1 This essay was largely researched in 1988, at which time I had invaluable conversations and correspondence with Professors Otto Kcenigsberger and Julius Posener, to both of whom I am indebted. On Walter Segal, see my short monograph Learning From Segal,/Von Segal Lernen (Birkhaueser, Basel and Boston, 1989); on Arthur Segal see Arthur Segal 1875-1944 (exhibition catalogue), herausgegeben von Wolf Herzogenrath und Paven Liska, Argon Verlag (Berlin, 1987).

2 Typical of Segal, he gently corrected Reyner Banham on accuracy (The Architects’ Journal, 7 June 1956, p. 630) instigating an exchange which continued with the professional historian again being corrected, until finally he threw in the towel: ‘Last word willingly conceded — I am too busy digesting all this hard-to-find information to argue. Thank you Mr.Segal.’, (The Architects’Journal, 21 June 1956, p. 701 Google Scholar.)

3 On Monte Verità see Armando Dado (ed.), Monte Verità (exhaustive exhibition catalogue 1978), published in Italian and German editions by Electra Editrice. Among visitors mentioned by the Segals were Rudolf von Laban (founder of modern choreography), his pupil Mary Wigman, and Isadora Duncan; the psychoanalysts Johannes Nohl and Otto Gross; Herman Hesse, James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence; Kropotkin and the anarchist poet Muhsam; Lenin and Silvio Gesell who founded Frieland-Friegeld (a Social Credit); Annie Besant, Krishnamurti and Rudolf Steiner. Family friends who came to stay chez Segal included Lou-Lou Albert-Lazard, Hans Arp, Tristram Tzara, Hans Richter, Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings (the founders of Dada), Raoul Hausmann and the writers Leonhard Franck and Eli Ludwig. Ascona neighbours included Henri Oedenkoven, Viking Eggeling, Heinrich Goesch, Otto Van Rees and Alexi Jawlensky.

4 Walter Segal, ‘Looking Back to the Architecture of the 1920s Before and After’, First of Three Lectures as Banister Fletcher Professor, University College London, 16 May 1973. (Published, edited, as ‘Into the Twenties’, The Architectural Review, January 1974, pp. 31-38.) I quote the unpublished lecture typescript. Hereafter referred to as Segal (1973).

5 Walter Segal, taped reminiscences, recorded over two days in 1984 by Newcasde University students, Bob Wills and Cherie Yeo, to whom I am most grateful. They are unpublished, and a major source. Hereafter referred to as Segal (1984).

6 Walter Segal, ‘Architect’s Approach to Architecture’, lecture at the RIBA May 1977, published (edited from tape transcription) as ‘Timber Framed Housing’.Journal of the RIBA, July 1977, pp. 184-295.

7 Segal (1984).

8 Ibid.

9 Segal (1973).

10 Segal (1984).

11 Segal (1973).

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid. Behne’s tide translates as Modern Practical Building.

14 Segal (1984).

15 Segal, Walter, The Architects’ Journal, 28 July 1960, p. 141 Google Scholar.

16 Ibid.

17 Arthur Segal and Ravestyn were selecting paintings for a November Group exhibition, for which Segal was the organizer.

18 Segal (1973).

19 Segal (1984). A few years earlier, Berthold Lubetkin had similarly been put orf by the Bauhaus teacher Moholy-Nagy, his ‘misgivings… confirmed by discussions with Bruno Taut’. ( Allan, John, Berthold Lubetkin: Architecture and the Tradition of Progress, RIBA (London, 1992), pp. 44–45 Google Scholar.) It is worth noting, however, that a specific architecture department was not introduced at the Bauhaus until 1 April 1927.

20 Ibid. To the end of his life Segal held to his belief that these were the two essential rudders of an architect’s education. Asked to advise on the rewriting of the architecture degree document at the Polytechnic of Central London in 1985, he said: ‘Teach structures — mechanics and calculus — to let designers liberate themselves through knowledge of the possible; and get professional historians to teach history, the knowledge of how it was done in the past. What is needed is knowledge, not witchcraft.’ (Author’s reporting of Segal’s unpublished words.)

21 As outlined in Walter Gropius, Idee und Aufbau des Staatlichen Bauhauses Weimar (1923).

22 Walter Gropius, ‘The Theory and Organisation of the Bauhaus’ (1923) in Bayer, H., Gropius, W. and Gropius, I. (eds) Bauhaus 1919-1928 (Boston, Mass., 1952), p. 22 Google Scholar.

