(...) A common inspiration for this exhibition is Lotte Stam-Beese (1903-1988): an architect, urban planner and photographer. Born in German Silesia (now Poland), Lotte Beese enrolled as a student at the Bauhaus in Dessau to study weaving. Prejudices about women studying subjects that were dominated by and previously reserved for men, led female students into branches that were considered ‘feminine’. When Hannes Meyer succeeded Walter Gropius as director, Beese became the first woman to study in the building department. During the interwar years she worked consecutively in architect’s offices in Berlin, Moscow, Charkov, Brno, and Amsterdam, and married Dutch architect Mart Stam. After their divorce she kept the name because this affiliation could give her a head start as an independent female architect in the Netherlands. From 1946, as chief-architect at the Agency for Urban Development and Reconstruction of Rotterdam, Stam-Beese worked on several (social) housing districts around the city. On the one hand, she kept on working with the universalist, rational principals of Functionalist architecture. On the other hand, she developed concepts (e.g. ‘neighborhood’ and ‘cluster’) to integrate notions of locality, diversity, complexity into her architectural grids. (...) 
Frank Maes

Photos: Juan Baraja

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Works