Werner Seligmann


Werner Seligmann, was an architect, urban designer and educator.

Biography

Werner Seligmann was born on March 30, 1930, in Osnabrück, Germany. His father, Fritz, was born December 31, 1902, in Krefeld, Germany, survived a labor camp in Bielefeld and deportation to KZ Theresienstadt,Terezin in Czechoslovakia. He died March 10, 1971, in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. His mother, Charlotte Louise, was Fritz's second wife and was born June 1, 1902. She died in KZ Ravensbrück, Germany, about 1944. Fritz was Jewish but Charlotte was not. His sister, Helga Seligmann, was born in Osnabrück September 17, 1931, and died during an Allied bombing raid November 21, 1944, in Kinderheim am Scholerberg, Osnabrück From his father, who was a violinist with the Osnabrück city orchestra, Seligmann inherited a lifelong love of music and the arts in general. He wanted to be a painter, but his father said he should have a better-paying occupation. He was apprenticed to an architect in Münster, Germany.
The family lived in Osnabrück, Germany, until they were captured by the Nazis. Seligmann spent the latter part of the Second World War in a concentration camp, thought to be in Osnabrück. After the camp guards abandoned their posts, he was picked up by American troops and ultimately reunited with his father. This appears to have been in a resettlement camp in Wentorf, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. Wentorf was a camp for Displaced Persons and occupied buildings that had been barracks for the German Army. From there, he was sent to the United States in 1949, leaving Bremerhaven aboard the "General J H McRae". He went to live with relatives in Groton, in upstate New York, a short distance from Cornell University in Ithaca. He studied at the Cascadilla School, a preparatory school for Cornell University, to make up for his lost time in high school and to learn English.
Seligmann received his B. Arch. degree from Cornell in 1955. On August 29, 1954, he married Jean Lois Liberman. They had two children: Raphael John and Sabina Charlotte. He became a naturalized citizen in 1955. From 1956 to 1958 he taught as an instructor at the University of Texas in Austin, Texas. There he became part of a small group of faculty that was later nicknamed The Texas Rangers, a name later attributed to Alan Chimacoff and Thomas Schumacher. They were then students in the graduate design studio taught by Colin Rowe. The group included historian Colin Rowe, John Shaw, painter Robert Slutzky, John Hejduk, Lee Hirsche, Bernhard Hoesli, Lee Hodgen, Jerry Wells, and W. Irving Phillips. After the were dismissed, Seligmann pursued graduate study at the Technische Hochschule in Braunschweig, Germany, from 1958 to 1959. He taught as an Assistant at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zürich, Switzerland from 1959 to 1961 and was a designer in the office of Hoesli and Aebli, Zurich, Switzerland. From 1961 to 1974 he was a Professor of Architecture at Cornell University and from 1974 to 1976 a Professor of Architecture at Harvard University. From 1976 to 1990, he was Dean and Professor of Architecture at the Syracuse University School of Architecture. In 1981, Seligmann was named a Fellow of the. In 1986 he was the Eliot Noyes professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. In 1988 he was the William Henry Bishop professor at Yale University. In 1994 he was the Thomas Jefferson Visiting Professor at the University of Virginia. From 1990 to 1993, he was the Karl Moser Professor of Architecture at the ETH in Zurich. On his return to Syracuse University, he was named the Distinguished Professor of Architecture.
In 1998 he was awarded The AIA/ACSA Topaz Medallion for Architectural Education, awarded jointly by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architectureand the American Institute of Architect, the highest award for an architectural educator.
In addition to serving as a visiting critic, Seligmann wrote and lectured extensively on the works of Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, and other architects and issues.

Unresolved Issues

There are several issues that are missing or contradictory.
  1. Sometime in the early 1970s, Seligmann mentioned that his family had "moved south" to avoid capture. No documentary evidence can be found to support this. What can be found is an indication that the family was in Braunschweig, Germany, which is some 100 milies to the east of Osnabrück, Germany. Even the stay in Braunschweig may be in error.
  2. During a conversation with Werner Seligmann, the only occasion in which he spoke about his time in captivity, he referred to seeing "waves of bombers flying overhead," something that took "an hour and a half." They were "headed towards Munich, which at that point had no military value because that's where Hitler had his start." There was one bomber raid on Munich, April 24, 1944, that involved some 500 US and British aircraft flying from England to strike Munich. It's possible that this is what he recalled, but it's uncertain.
  3. During the same conversation with Seligmann, he spoke about being in a resettlement camp in Holland and being called to the main office where his father, Fritz, was waiting. It was "the happiest day in my life". Authoritative sources place the resettlement camp in Wentorf, Germany.
  4. It was stated that he arrived in the US at the age of 14. Given his birth date, this would be 1944, before the end of World War II. Other sources indicate that he sailed to the US in 1949 >at which point he would be 19 years old. He would thus have spent over four years in a resettlement camp. There has been no confirmation of this.
  5. Seligmann was quite clear that he was incarcerated "in a camp". He spoke about "waking up one morning, and the gates were open" and "the guards were gone." Other sources state he "survived the Shoah in hiding with another German family."

    Architectural Practice

Seligmann was registered to practice architecture in 1957 by which he had already designed and constructed three small homes. Throughout his teaching career, he maintained a practice and entered many competitions, including the invited competition, Topography of Terror for Berlin, Germany in 1993. His firm, Werner Seligmann and Associates, Architects and Urban Designers was based in Cortland, New York. Launched in 1961, the firm placed in national and international competitions and work of the firm was published and exhibited often, both in the US and abroad.
The architectural work of Werner Seligmann won two Progressive Architecture Design Awards, was illustrated on the cover of Progressive Architecture journal three times and was placed, or won, several national and international design competitions. Seligmann's work on developing housing prototypes for the New York State Urban Development Corporation in the 1970s and 1980s established his reputation in the design of social housing. The Ithaca Scattered Site Housing Project has been widely exhibited and published. The project's design was included in the permanent collection of the in New York City. in Binghamton NY was often seen as a significant synthesis of Wright and Le Corbusier although it was derived from the preliminary sketches for the Villa Shodhan by Le Corbusier.
Seligmann also published numerous articles on the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, and modern architecture in general.
PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES
SIGNIFICANT BUILT WORKS
SIGNIFICANT URBAN DESIGN WORKS
SIGNIFICANT COMPETITION ENTRIES
PUBLICATIONS
GUEST LECTURER
Graham Foundation; Temple University; Rhode Island School of Design; University of Venice; University Rome; Rice University; University of Houston; University of Kansas; University of Texas at Arlington; University of Illinois, Chicago Circle; University of Puerto Rico; Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, New York; University of Notre Dame in Rome; Harvard University; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Princeton University; Cornell University; Syracuse University; Washington University, St. Louis; University of Southern California; University of California at Los Angeles; Hampton Institute; Iowa State University; University of Virginia; Virginia Polytechnic Institute; University of Houston; Rice University; Carnegie-Mellon University; Cooper Union; SUNY Buffalo, Binghamton; Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Brandeis University; New Jersey Institute of Technology; University of Osnabruck, Germany.
GUEST JUROR
Harvard University; Columbia University; Yale University; Princeton University; Rhode Island School of Design, Cornell University; Iowa State University; Boston Architectural Center; Washington University; St. Louis; Architectural Association, London; Polytechnic of Central London, London; Thames Polytechnic, London; Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, New York; Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Eigenoessische Technische Hochschule, Zurich; University of Stuttgart; University of Virginia; University of Toronto.