23 Walter Segal, ‘Meaning and Non-Meaning in Architecture’, second of three lectures as Banister Fletcher Professor, University College London. I quote the unpublished lecture typescript dated 22 May 1973. In fairness, Gropius himself had warned of’the danger of excessive Romanticism’ at the Bauhaus back in 1922 ( Pevsner, Nikolaus, ‘Architecture and the Bauhaus’, in 50 Years Bauhaus, exhibition catalogue, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1968, p. 145)Google Scholar; but he was using the term in a more partial sense than Segal.

24 Segal (1973).

25 Ibid.

26 Segal (1984).

27 Ibid.

28 Ibid. ‘Buys was shunned by the orthodoxy in Rotterdam, but in the course of a few years he changed his direction so completely that he could not be ignored. Decried as an epigony, he found eventually his place …’ (Segal, 1973).

29 Segal (1984).

30 Ibid.

31 This is dispassionately exemplified in Creating the Architect — 200 Years of Architectural Education in the Netherlands, exhibition at Nederlands Architectuurinstituut, Rotterdam, 9 March-2 June 1996.

32 Segal, Walter, ‘About Taut’, The Architectural Review, January 1972, p. 26 Google Scholar.

33 Segal, Walter, The Architects’Journal, 2 June 1970, p. 1254 Google Scholar.

34 Segal (1973).

35 Walter Segal, ‘Architecture: The Assertive and the Unobtrusive’, The Architect and Building News, 25 September 1969, p. 24.

36 Segal, Walter, ‘Bruno Taut’ (Obituary), Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, January 1939, p. 313.Google Scholar

37 Segal, Walter, ‘About Taut’, The Architectural Review, January 1972, p. 26 Google Scholar.

38 Otto Koenigsberger, in conversation with the author, March 1988.

39 Segal (1984).

40 Ibid.

41 Segal, Walter, ‘Timber Framed Housing’ lecture reprinted in Journal of the RIBA, July 1977, p. 284 Google Scholar.

42 Segal (1984). There is record of bis winning third prize in a student competition in 1929. His second-prize project in a 1930 student competition became his first published work, Bauwelt, vol. 29 (1930), p. 992: ‘Wettbewerbe: Preisausschreiben der T.H. Charlottenburg fur eine Ausflugs-Gaststätte — 2 Preis Walter Segal’.

43 Posener, Julius, The Architectural Review, June 1963, p. 401 Google Scholar. The teaching of Tessenow, who arrived in Berlin from the Dresden Art Academy early in 1926, was described slightly more politely by the younger student Peter Moro as ‘relaxed … [his] cosy images out of step with “Isherwood” Berlin’. Peter Moro, unpublished memoir, c. 1990, which I am grateful for the opportunity to read.

44 Segal, Walter, ‘Mart Stam; Pioneer and Perfectionist, Journal of the RIBA, January 1970, p. 317 Google Scholar.

45 ‘I have wondered, though, how differently my life would have turned out if Pœlzig, who was very much on the political left and surrounded by students of the same persuasion, had accepted me.’ Speer quoted in Sereny, Gitta, Albert Speer, His Battle with Truth (Macmillan, London, 1995), p. 69 Google Scholar.

46 Segal (1984).

47 H. W. Rosenthal, unpublished ‘autobiographical note’, c. 1990, RIBA Drawings Collection. This is quoted in Benton, Charlotte, A Different World: Emigré Architects in Britain 1928-1959, RIBA exhibition catalogue (1995), p. 19 Google Scholar, which offers useful glimpses of architectural education in Germanic Europe at this moment.

48 Posener, Julius, ‘Pœelzig’, The Architectural Review, vol. 133, June 1963, p. 402 Google Scholar.

49 Konrad Wachsmann quoted by Christa, and Gruning, Michael, ‘Konrad Wachsmann — Pioneer of Architectural Engineering’, in Wachsmann, K., Building The Wooden House (Birkhaeuser, Basel, 1995), p. 8 Google Scholar.

50 Julius Posener, ‘Memories of Walter Segal’, text for The Architects’ Journal’s memorial issue on Segal in 1988, quoted from revised manuscript translation by Peter Blundell Jones, 13 February 1988, with thanks to author and translator in 1988 for permission.

51 Otto Koenigsberger, in conversation with the author, March 1988. This also is a radical design method — one still too rigorous for most architectural education, but one practised as policy, for example, in the office of Norman Foster — who, coincidentally, describes himself (in a letter to the author, 1990) as ‘a great admirer of Segal’.

52 Segal (1984).

53 Ibid. Walter Segal was later a teacher himself, at the Architectural Association, London, in the late 1940s. Students loved him; anyone or any theory standing on rank did not. One student recalled: ‘He demanded very high standards of sensitive designing, but he also was the first teacher at the AA always to take the student’s side.’ (D. A. C. A. Boyne, in conversation with the author, February 1988.)

