Volker M. Welter
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Volker M. Welter is an architectural historian whose specializes in modern architecture from the 19th century onwards. Working mainly on Californian, British, and German, but also current architecture, his research centers on domestic architecture, patronage, histories of modernist, revival styles, and sustainable architecture, and historiography of modern architecture. The subject matter of his research usually emerge from his ongoing work in archives where the unordered adjacencies of archival sources often inspire new projects. He is interested in the ways 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, when appropriate, philosophical, sociological and psychological (theories of spatial perception) thought contemporary to a research project’s focus.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. He is working on book on the patronage of mid-20th century domestic American architecture, compiling a history of the concept of Umwelt in relation to architecture, and researches how the battlefields of the Great War influenced the emergence of European architectural modernism in the 1920s.
