The AA Archives and Birkbeck, University of London are pleased to announce the launch of a Collaborative Doctoral Award which will enable the cataloguing of one of the AA Archives’ most extensive and important collections - the Otto Koenigsberger Papers.
Entitled ‘Shaping Postcolonial Worlds: Otto Koenigsberger and the networks of the international planning consultant’, this funded PhD is supported through the CHASE Doctoral Training Partnership and is available to UK and EU students for a three year or six-year part-time Collaborative Doctoral Award.
For full details of the award, please visit the Birkbeck website
Otto Koenigsberger
Otto Koenigsberger (1908-1999) had an extraordinary life and career. Studying at the Technische Hochschule Charlottenburg and working at the Berlin State Architecture Department, he was forced to flee by the rise of the National Socialist Party. From Egypt, where he worked as an archaeologist, he moved to India to work as architect for the princely state of Mysore, where he first developed forms of tropical architecture. Having experienced post-independence India, Koenigsberger moved in 1951 to London. During this period Koenigsberger acted as an international planning consultant to many newly independent nations including those of Pakistan, Nigeria, Ceylon and the Philippines. He also played a leading role in numerous UN missions and programmes to countries including Singapore (where his ‘Ring Plan’ concept, developed in association with Charles Abrams and Susumu Kobe was formally adopted in 1971), Burma, Zambia and Lagos. Koenigsberger’s advisory powers also extended into architectural education, working with the UN Technical Assistance Programme to plan the first syllabus for the Escuela de Arquitectura (University of Costa Rica). He was instrumental in establishing and running the Architectural Association’s Department of Tropical Architecture (1954-1970), which recruited to its teaching ranks many of the leading theorists and practitioners in this area and had a global impact through its training of many leading postcolonial architects and planners, including Ram Karmi, Denise Scott Brown, Muzharul Islam and Valentine Gunasekara.
