Edmund Collein

Edmund Collein was born on this day in 1906. From 1925 to 1927, he studied architecture at the Technical University in Darmstadt. From the winter semester of 1927/1928 to 1930, he was a student at the Bauhaus in Dessau. He initially attended the preliminary course with László Moholy-Nagy and took courses with Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky. From 1928, he was a student at the carpentry workshop, which at the time was run by Josef Albers and Marcel Breuer. He also studied from 1928 to 1930 in the construction and interior department of the Bauhaus under Hannes Meyer. Today, it is mainly photographs from Collein's Bauhaus period that are known, which he took as an autodidact at the time.

From 1930 to 1945, he worked as an architect in Czechoslovakia, Vienna, Munich and Berlin. In January 1931, he married former Bauhaus student Lotte Gerson. From 1946 to 1951, he was head of the urban planning and engineering department in East Berlin. One of his most important projects was the 2nd construction phase of Berlin's Stalinallee/Karl-Marx-Allee. In 1966, Collein became president of the Association of German Architects in the GDR.