Alexander von Senger

Who was Alexander von Senger?

Alexander von Senger, Swiss architect and architectural theorist.

Hugues Rodolphe Alexandre von Senger was born in Geneva. After his humanistic and technical Matura at the Collège Calvin, he studied at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technologie in Zürich, where he obtained 1904 his diploma as architect. He designed the main station of the Swiss Railwais in St. Gallen and the main building of the Swiss Reassurance Company in Zürich.

In 1931, Senger, along with other Nazi architects such as Eugen Honig, Konrad Nonn, German Bestelmeyer, and especially Paul Schultze-Naumburg were deputized in the National Socialist fight against modern architecture, in a para-governmental propaganda unit called the Kampfbund deutscher Architekten und Ingenieure. Through the pages of the official Nazi newspaper, the People's Observer, these architects actively attacked the modern style in openly racist and political tones. They placed much of the blame on members of the architectural group "The Ring," calling Walter Gropius an "elegant salon-bolshevist", and calling the Bauhaus "the cathedral of Marxism".