Events

Returning to the Garden of Europe’s Peaceful Children: Three Variations on Architecture and its Flora in West Germany, 1946 – 1956

A lecture by Lynette Widder.  

During the era immediately following German surrender, uncultivated plant life quietly joined in the occupation of bombed-out cities. In those cities and in the fiction of the era, a resurgent natural world thrived suggestively amidst the wreck of the manmade. The fact and the imaginary of plant life, both wilded and willed, loomed no less large in the architectural imagination of the period. Three instances describe how plant life was treated by postwar West German architects: as bearer of survival and loss, of postwar rebuilding, and ultimately, of Germany’s return to the “garden of Europe’s peaceful children,” as one newspaper reporter would write of West Germany’s 1958 World’s Fair entry.

About the Speaker:

Lynette Widder, Professor of Professional Practice; Principal and Cofounder, aardvarchitecture