This article is more than 16 years oldObituaryOM Ungers
This article is more than 16 years oldGerman architect in the classical tradition devoted to the square, the cube and the right angleOswald Mathias Ungers - or "OMU" to the many who knew and worked with him, or who were taught by this hugely knowledgable, cultured and prolific German architect - has died in Cologne at the age of 81. A modern classicist devoted to the architecture of the square, the cube and the right angle, he was at once a natural successor to such great German architects as the Prussian master Karl Friedrich Schinkel and a modern interpreter of the aesthetic ideals and design ideas of the architects of the Italian Renaissance.
Unlike members of an earlier generation of German architects who came to the forefront of their profession in the decades following the second world war, Ungers saw no need to disconnect himself as an artist from the classical tradition that had flowered, sometimes floridly, at others stiffly, in Berlin and elsewhere in Germany from the Renaissance. Not for Ungers the free-flowing forms of Hans Scharoun, architect of the Philharmonic Concert Hall, Berlin, or the swooping and seemingly wilful designs of Günter Behnisch, commander of U-boat 2337 in the dying days of the war. For Ungers, who was pressed into military service from school and spent some months as an allied prisoner of war, the important thing was to reconnect with history and, above all, to nurture the pure art of architecture.
As such, he not only built a number of imposing and intriguing contemporary takes on neoclassical design, including the residence of the German ambassador in Washington DC in 1994, and powerful buildings that played chess-like games with classical plans, including the cube-like Wallraf-Richarz museum, Cologne, in 2001, housing a magnificent collection of German art from the medieval to the 20th century, but he also became a great collector of books on architectural history and historic models of architects' buildings. As such, Ungers was the perfect choice as designer of the German Architecture Museum, Frankfurt, in 1984. Housed in a fine 18th-century house, the museum takes the form inside of rooms that prove to be cubes within cubes, or elemental Platonic buildings within elemental Platonic buildings.
As an erudite thinker and writer on architecture, Ungers was keen to renew the Grecian notion of there being fundamental architectural building blocks - cube, cylinder and so on - that could, nevertheless, be reinterpreted or reorganised for specific building sites. A modern building need not look like a Greek or Roman temple, and yet it might share its essential nature. Significantly, perhaps, one of Ungers' most recently completed designs has been a new entrance to the ruins of the Roman bath at Trier, while he was busy up until his death at work on the reconstruction of the mighty Pergamon Museum, Berlin; this daunting pantechnicon houses segments and reconstructions of a number of ancient classical and Mesopotamian buildings. The work here is due for completion in 2010. It will be a lasting monument to Ungers, as well as to German classical culture, architecture and learning. Only last year, Ungers work was celebrated in the Cosmos of Architecture exhibition in Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie, a building designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe that is a Greek temple by determinedly modern means.
Ungers, the son of a postal service official, was born in Kaisersesch, in the Eifel region of western Germany. After release from PoW camp, from 1947 to 1950 he studied architecture at the University of Karlsruhe under Egon Eiermann, a rigorous functionalist, and set up his own practice in Cologne in 1950. His early buildings included a number of Bauhaus-influenced apartment blocks and private houses, while in the early 1960s, and now with an office in Berlin, Ungers worked on the Markisches Viertel housing complex, completed in 1970, a series of high-rise, prefabricated blocks marching, unprepossessingly, but with regular stride, along Wilhelmsruher Strasse.
At the time of the 1968 student uprisings in Berlin and elsewhere in Europe, a disapproving Ungers moved to Cornell University in New York state. There, he was chairman of the architecture department from 1969 to 1975, and much respected for attracting international talent to the school. He became a member of the American Institute of Architects, but in 1976 returned to Germany. He continued to teach on and off in the US, where his son and daughters were educated, but increasingly he was drawn into what proved to be a busy and rewarding architectural practice with offices in a number of German cities.
The state library in Karlsruhe (1991), a polar research institute at Bremerhaven (1986), the family court, Kreuzberg (1995) and his own beautiful House without Qualities in Cologne (1995) were just some of the many distinguished buildings Ungers designed between re-establishing himself in Germany and shaping the Wallraf-Richarz museum at the turn of the century and proving himself to be one of the finest architects of his generation. In his library at home the most prominent object on display was a bust of Schinkel. Ungers was happy to pose beside it.
He suffered great sadness when his son, the architect and artist Simon Ungers died, aged 48, last October. His wife Liselotte Gabler and daughters Sybille and Sophia survive him.
· Oswald Matthias Ungers, architect, born July 12 1926; died September 30 2007
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