Volker M. Welter

Professor Welter is currently not accepting new graduate students.

Specialization:

Modern architecture; domestic architecture; émigré architects; patronage; histories of modernism, revival styles, and sustainable architecture.

Education:

Ph.D. University of Edinburgh

Bio:

Volker M. Welter is an architectural historian specializing in modern architecture from the 19th century onwards, mainly in California but also in Great Britain and Germany. His research interests center on domestic architecture; émigré architects; patronage; histories of modernism, revival styles, and sustainable architecture.

The subject matter of his research usually emerges from ongoing exploration in archives, where the adjacencies of archival sources often inspire new projects. He is interested in how architecture intersects on a smaller scale with individual human lives and on a larger scale with the environment. His work combines detailed architectural historical analysis with biographical research and contemporary philosophical, sociological, and psychological thought.

Prof. Welter has received grants and fellowships from the Getty Grant Program, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and the Centre Canadien d’Architecture, Montreal. Following on from Biopolis: Patrick Geddes and the City of Life (Cambridge, MA, 2002), he continues publishing on the Scotsman’s theories of the city. His book Ernst L. Freud, Architect: The Case of the Modern Bourgeois Home (Oxford, 2012) reintroduced the architect son of Sigmund Freud into the history of European architectural modernism. Tremaine Houses: One Family’s Patronage of Domestic Architecture in Midcentury America was published in 2019.

He is currently completing a book on the California works of the Austrian-Jewish émigré architect Leopold Fischer (1901–1975), a today little-known student of the Austrian modernist Adolf Loos who worked in exile in Los Angeles alongside Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra.

Publications:

"Reflections from Theodor Adorno’s unbuilt House in Pacific Palisades," Athenaeum Review, issue 11 (Spring 2025): 30–44.

Volker M. Welter. "Rebuilding, Recovery, Reconceptualization: Modern architecture and the First World War ." In Revival After the Great War: Rebuild, Remember, Repair, Reform, edited by Luc Verpoest et al. (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2020), 107-121.

Volker M. Welter. "An Architect at War: Adrian Berrington and the Environment of the Modern Battlefield of the First World War ." RIHA Journal 0236 (January 30, 2020): online.

Volker M. Welter. “Restoration within Reach: The Miles C. Bates House, Palm Desert, California ." Western Humanities Review 72.3 (2018): 99-122.

Volker M. Welter. “SCHLOSS MURNAU, HOLLYWOODLAND, CA 90068 ." Cabinet: A Quarterly of Art and Culture, Issue 63: The Desert (2017): 41-49.

Volker M. Welter. “From the Landscape of War to the Open Order of the Kaufmann House: Richard Neutra and the Experience of the Great War ." In The Good Gardener?: Nature, Humanity and the Garden, edited by Annette Giesecke, Naomi Jacobs, and Rick Darke (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2015), 216-233.

Volker M. Welter. "The Valley Region: From Figure of Thought to Figure on the Ground ." In New Geographies Journal 06: Grounding Metabolism, edited for Harvard University Graduate School of Design by Nikos Katsikis & Daniel Ibanez (Harvard University Press, 2014): 78-87.

Volker M. Welter. “Therapeutic Frontiers: The Tremaine Houses in Santa Barbara ." Manifest: A Journal of American Architecture and Urbanism 1 (2013): 178-187.

Volker M. Welter. “From Disc to Sphere: Taking on the Whole Earth ." Cabinet: A Quarterly of Art and Culture, Issue 40: Hair (Winter 2010/11): 19-25.