Name Edmund Collein | ||
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Born 10 January 1906 Bad Kreuznach, Germany Occupation Architect
urban planner Spouse(s) Lotte Gerson
(m. 23 February 1931) Died January 21, 1992, Berlin, Germany | ||
Edmund Collein (10 January 1906 – 21 January 1992) was a German architect and urban planner. Between 1966 and 1975 he served as President of the "Association of Artchitects in the German Democratic Republic" ("Bund der Architekten der DDR").
Contents
Life
Edmund Collein was born in Bad Kreuznach, a spa town in Prussia's western province. He studied, between 1925 and 1927, at the Technical Academy in Darmstadt and then, till 1930, at the Bauhaus design school in Dessau. His teachers included both Walter Gropius and Hannes Meyer. Between 1930 and 1940 he was employed by a succession of architectural firms in Munich, Berlin and Vienna. The focus of his work during this period was on social housing and hospitals. Meanwhile, in 1931, he married Lotte Gerson, another Bauhaus student.
War resumed in 1939: between 1940 and 1945 Collein served in the army, ending up as a prisoner of war. He was released relatively promptly, returned in 1945 to Berlin where he worked for the municipal authorities. Between 1945 and 1951 he was employed by the city's Central Buildings Department, becoming head of the City Planning Office. Since 1945 Berlin had been at the heart of the Soviet occupation zone in what remained of Germany: in October 1949 the zone was re-invented as the Soviet sponsored German Democratic Republic, which is the country in which Edmund Collein pursued the rest of his professional career. During 1950 he undertook the first of several visits to the Soviet Union and in 1951 he became Professor for Urban Planning and Vice-president at the newly created East German Building Academy (DBA / Deutsche Bauakademie).
In 1958 he took over as head of the Institute for District, Town and Village Planning at the DBA. Together with Josef Kaiser and Werner Dutschke he was involved in the high-profile reconstruction along the "Karl-Marx-Allee" (till 1961 the Stalinallee, and before 1949 the Große Frankfurter Straße ) in Berlin, notably the section between Strausberger Platz and Alexanderplatz. More generally the decade ahead spawned a new vision for socialist urban planning, as the architects of the time identified the weaknesses of existing urban solutions: Collein was prominent as an advocate for the new ideas. Between 1963 and 1971 he was chairman of the DBA's important Economic Council. From 1966 till 1975 he also served as DBA president in succession to Hanns Hopp.
Award
In 1962 Edmund Collein received the National Prize of East Germany.