Werner Düttmann. Nachdenken über Architektur

Werner Düttmann (1921-1983) is one of the most important Berlin architects of the post-war period. The Academy of Arts, Berlin is closely associated with him on several occasions: as architect of the Academy building on Hanseatenweg (1960), as director of the Department of Architectural Art (1967-1971), and finally as its president (1971-1983). The Academy’s archive of architectural art preserves his estate, which provides the basis for this text volume.

Here, for the first time, Düttmann’s speeches and writings from more than three decades since the late 1940s are published. Numerous manuscripts and typescripts from the various contexts of his activities as architect, urban planner, and president reveal his way of working and thinking. Writing was his instrument of working and processing.

Werner Düttmann was an extremely astute observer, well-read, humorous, analytical, and articulate: His texts read like highly topical and still relevant contributions to debates on architecture and urban development, whether on social housing, transportation planning, spatial and functional programs, or the social significance of architecture in general.

“Everyone knew him; only a few knew of his actual reality, but also of his own doubts. Werner Düttmann was an architect as well as a painter; he could also have been a writer. He was an unnamed patron of so many of this city’s intellectual and artistic concerns. Tradition and history of Berlin were for him sources of inexhaustible enthusiasm and passion.”
Hans Christian Müller, September 1, 1983