54 Otto Kcenigsberger, in conversation with the author, March 1988.

55 Julius Posener, letter to the author, 25 February 1988.

56 Posener, Julius, ‘Pcelzig’, The Architectural Review, vol. 133, June 1963, p. 402 Google Scholar.

57 Walter Segal, quoted in McKean, John, ‘The Segal System’, Architectural Design, May 1976, p. 295 Google Scholar.

58 Walter Segal in recorded conversation with the author, January 1976.

59 Segal (1984).

60 Walter Segal quoted in McKean, John, ‘Walter Segal: Pioneer’, Building Design, 20 February 1976, p. 10 Google Scholar.

61 Ibid.

62 Segal, Walter, ‘Timber Framed Housing’ lecture reprinted in journal of the RIBA, July 1977, p. 284 Google Scholar.

63 Published in English for the first time by Birkhæuser, Basel, Boston, Berlin, 1995.

64 Julius Posener, letter to the author, 25 February 1988.

65 Walter Segal quoted in McKean, John, ‘Walter Segal: Pioneer’, Building Design, 20 February 1976, p. 11 Google Scholar.

66 Bauwelt, Heft 9 (1931), p. 20.

67 Segal, Walter, ‘Timber Framed Housing’ lecture reprinted in journal of the RIBA, July 1977, p. 284 Google Scholar.

68 Segal, Walter, ‘Small Houses’, leading article in Architectural Design, November 1953, p. 299 Google Scholar. (This was published anonymously; Monica Pidgeon, Architectural Design editor at the time, confirmed in letter to the author, 17 April 1988, that it was written by Segal.)

69 Veronesi, Giulia, J. J. Pieter Oud (Il Balcone, Milano, 1953), p. 112 Google Scholar.

70 See Christa, and Gruning, Michael, ‘Konrad Wachsmann — Pioneer of Architectural Engineering’ in Wachsmann, K., Building The Wooden House (Birkhæuser, Basel, 1995), p. 8 Google Scholar.

71 Quoted in Boudon, Philippe, Pessac de le Corbusier (Dunod, Paris, 1969), p. 30 Google Scholar.

72 Exemplified in Mies’ model house (with Lilly Reich) for the Berlin Architectural Exhibition, 1931. It must be said that this project contrasts equally with pre-National Socialist and pre-Mies Bauhauslers’ contemporary exercises in small-house planning.

73 Segal (1984).

74 Julius Posener, letter to the author, 21 March 1988.

75 Segal (1984).

76 The Freysinnet hangers were built in 1916 and 1924.

77 Segal (1984).

78 John Allan, op. cit., p. 50, suggests that all Lubetkin learned at TH Charlottenhof was reinforced concrete theory from ‘the eminent engineer’ Professor Kersten, and his key text Der Eisenbetonbau.

79 Segal (1984).

80 Otto Kcenigsberger, in conversation with the author, March 1988.

81 Segal (1984).

82 Julius Posener, letter to the author, 21 March 1988.

83 Segal (1984).

84 See Sereny, op. cit., p. 70.

85 Walter Segal quoted in McKean, John, ‘Walter Segal: Pioneer’, Building Design, 20 February 1976, p. 11 Google Scholar.

86 Segal, Walter, ‘Timber Framed Housing’ lecture reprinted in Journal of the RIBA, July 1977, p. 284 Google Scholar.

87 When the author first published the importance of Segal’s Berlin years — where he was born and to which he returned after World War One — close friends who felt they knew Segal very well were considerably surprised, convinced he had been born in Switzerland.

88 Segal, Walter, ‘Timber Framed Housing’ lecture reprinted in Journal of the RIBA, July 1977, p. 284 Google Scholar.

89 Segal, Walter, ‘View from a Lifetime’, RIBA Transactions 1, vol. 1, no. 1 (1981/82)Google Scholar.

90 Segal, Walter, ‘Timber Framed Housing’ lecture reprinted in Journal of the RIBA, July 1977, p. 284 Google Scholar.

91 Though not until a late edition, following its appearance in the Coronation Number of The Architectural Review, May 1937; Yorke, F. R. S., The Modern House, 3rd Edition (The Architectural Press, London, 1937), pp. 118-19Google Scholar.

Walter Segal’s Home Environment was published by Leonard Hill, London, in 1948. It was enthusiastically reviewed by C. S. Mardall in the Journal of the RIBA in June. An enlarged second edition appeared in 1953.