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O.M. Ungers, Internationally Renowned German Architect, Dead at 81;
Oswald Mathias Ungers, the Cologne-based, award-winning architect who gained international recognition for his signature style and influenced generations of architects through his work as professor of architecture and architectural theory in the United States and Germany, died on Sunday in Cologne. He was 81. Well-known projects by Ungers include the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne, the new wing of the Hamburger Kunsthalle, the regional library of Karlsruhe, Frankfurt’s exhibition center, the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, the Friedrichstadt shopping arcades in Berlin, and the Residence of the German Ambassador here in Washington, DC.
Ungers was born in 1926 in the city of Kaisersesch in the Eifel region of western Germany. He was pulled out of secondary school to join the military in the last months of WWII and was held as a POW until 1946. He studied for three years at the Technical University in Karlsruhe under architect Egon Eiermann, one of the most prominent postwar architects and architect of the German Embassy’s Chancery in Washington, DC. At the young age of twenty-four, Ungers opened his first architecture firm in Cologne. He began his architectural career at a time when Germany was rebuilding its cities and redirecting the role of architecture in society. In the years after the war, while his contemporaries were revisiting the architectural styles of the 1930s or focusing heavily on decorative façades, Ungers remained true to his own architectural principles—clarity and rationality achieved through the use of basic geometric forms such as the square and the cube. Eventually, he became one of the most important and revolutionary architects of the second half of the twentieth century. While this did not exempt him from critique, he remained steadfast in his beliefs about the aesthetics and the purpose of architecture throughout his lifetime. While thoroughly modern, Ungers works were not disconnected from the past. He adored the Italian Renaissance architects Palladio and Alberti as well as the 19th-century Prussian architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel. The classical symmetry and the monumentality of their designs inspired him. The German Ambassador’s Residence in Washington, DC, completed in 1994, combines this type of influence with aspects derived from the prevalent styles of 19th-century architecture in Washington, DC and modern elements.
Ungers received many honors throughout his career, including the Architecture Award of the BDA (German Architectural Federation) and the Goethe Plaque of the City of Frankfurt. In addition, many of his students, including Rem Koolhaas, Hans Kollhoff, and Christoph Mäckler, have achieved great success. Last year the New National Gallery in Berlin exhibited Ungers’ collection of art and architecture in an exhibition titled “Cosmos of Architecture,” which was planned in celebration of his 80th birthday. October 5, 2007 Links
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