Author:

"Stam"

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Mart Stam (1899) was a Dutch architect and industrial designer born in Purmerend. After studying drawing in Amsterdam, he worked between 1919 and 1924 with Marinus Jan Granpré Molière in Rotterdam, Max Taut and Hans Poelzig in Berlin, and Karl Moser in Zurich. In ABC magazine. Beiträge zum Bauen, edited in collaboration with Hans Schmidt, he published articles on design, architecture and furniture and also perspective drawings of functionalist buildings.

Between 1925 and 1928, while working in the law firms of Johannes Andreas Brinkman and Leendert Comelis van der Vlugt, he collaborated on the Van Nelle tobacco factory project in Rotterdam (1925-1930). Around the same time he accepted an invitation from Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to build a rigidly articulated group of semi-detached houses with a roof terrace for the Weissenhof housing estate in Stuttgart (1927). However, his steel tube chair and accessories designed for the occasion did not offer the elastic effect of the Mies suspension chair. From the same dates are the Hellerhof housing estate in Frankfurt am Main (1928-1932) and a nursing home in the same city (1928-1930), a two-story white building, with an H-shaped plan and largely glazed on the side. South, because while the functionalist dwellings had a north-south orientation to optimize the incidence of the sun in the morning and in the afternoon, Stam conceived an asylum adapted to the other demands of use.

In 1930 Stam emigrated to the Soviet Union in the company of Ernst May and other architects; there he worked as a town planner and designed, among other things, a plan for Magnltogorsk. When he found that his visionary ideas were practically uninteresting in the Soviet Union, he returned with his wife Lotte Stam-Beese to Holland in 1934.

Between 1939 and 1953 he directed the training schools in Amsterdam, Dresden, and East Berlin and in the 1950s he built the Geilustreerde Pers office building in Amsterdam (1957-1959). From 1925 he worked with Johannes Andreas Brinkman (1902-1949), son of the architect Michiel Brinkman, who had studied at the Higher Technical School in Delft. Stam passed away on February 21, 1986, at the age of 87 in Goldbach.