Mart Stam
Stam was extraordinarily well-connected, and his career intersects with important moments in the history of 20th-century European architecture, including the invention of the cantilever chair,[3] teaching at the Bauhaus,[4] contributions to the Weissenhof Estate, the Van Nelle Factory, (an important modernist landmark in Rotterdam), buildings for Ernst May's New Frankfurt housing estates, followed by work in the USSR with the idealistic May Brigade, to teaching positions in Amsterdam and post-war East Germany.
During his period of incarceration he wrote a pamphlet called Brieven uit de cel, (letters from prison), which was published by the Internationale Anti-Militaristische Vereeniging, (International Anti-Militarist Society).
These two concerns, i.e. that new modes of transport should govern city morphology, and that "all forms of embellishment or theatrical elements ought to be avoided"[9] became mainstays in Mart Stam's oeuvre.
In 1924, Lissitzky had designed the striking Wolkenbügel, or cloud iron / sky hook, a t-shaped skyscraper supported on 3 metal framed columns, which appeared on the front cover of Adolf Behne's book, Der Moderne Zweckbau, and was published in further articles written by Lissitzky for the Moscow-based constructivist architectural review ASNOVA News (journal of ASNOVA, the Association of New Architects), and in the German art journal Das Kunstblatt.
Deliberately horizontal in orientation, the buildings were set on the main intersections of Moscow's ring road and only rose to a relatively modest height as to form symbolic city gates.
[17] Ludwig Mies van der Rohe became aware of Stam's work on the chair during planning for the Weissenhof Siedlung and mentioned it to Marcel Breuer at the Bauhaus.
In the late 1920s, Breuer and Stam were involved in a patent lawsuit in German courts, both claiming to be the inventor of the basic cantilever chair design principle.
This put him in the company of Le Corbusier, Peter Behrens, Bruno Taut, Hans Poelzig, and Walter Gropius, and the exhibition had as many as 20,000 visitors a day.
The May Brigade included Austrian architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, her husband Wilhelm Schütte, Arthur Korn, Erich Mauthner and Hans Schmidt.
Stam was there in February 1931 to participate in the struggle to build rational worker housing from the ground up, an effort ultimately defeated by adverse weather, corruption, and poor design decisions.
Stam moved to planning activities in Makeyevka in Ukraine in 1932, then to Orsk, with his friend Hans Schmidt (again) and with Bauhaus student and future wife Lotte Beese, then to the copper-mining Soviet city of Balgash.
He self-initiates a row of five drive-in houses with his wife Lotte Beese and van Tijen in Amsterdam South, once again exploring the expression of mobility in an innovative manner.
[20] In 1939, upon referral of Sandberg, Stam becomes director of the Instituut voor Kunstnijverheidsonderwijs, IvKNO in Amsterdam (Institute for Applied Arts, and the predecessor to the current Rietveld Academy).
In 1948, he took a professorship at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste Dresden and began advocating a modern, strict structure for the heavily destroyed urban landscape, a plan which most of the citizens rejected as an "all-out attack on the identity of the city", and which would have obliterated most of the remaining landmarks.
