Otto Königsberger

Otto H. Königsberger (13 October 1908 – 3 January 1999) was a German-Indian architect who worked mainly in urban development planning in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, with the United Nations. He also proposed plans for developing new cities like Bhubaneswar and Jamshedpur in India.

Early life

Königsberger was born in Berlin to a Jewish family in 1908 , and trained as an architect at the Technische Hochschule in Charlottenburg (now Technische Universität Berlin), graduating in 1931. In 1933, he won the Schinkel Prize for Architecture for a design for the Olympic Stadium in Berlin. However, with the rise to power of the Nazi Party, Königsberger was forced to leave the country, as was his uncle, physicist Max Born. Königsberger later illustrated Born's popularized physics text, The Restless Universe (published 1935).

Königsberger spent the next six years in the Swiss Institute for the History of Egyptian Architecture in Cairo, where he gained his doctorate. When his uncle Max Born was in Bangalore as a guest of Raman, the Diwan Mirza Ismail enquired if he know of any trained architect. Thanks to Born's introduction, Königsberger was appointed chief architect and planner to Mysore State, India in 1939. His buildings during this period include some buildings in the Indian Institute of Science (1943–44), the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Bombay (Mumbai), the bus station, Serum Institute and Victory Hall (1946, renamed as Town Hall) in Bangalore. He also practiced urban planning and led the town plan for Bhubaneswar, and was hired by Tata to design a plan for Jamshedpur. After Indian Independence he became director of housing for the Indian Ministry of Health from 1948 to 1951, working on resettling those displaced by partition.

Resident in India since 1939, Königsberger became an Indian citizen in 1950, when he received Indian passport from the Nehru government. He emigrated to England in 1951, but remained an Indian citizen until 1991, when he was driven to take British citizenship due to the UK government's stance on immigration legislation, which made it problematic for him to receive health care in the United Kingdom.

Career In 1953 Königsberger moved to London and became head of the Department of Development and Tropical Studies at the Architectural Association, which later became the Development Planning Unit of University College, London, where he worked as a professor until his retirement in 1978.

Königsberger taught that town planners in the developing world should be prepared to dynamically adapt their plans, and involve local communities and techniques, as opposed to imposing a static master plan based on Western ideas – an approach he called Action Planning. He served as a senior adviser to the United Nations Economic and Social Council from the 1950s, and helped launch Habitat International in 1976, which he edited until 1978. His Manual of tropical housing and building was published in several languages and remains a standard course text in many parts of the world. He is credited with introducing Bauhaus style of architecture to India and neighbouring countries.

He stayed in contact with his cousins and developed their shared interests in the Peace Movement, notably Lewis Elton, Andrew Ehrenberg, Gustav Born, Ralph Elliott, Wolf Tillmann, Otto Ehrenberg, Raphael Rosenzweig, and also Victor Ehrenberg and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy.

Awards and legacy In 1989, Königsberger was one of the first recipients of the UN Habitat Scroll of Honour, the most prestigious award given by the United Nations in recognition of work carried out in the field of human settlements development. The same year, University College London established the Otto Koenigsberger Scholarship to enable young professionals from developing countries to study urban planning in the UK.