Building Auschwitz
VortragProf. Robert Jan van Pelt (Selected biography)
Born and raised in the Netherlands
1974-84 studies at Leiden University (Art History, Classical Archeology, Architectural History, Ph. D. in the History of Ideas).
1984-96 various teaching positions, e.g.
School of Architecture, Massachusettes Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA,
School of Architecture, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA,
Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, USA,
Architectural Association, School of Architecture, London, UK,
School of Architecture, National University of Singapore.
Since 1996 Professor of Cultural History, School of Architecture, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
Academic honours:
1997 Spiro Kostof Award, Society of Architectural Historians for "Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present",
1996 National Jewish Book Award
Publications:
"Auschwitz: 1270 bis heute", trans. Klaus Rupprecht (Zürich: Pendo, 1998)
"Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present" (London: Yale University Press, 1996)
Architectural Principles in the Age of Historicism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991, Paperback 1993)
Dios, arquitecto: Juan Bautista Villalpando y el Templo de Salomon (Madrid: Ediciones Siruela, 1991)
Tempel van de Wereld: de Kosmische Symboliek van de Tempel van Salomo (Utrecht: Hes Publishers, 1984)
Films:
"Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter Jr." Non-Fiction Feature made by Errol Morris. Rough cut shown at the Sundance Festival, 1999.
"Auschwitz: The Blueprint of Genocide," BBC Horizon, WGBH Boston/ WGBH Nova (documentary made by Isabelle Rosin and Mike Rossiter).
Quotations of Prof. van Pelt on the topic:
"Asked if I could name a contemporary building that could take the central place in our imagination and discourse that the Temple (of Solomon, Anm. d. Red.) had occupied for almost two thousand years, I answered: ‘the crematoria of Auschwitz’. This intuitive response became the starting point of an odyssey which has not yet ended.
Auschwitz was designed by a Bauhaus-trained architect and developed by a group of university-educated engineers. Yet the camp was not mentioned in a single general history of modern architecture. It was as if the profession was either totally ignorant or willfully oblivious.
I began to reconsider the whole of architectural history in light of both the crematorium itself and the post-war prosperity of its architect, Walther Dejaco."