The architect Lotte Beese and her work in the Soviet Union, 1932-1935
Lotte Beese (Reisicht 1903 - Krimpen aan den IJssel 1988) was the first female student to enrol for the Swiss architect Hannes Meyer’s neue baulehre (‘new architecture’) course at the Bauhaus. She later worked for architecture firms in Berlin and the city of Brno in Czechoslovakia. In spring 1932 she left for the Ukrainian city of Kharkov to help build the sotsgorods (‘socialist cities’). Research shows that she drew ground plans for the KhTZ district of the city, commissioned by the Giprograd building trust, for employees of the nearby new tractor factory and their families. The district was divided into housing units in which blocks of flats, schools, crèches and a communal kitchen with dining rooms alternated with lawns, gardens and footpaths.
In Kharkov Lotte Beese got to know the Dutch designer and architect Mart Stam, with whom she was already familiar as a guest lecturer at the Bauhaus. Stam was part of the May Brigade, a group of architects headed by the Frankfurt city architect Ernst May, who had come to the Soviet Union to build the industrial city of Magnitogorsk. Beese decided to throw in her lot with Stam and join the May Brigade. Stam was commissioned to turn the town of Orskaya in the southern Urals into the industrial sotsgorod Orsk, for which Beese designed several housing blocks, a school, a crèche and two nursery schools for children up to three years of age. It is not yet clear whether one of the three of the latter designs were ever built. in November 1934, after Mart Stam had refused to build a new city in an area near Lake Balkhash that was polluted by copper ore, Beese left the Soviet Union with him and moved to the Netherlands, where they set up the Stam en Beese architecten firm in Amsterdam. In 1946, after divorcing Stam and completing her architectural training, Lotte Beese was appointed as urban-planning architect for the city of Rotterdam, where she designed residential districts with separate housing, work, traffic and recreation functions, and ample green space. Her practical experience in the Soviet Union stood her in good stead in her new job.