Ida Falkenberg-Liefrinck

Ida (Liv) Falkenberg-Liefrinck , née Ida Liefrinck, (born July 22, 1901 in Arnhem , † January 20, 2006 in Berlin ) was a Dutch interior architect and designer. Along with Lotte Stam-Beese and Bé Niegeman-Brand , she was one of the few women who was involved in the New Building movement.

life and career

Max Lingner House seating area

She attended the Quellinus School of Applied Arts in Amsterdam from 1918 to 1922 , studied art history in Zurich from 1922 to 1925, assisted in an architectural office there, then worked briefly in a Paris furniture store as a draftsman, furnished her father's house in Oosterbeek and was then from 1926 Until 1928 employee in the architecture office of Jacobus Johannes Pieter Oud in Rotterdam. In 1927 she worked on the Weißenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart and became a member of the groups and magazines Opbouw and de 8 . Between 1928 and 1930 she designed furniture and interior fittings and in 1931 began training as a cabinet maker at the Deutsche Werkstätten Hellerau . There she took the first name Liv and married the electrical engineer Otto Falkenberg in 1933 , who confronted her with the views of communism. Both used their honeymoon to flee to the Netherlands. She worked as a freelance interior designer, furniture and interior design were created. She designed the first chairs made of rattan with the furniture joinery Lang from Ulft. She later designed cane furniture for the trading company Liberty Metz & Co in Amsterdam. She equipped the first major projects, such as parts of the interior of the tanker Pendricht and the Catholic sanatorium in Heiloo, with furniture she designed herself. From 1939 she designed vases, glasses, bowls and (whiskey) carafes for the Dutch glass factory Leerdam on behalf of the director Dirk Copier . Otto Falkenberg was arrested in September 1940 and later interned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp . After the war ended, the two met again in the Soviet zone of occupation in Dresden. In 1945 Otto Falkenberg was entrusted with the reorganization of the industry in Saxony, she worked as an interior designer for the Leipziger Messe, the party school in Kleinmachnow, the business school in Plessow, the administration academy Forst Zinna (planning collectives with Selman Selmanagic , Franz Ehrlich , Eduard Collein , Herbert Hirche and Reinholf Lingner ) and designed, among other things, the furnishings for Friedrich Wolf's house (the furnishings in the house have been completely preserved) in the Lehnitz-Nord forest settlement . In 1948 the two of them placed Mart Stam as professor and later rector at the Dresden Art Academy. In the 1950s, orders, some of which were due to her husband's position, fell sharply. She was no longer able to carry out the interior fittings for the writer Arnold Zweig and the director Wolfgang Langhoff because she and her husband moved to Prague in 1950. Because Otto Falkenberg, who had become Minister in the State of Brandenburg (GDR) in 1948, went with his wife to the diplomatic service in Prague and New Delhi for eleven years, most recently to Moscow, where she wrote a few articles about the new Russian architecture for German architecture magazines wrote. After 1962 she stopped working as a designer. From 1962 to 1970 she worked in the information department of the VEB Berlin Projekt, which implemented exposed building projects under Heinz Graffunder in the 1960s and 70s . She lived in Berlin until her death. She became a member of the BdA . Since the mid-1980s, works by her have been exhibited, especially in the Netherlands.

literature

• Klaus Kühnel: Man is a very strange piece of furniture. Biography of the interior designer Liv Falkenberg-Liefrinck, b. 1901. trafo , Berlin 2006, ISBN 3-89626-572-5 .

Web links

Commons : Ida Falkenberg-Liefrinck  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files