During his early years he was powerfully influenced by the work of great twentieth century pioneers of modern architecture and urban planning, such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Hans Poelzig and Ernst May.
One of his projects during his time as part of "Team Poelzig" was for the interior fitting out of Berlin's prestigious new Haus des Rundfunks (Broadcasting House).
Further work that he undertook between 1929 and the middle part of 1931, alongside involvement in city planning projects, tended to focus on the health care sector, especially on functional buildings, principally hospitals.
[12] The backwash from the Wall Street crash in October 1929 had been reflected in a cut back in new building in Germany, and it was possible to anticipate more and better opportunities for architects in Moscow than in Berlin.
[2][4] Liebknecht was assigned to the so-called "Second May Group" under the leadership of another expatriate German architect, Werner Hebebrand: construction activity was focused on Moscow.
[2] Alongside these assignments he teamed up with his Dutch colleague Marinus Gewin to enter a submission for an international competition held in 1931 involving plans (much touted but never implemented) for a Palace of the Soviets on the site of the demolished Cathedral of Christ the Saviour near the Moscow Kremlin.
Then, starting in 1933, he worked for the "People's Commissariat for Transport and Communications" (" Volkskommissariat für Verkehrswesen und Verbindungswesen"), where he was responsible for the planning of clinics, along with residential and office developments in several important cities and towns, including Magnitogorsk and Stalinsk (as Novokuznetsk was known till 1961).
As part of the "Operation to take repressive measures against German national who are suspected of espionage against the Soviet Union" (NKVD Order Number 00439).
[12] Kurt Liebknecht was one of relatively few Germans in the Soviet Union to be fully rehabilitated in the aftermath of the purges, though he lived with the awareness that he was being constantly monitored and his luck might turn again.
[12] As part of his rehabilitation, at the end of 1939 Liebknecht took charge of the "Department of Health and Social Matters" at the "All Unions Academiy for Architecture" in Moscow.
His architectural designs came with ever more "Russian national flourishes"[12] As the Germans came closer the entire "All Unions Academy" – including all its workers – was evactuated to Shymkent (Шымкент), an industrial city (with a rich cultural heritage) in Kazakhstan.
[12] During 1946/47 he was a freelance worker at the Soviet Information Office and a specialist contributor on building matters in the German language section of Radio Moscow which involved several further working visits to East Berlin.
In the zone's destroyed cities the defining challenge involved adopting Soviet-Socialist construction principals for the massive rebuilding programme that was needed.
[12] Liebknecht was also co-opted to work with the German Economic Commission ("Deutsche Wirtschaftskommission"), an innocuously named organisation which formed the basis for a future government in the event that the direct control by the Soviet Military should ever be relaxed.
He joined the party only in December 1949,[1] but his record in the Soviet Union evidently ensured that as far as the new state was concerned his political credentials were beyond reproach from the outset.
The East Germans had the opportunity to inspect and study architectural precepts being applied in the "great socialist brother state", visiting Moscow, Kyiv, Stalingrad (as it was still known at the time) and Leningrad.
Shortly after the delegation returned home the results of the visit were published in East Germany as the "16 principles of urban building" ("16 Grundsätze des Städtebaus“").
In 1951 he was given a professorship at the "Hochschule für Baukunst" in Weimar,[1] although there are strong indications that his own contributions to the East German built environment took little account of the Bauhaus ideas which had inspired the institution, differently named, before 1933.
[12][17] Meanwhile, the government gave him a lead role in the planning of the Bauakademie (college of building and architecture), set in the heart of East Berlin, which finally opened its doors in January 1951.
His subsequent membership, starting in February 1951, of the artistic sciences council at the Ministry of Culture meant he was part of the nationalk leadership team.
[1] Another government appointment came in 1952 when he joined the presudium of the "Society for foreign cultural links" ("Gesellschaft für kulturelle Verbindung mit dem Ausland").
[1] In terms of the political hierarchy his most significant appointment came in 1954 when he became one of (at this stage) just 90 members of the Party Central Committee: he retained his membership till 1963.
[12] His successor at the Bauakademie was Gerhard Kosel (1909–2003),[12] who had also worked successfully as an architect in the Soviet Union, returning to East Germany, as the Krushchev era dawned, only in September 1954.