Lotte Stam-Beese

Charlotte Ida Anna "Lotte" Stam-Beese (28 January 1903 – 18 November 1988) was a German-Dutch architect, photographer and urban planner who helped with the reconstruction of Rotterdam after World War II.

Biography Beese was born in Reisicht, Silesia, Germany (now Rokitki, Poland).

Before beginning her career as an architect, Beese was a successful photographer. Though she only worked with the medium professionally for a short period from 1926 to 1930, her work had a disproportionate impact and is now held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

From 1926 to 1928 she attended the Bauhaus school in Dessau. In the next years of the interwar period she worked in office in Berlin, Moscow, Ukraine, Brno, and Amsterdam.

From 1946 to 1968, Beese worked as an urban-planning architect, and later as chief architect, for the Agency for Urban Development and Reconstruction of Rotterdam, which had been heavily bombed in 1940 during the Second World War. Beese was a good student but Meyer was not convinced of Beese's future prospects, unless she would marry a male architect and work for his firm.

Meyer, Bauhaus-director and a married man with two children, and Beese started a love affair.

Office in Berlin, Moscow, Ukraine, Brno, and Amsterdam In 1928 Hannes Meyer hired Beese at his office in Berlin, but she was dissatisfied. He then tried to find Beese another job through his network, in vain. She was turned down by Walter Traulau, because, as indicated in a letter to his friend, he did not "like working with women". The combination of her studies and the care for two children added pressure on her marriage with Stam. In 1943, they divorced, after Stam committed adultery. She graduated in 1945. Designing in a Functionalist style and influenced by the planning ideologies of the CIAM association, Beese worked on several (social) housing districts around the city, including: Kleinpolder (1946–1952), Pendrecht (1948–1952), Westpunt in Hoogvliet (1956–1957), het Lage Land (1961–1962) and Alexanderpolder/Ommoord (1957–1971). The neighborhood concept referred to the neighborhood as a self-supporting geographical unit, a city within a city, with a social structure and community reminiscent of that of a village. During the post-war reconstruction, the neighborhood idea became a widely employed model for the creation of communities and the harmonious ordering of society. However, in the following decades, the idea of the neighborhood unit had been abandoned and large parts of Pendrecht were modified or torn down.