Walter Curt Behrendt was a German-born American architect and active advocate of German modernism.
Background
Walter Behrendt was born on December 16, 1884, in Metz, Lorraine, the only son and elder of two children. His parents, Alfred and Henriette (Ohm) Behrendt, both of western German origin, lived successively in Metz, Mainz, Wiesbaden, and Braunschweig before Alfred Behrendt assumed his final post, as director of the Reichsbank in Hannover. Though not rich, Behrendt's parents were always in comfortable circumstances.
Education
After attending various humanistic Gymnasiums, Behrendt entered the Technische Hochschule in Charlottenburg and completed his engineering studies at the Technische Hochschule in Dresden, from 1907 to 1911, when he received the degree of Doctor of Engineering.
Career
From the outset Behrendt's prime interest was architecture rather than structural engineering; and his doctor's thesis, on the uniform façade as a spatial element in city planning, embraced the two main fields he cultivated both as civil administrator and as scholar. It was in fact as architect that he served in the Prussian Ministry of Public Works, from 1912 to 1916. Though disrespectful of Germany's militarist traditions, Behrendt exemplified both Prussian discipline and the Prussian sense of duty at their exacting best. Between 1916 and 1918 he served in the German army as a private, and he retained to the end, in other fields besides war, his pride and self-confidence as a "front-line fighter" and an expertmarksman. After demobilization, he served in the Prussian Ministry of Public Health as housing and city planning adviser until 1927, when he became technical adviser to the Minister of Finance, Department of Public Buildings.
In the first post, he was in charge of the technical and financial aspects of Germany's housing program in the 1920's and helped develop the high standard that made Germany, after England, the leader in this field. Similarly, in the design of new public buildings he threw off the incubus of ponderous official architecture and encouraged a more direct expression of modern functions and needs. Berlin, where he lived, was then the chief experimental center of the modern movement in architecture. Since many of the new public housing developments were set in the heavy industry areas, Behrendt became concerned with the problems of regional planning; and he served as a consultant in the development of the Ruhr Valley industrial region, the Middle German soft-coal region around Halle and Merseburg, and the greater Hamburg region. During World War II - though painfully anticipating the destruction to his native land - he placed his detailed maps of these areas at the disposal of the military forces of his adopted country.
Through Behrendt's personal contact with Charles Harris Whitaker, editor of the Journal of the American Institute of Architects, as well as through the articles on German housing and regional planning he contributed to that journal, he exerted a positive influence on American thought in these fields, notably in the work of Henry Wright and Clarence S. Stein. Behrendt's career as architectural historian and critic paralleled his work as administrator. As architectural editor and regular critic of the Frankfurter Zeitung and as editor of Die Form, he was a sympathetic yet always discriminating advocate of the new movement in architecture and decoration which was promoted by the Deutscher Verbund and by both Henry van de Velde's Weimar School and Walter Gropius's Bauhaus. This same point of view was expressed in his many architectural articles. It was developed in his book Der Kampf über den Stil in Architektur und Kunstgewerbe ("The Struggle over Style in Architecture and the Crafts, " 1920) and reaffirmed and restated in Der Sieg des Neuen Baustils ("The Victory of the New Building Style, " 1927).
Germany's takeover by Nazism ended Behrendt's official career, for though his parents had espoused Protestantism, they were Jewish in origin. Fortunately his first visit to the United States in 1925 had given him a circle of helpful American friends, and when he left Germany in 1934 it was to become a visiting lecturer at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. By temperament both he and his wife felt at home in America and played an animated part in the community - Mrs. Behrendt taught music and gave many brilliant piano concerts in Hanover.
Behrendt's teaching at Dartmouth was interrupted by four somewhat strained and abortive years as technical director of the Buffalo City Planning Association, beginning in 1937, but he returned as professor of city planning and housing in 1941. That year he became a full-fledged American citizen and built a handsome redwood home at Norwich, Vermont, on a bluff above the White River, the first indigenous modern house in that region. Behrendt's Dartmouth career brought his entire life to a fruitful consummation by disclosing his strong vocation as a teacher, one who imbued his students with his own vivid humanity, moral responsibility, and scholarly zeal. More permanently, it gave him the opportunity to integrate his learning and his administrative experience in a masterly book, remarkable for both its range and its incisive judgments: Modern Building: Its Nature, Problems, and Forms (1937). Not as widely known as Nikolaus Pevsner's Pioneers of the Modern Movement (1936), nor as exhaustive as Siegfried Giedion's Space, Time, and Architecture (1941), Behrendt's Modern Building nevertheless remains probably the best critical and historical summation of the modern (postrevivalist, posteclectic) movement in architecture.
Wartime teaching pressures, plus the inner tensions of a sensitive personality full of timely forebodings about the human future, helped bring on a series of heart attacks that resulted in Walter Curt Behrendt's death at the age of sixty at his home in Norwich. He was buried in Hillside Cemetery there, a site that, like his home, commanded the stretch of river landscape he admired and loved.