(1926-2007)

Born in Germany during the interwar period, Oswald Mathias Ungers was an enthusiast of the right angle, the square and the cube. Trained at the University of Karlsruhe and influenced by Prussian masters such as Karl Friedrich Schinkel, by Greco-Roman tradition and by the Modern Movement, the professional career of Ungers was marked by his intellectual rigor and by a severe geometry and classical harmony. In 1964 he founded his studio in Berlin, and was head of the architecture department at the city’s school of architecture until he went to Cornell University, where he was he chairman of the architecture department between 1969 and 1975. He also taught at Harvard University and at that of Los Angeles. In 1976 he returned to Germany, though he kept on teaching sporadically in the United States. His most important works are located in his home country, and include the Deutsches Architektur Museum in Frankfurt (1984), Hamburg’s Kunsthalle (1995), or the new headquarters of the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne (2001). His most renown theoretical piece is 10 Kapitel über Arkitektur (1999).