th-century American architects Dartmouth College faculty German emigrants to the United States People from Alsace-Lorraine People from Metz {{Germany-architect-stub