Volker M. Welter
Freud. The name is synonymous with psychoanalysis. Lesser known, however, is Ernst Freud, the architect son of Sigmund who designed modern homes for mainly bourgeois clients. Freud attended Adolf Loos’s private Bauschule in Vienna, practiced in Berlin after the Great War, and, from 1933 onwards, in London. The talk will focus on Freud’s modern architecture in London, which will be compared with examples from his time in Berlin. The talk will also present Ernst Freud’s designs of psychoanalytic consulting rooms and couches; the son of the founder of psychoanalysis was one of the first architects to design this type of professional space.
Volker M. Welter is an architectural historian who has lived, studied, and worked in Germany, Scotland, and England, and is now a Professor for Californian and European modern architectural history and theory at the Department of the History of Art and Architecture, University of California at Santa Barbara. His publications include Biopolis—Patrick Geddes and the City of Life (Cambridge, Ma.: MIT Press, 2002), Ernst L. Freud, Architect: The Case of the Modern Bourgeois Home (Oxford/New York: Berghahn, 2012). He is currently working on a book entitled Tremaine Houses: A Study in mid-twentieth-century Patronage of Modern American Architecture.
Comments
Remarkably insightful as this lecture is on the making and remaking of an architect through his long career in country after country, it is all the more important now for understanding exile as a process from generation to generation. We have to rethink the agency of the son as a fore-sighted exile who makes his break before the disaster is overwhelming and the father who sees too late and is driven into displacement and the emigre’s misery. Welter illuminate a wealth of ironies.