Simon Schmiderer

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Simon Schmiderer (born on January 27, 1911 in Saalfelden ; died on April 12, 2001 in Highland Beach , USA) was an Austrian architect who emigrated to the USA due to the occupation of Austria by the Nazi regime .

life and work

Schmiderer was the son of a railroad worker from the Pinzgau region of Salzburg . He studied at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, where he met his future wife Mabel Burlingham . Mabel was a great-granddaughter of the New York jeweler Charles Lewis Tiffany and daughter of Dorothy Burlingham Tiffany , psychoanalyst and life partner of Anna Freud . This is how Schmiderer got to know Sigmund Freud . One of his closest friends became Harry Freud , a nephew of the psychoanalyst.

In 1938 Schmiderer emigrated to Great Britain with the Freud family , and later to the USA with his wife . One of his first assignments as an architect was a confectionery shop for the Heller family, who had also emigrated from Vienna, on 5th Avenue in New York. From 1943 he worked for the architects Wallace Harrison and Maxwell Abramovitz, who, among other things, realized various projects for Nelson Rockefeller and his companies. From 1944 he worked for the TIME-Life publishing house in New York, and from 1947 he was involved as an architect in the construction of the UN headquarters in Manhattan . Rockefeller donated a piece of land in Manhattan to the UN and invited internationally renowned architects such as Oscar Niemeyer and Le Corbusier . “Schmiderer was one of the 'backroom boys' who turned drafts into concrete models.” He was particularly responsible for the library and the general assembly of the UN headquarters . From 1952 until the 1960s, he implemented extensive residential construction programs in Puerto Rico on behalf of a Rockefeller Foundation . Here he implemented ideas of serial living and coined the phrase: "One house in one hour". After the Second World War, he was one of the inventors of finished parts made of concrete .

literature

  • Visionaries and displaced persons , exhibition catalog, Vienna 1995
  • Gerald Lehner: The human measure. A utopia? Conversations with Leopold Kohr about his life . Salzburg 2014. ISBN 978-3-902932-01-3 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Gerald Lehner: The human measure. A utopia? Conversations with Leopold Kohr about his life . Salzburg 2014. ISBN 978-3-902932-01-3 .
  2. ↑ a b Eva Maria Bachinger, Gerald Lehner: '' In the shadow of the Ringstrasse ''. Vienna: Czernin 2015, ISBN 978-3-7076-0432-0 , pp. 155–159.
  3. ↑ Guggenheim Museum : Collection Online: Simon Starling , accessed on June 5, 2015. Starling revised Schmiderer's designs in 2002 using Schönberg's 12-tone technique .
  4. ^ Austria-Forum: Official short biography of Simon Schmiderer , accessed on June 5, 2015.
personal data
SURNAME Schmiderer, Simon
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian architect and emigrant due to the Nazi regime
DATE OF BIRTH January 27, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH Saalfelden , Austria
DATE OF DEATH April 12, 2001
Place of death Highland Beach (Florida) , USA