Felix Samuely

Felix James Samuely (born February 3, 1902 in Vienna ; † January 22, 1959 ) was a British civil engineer.

Samuely was the son of a doctor and went to school in Berlin. In Berlin, he was a partner in the engineering office Berger and Samuely, who, among other things, advised on welded steel structures in the Soviet Union. Before being persecuted by the National Socialists, he emigrated to Great Britain in 1933, where he continued his advisory work on welded steel structures (little known in England at the time). He worked on the De La Warr Pavilion built in 1935 in Bexhill on Sea under Erich Mendelsohn . From 1942 to 1944 he designed welded tubular structures for aircraft hangars. He belonged to the Modern Architectural Research Group (MARS) and, together with members of the group such as Arthur Korn, also presented a new urban plan for London in 1942. He had one of the leading engineering firms in London in the 1950s. One of his collaborators was Frank Newby , and both of them attracted attention at the 1951 Festival of Britain for the Skylon, a tensegrity structure that gave the impression of floating freely in space. Architects were Phillip Powell (1921–2003) and Hidalgo Moya (1920–1994). The British pavilion at the world exhibition in Brussels in 1958 was also designed by Samuely's engineering office.

In the 1950s, Samuely developed a kind of curtain wall concept with the architect George Grenfell Baines because of the material shortages after the war (Mullion Wall, the name comes from the coupled Gothic windows ).

literature

• Frank Newby, article in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
• Obituary in Proc. Inst. Civil Engineers, Vol. 15, 1960, pp. 314-315

Individual evidence

1. ^ John S. Scott, Dictionary of Civil Engineering, Chapman and Hall 1993, p. 528