faculty

volker m. welter, associate professor

specialization

History and theory of architecture, urbanism,

and the debate about the modern city

since the 19th century;

historiography of modern architecture;

history and theory of sustainable architecture

office hours

Arts 1233, Wednesday 12:00-1:00

phone

805 893 5875

Ph.D. University of Edinburgh

Volker M. Welter studied architecture at the Technische Universität Berlin and received his Ph.D. in history of architecture from the University of Edinburgh. He has worked as architectural historian in Berlin, in Scotland (University of Edinburgh and Strathclyde University, Glasgow), and in England (University of Reading). 1998-2000 Recipient of a Senior Research Grant, Getty Grant Program, Los Angeles. Since 2003, he directs the undergraduate emphasis Architecture and Environment at the Department of the History of Art and Architecture, UCSB. During the Academic Year 2007-8, he will be Senior Fellow of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.

His research focuses on Western architecture and urbanism since the 19th century, especially the interactions between architectural, philosophical, sociological, and environmental thought. The critique of alternative narratives of the emergence of Modernism in architecture and urbanism, in particular those that are influenced by thought critical of Enlightenment and Modernity, are another area of his scholarly interest. Moreover, his teaching and research are shaped by his interest in the aesthetics of architecture, especially in relation to theories about both the aesthetic and the perception of nature.

His latest book is Biopolis-Patrick Geddes and the City of Life (Cambridge, Ma., 2002, reprint 2003). More recent publications have focused on mid-20th century urbanism, for example, 'From Locus Genii to Heart of the City-Embracing the Spirit of the City,' in The Spirit of the City in Modernity, ed. by I. B. Whyte (London, 2003); 'In-Between Space and Society-¬On some British Roots of Team 10's Urban Thought in the 1950s', in Team 10, 1951-81-In Search of the Utopia of the Present, ed. Max Risselada and Dirk van den Heuvel (Rotterdam, 2005) , and 'Everywhere at any Time-Post-World War Two Genealogies of the Modern City,' in The Man-Made Future: Planning, Education and Design in the mid-twentieth Century, ed. by I. B. Whyte (forthcoming). He is currently working on a book on bourgeois and middle-class modern architecture in the Weimar Republic as exemplified in the ouvre of Ernst L. Freud, the architect son of Sigmund Freud. His essay 'Ernst L Freud-Domestic Architect,' was published in the Yearbook of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies (London, 2005).