Wils Ebert (1909-1979)

Yesterday I received the, to my knowledge, only comprehensive book on the work of Berlin architect Wils Ebert. Born in 1909 as Karl Willy Ebert, Wils Ebert between 1929 and 1933 studied under Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe at the Bauhaus in Dessau. The book comprises some 240 pages including Ebert's text on architectural topics and problems as well as numerous sketches and two-tone images of his built work.

His most famous buildings without a doubt are the 9-story complex built in collaboration with Walter Gropius's TAC on the occasion of the 1957 Interbau exhibition at Berlin, a groundbreaking exhibition that set the pace for building principles in postwar Germany, and the Völkerkundemuseum in Berlin-Dahlem built between 1965 and 1970, again in collaboration with another architect, this time fellow Berliner Fritz Bornemann. Today Wils Ebert is more or less forgotten but will, hopefully, be rediscovered in the course of the general revalution of postwar modern architecture in Germany which until just recently has neither been sufficiently preserved nor acknowledged by the greater public.