Very little survives from the built work of Konrad Wachsmann, who was born in 1901 in Frankfurt an der Oder and died in Los Angeles in 1980. His German beginnings in architecture were in wood construction, as he worked for Christoph & Unmack, a firm engaged in prefabrication, and built Albert Einstein’s weekend house in Caputh, Germany, in 1929. During the Second World War, after he emigrated to the U.S., he designed the Packaged House System, consisting of assembled factory-made panels, held together by his extremely ingenious “wedge connector,” though the system turned out to be a commercial failure. But several of the modest, boxy houses still dot the Los Angeles landscape.
Dropping wood for metal, Wachsmann hit the headlines in 1954 with a giant cantilevered hangar for the U.S. Air Force’s strategic bombers. Designed at IIT in dialogue with Mies van der Rohe, it was a forest of tubular trusses joined by other imaginative nodes. Floating high above the ground, this expansive structure became the main attraction of his carefully laid-out book The Turning Point of Building, published in 1959 in Germany, a bible for European radical architects beginning with Yona Friedman, and which mesmerized me during my student years in the late 1960s. It assembled a seductive collection of images ranging from the Crystal Palace to Wachsmann’s own Mobilar building system. In parallel with the making of this book, he taught seminars from Germany to Austria, Israel, and Japan, where his influence on the young Metabolists was significant.
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