Friedrich Wilhelm Schwerdtfeger was seriously injured at the age of 12 by a Russian shell, on the Eastern Front, his life being saved by a female Russian army doctor. He studied engineering in East Berlin, managing to escape over the rooftops into West Berlin, where he continued his architectural and engineering studies. In 1964 he enrolled on the postgraduate program run by the Architectural Association’s (AA) Department of Tropical Studies, in London. He elected to attend the ‘Educational Building’ course and successfully completed his studies in the summer of 1965. He subsequently undertook urban research in Zaira, Ibadan and Marakech between December 1967 and January 1969, funded by the German Academic Exchange Service in Bonn. This was to culminate in a PhD, at the School of Environmental Studies, at University College London (1975) - his thesis being entitled ‘A comparative study of conventional urban houses in three regions in Africa’. By 1977 he was teaching at the Department of Architecture at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. He was appointed professor and continued to teach for over 20 years, acting as Head of the Department from the late 1990s. Over the course of his distinguished career, Schwerdtfeger has published numerous articles and books and articles, including his seminal ‘Traditional Housing in African Cities (1982) and ‘Hausa Urban Art and its Social Background…’ (2007).
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