Werner Seligmann

Who was Werner Seligmann?

Werner Seligmann, was an architect, urban designer, and educator.

He was born on March 30, 1930 in Germany. His father was a violinist; Seligmann inherited a lifelong taste for music and the arts in general. He family spent much of their life in Braunswieg Germany, until they were captured by the Nazis. The family was separated and Seligmann spent the latter part of the Second World War in a concentration camp. Unfortunately, his mother and sister never returned from the camps. After the camp guards abandoned their posts he was picked up by American troops, and ultimately reunited with his father, in Holland. From there he was sent to the US to live with relatives, in Groton, in upstate New York, a short distance from Cornell University in Ithaca. Seligmann received his B. Arch. degree from Cornell in 1955 and went on to do graduate study at the Technische Hochsschule in Braunschwieg, Germany in 1958 and 1959. From there he returned to the US and taught as an Instructor at the University of Texas at Austin from 1956 to 1958. It was there that he became part of a small group of faculty that was later nicknamed The Texas Rangers, a group that included Colin Rowe, John Shaw, Robert Slutzky and John Hejduk. After this group was dismissed from Austin Seligmann returned to Europe, where he taught as an Assistant at the Eidgenossiche Technische Hochschule, in Zurich, Switzerland from 1959 to 1961. From 1961 to 1974, he was an Associate Professor of Architecture at Cornell and an Associate Professor of Architecture at Harvard University. From 1976-1990 he was Dean and Professor of Architecture at Syracuse University. He was subsequently made Distinguished Professor of Architecture at Syracuse University. From 1990 to 1994 he was a Professor of Architecture at the ETH in Zurich.