A native of Rostock (Germany), Ludwig Leo belonged to the first generation of architects who earned their degrees after World War II, in which he had participated at only 20 years of age, losing a leg in the Eastern Front. After studying engineering and architecture in Berlin, he began his career in 1953, working first with Oswald Mathias Ungers and later in the studio of Wasili and Hans Luckhardt, reconverted to the principles of functionalism, with whom he learned the basics of industrial design. Leo soon took on teaching posts, primarily in the Hochschüle der Künste of Berlin (HBK). In the 1960s and 1970s he maintained a busy professional practice, most of it theoretical, characterized by a functionalism compatible with the use of much less rigid languages, and marked by social sensibilities, as we can see in some of his most representative buildings, including the BFLS Institute or the Hydraulic Library, both in Berlin. Echoing Archigram’s ‘technopop’, these were works that would have an influence on the trajectories of artchitects like Peter Cook, Ernst Gisel, Max Dudler or Norman Foster.