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Lotte Stam-Beese

Amsterdam, Netherlands
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Photo unknown, around 1929.

Charlotte Ida Anna "Lotte" Stam-Beese was a German architect and urban planner who helped with the reconstruction of Rotterdam after World War II. Beese was born in Reisicht, Silesia, Germany (now Rokitki, Tczew County, Poland). As a young adult she first found work as a weaver in Dresden. She attended the Bauhaus school, starting in 1926, where she studied with Josef Albers, Wassily Kandinsky, Joost Schmidt, and Gunta Stolzl. Though she enrolled to study weaving, she took classes in photography as well as architecture, changing her career path.

She was one of the first women to join the Bauhaus Department of Architecture in 1927 and the first to study with Hannes Meyer and Hans Wittwer. She continued to work with Meyer after leaving Bauhaus, working at his office in Berlin and later following him to Moscow to work for Mart Stam. In 1935, Lotte Beese moved with Mart Stam to Amsterdam, whom she finally married. Until 1938 Beese ran her own architectural office in Amsterdam. During the war, she wrote her diploma thesis at the School of Architecture in Amsterdam, for which she graduated in 1944 with a diploma. From 1946 to 1968 Beese worked as an architect in urban development in Rotterdam. In 1947 she built the first car-free street in the Netherlands; from 1949 she was involved in the construction of the quarter Pendrecht, later followed by Alexander Polder and Onmoord. Beese also taught at the Academy of Architecture and Urban Design in Amsterdam. Lotte Stam-Beese died on 18 November 1988 in Krimpen (Netherlands).

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Amsterdam, Netherlands
bostjan, February 15th, 2019
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