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The result of a study I completed in November 2018 was a biography of the urban-planning architect Lotte Stam-Beese. Born as Lotte Beese, she studied at the Bauhaus in Dessau, worked as an architect in Germany, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union, and moved to the Netherlands in late 1934. She made a name for herself with her designs for modernist housing estates in Rotterdam. I did my research on her as an external PhD candidate at Eindhoven University of Technology. My dissertation was simultaneously published by Vantilt in Nijmegen. Both the dissertation and the book are entitled ‘Want de grond behoort ons allen toe’. Leven en werk van stedenbouwkundig architecte Lotte Stam-Beese (‘For the land belongs to all of us’: the life and work of the urban-planning architect Lotte Stam-Beese’). The main title was one of her favourite quotes. What she saw as a problem in many new postwar housing estates was the lack of contact between the residents and their immediate physical environment. Her designs for communal gardens were part of her attempt to compensate for this perceived ‘lack’.

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In connection with this research I have written various articles about Lotte Stam-Beese in Dutch and foreign books and journals, taken part in symposiums and given lectures.

 

 

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