I just received the following email from Marilyn Jordan Taylor, Dean of PennDesign.
Detlef Martins, from Archinect's feature:
Design in the World: An Interview with Detlef Mertins
I just received the following email from Marilyn Jordan Taylor, Dean of PennDesign.
Dear Members of the PennDesign community,
With deepest sadness, I write to let you know that our extraordinary colleague Professor Detlef Mertins passed away yesterday, January 14, 2011.
Detlef’s contributions to our school, to us collectively and individually, and to the fields of architecture history and theory are of immense and lasting value. The loss of his presence among us is immeasurable and, at this moment, impossible to grasp.
I have spoken with Keller Easterling, who asked that we respect the families’ need for a quiet time. There will be a memorial service in the spring, when we will join many others in celebrating Detlef’s work, including the recently published G and his forthcoming volume on Mies van der Rohe, as well as his many gifts to us all.
Marilyn Jordan Taylor
Dean and Paley Professor
School of Design
University of Pennsylvania
14 Comments
he was on my final graduate thesis review. i remember our discussion vividly.
what were the circumstances of his death? he seemed very young still.
I worked as an assistant for 3 years to Detlef while he was Chair of the Department of Architecture at PennDesign. His passing is a great shock and deep loss. I know that any students who sought his counseling were grateful for his immense ability to listen and genuine interest in his students. My thoughts go to Keller and Detlef's family and to anyone who had the pleasure of working with him.
The photo that appears alongside this announcement was taken by me one afternoon on Penn's campus for an interview he conducted for Archinect with Geoff Manaugh. It pains me to see it now but also reminds me of that afternoon and Detlef's witty and self-deprecating remarks about being photographed. He is missed.
My condolences to his family, friends, colleagues and students. I wasn't fortunate enough to have had him as a Professor, having just missed him. I'm sure people at Penn are hurting right now, so give them my best Philip.
This is very sad news; Detlef was hugely helpful, patient, interested, and freely available even to someone with no connection to Penn, such as myself. A real loss.
I am saddened to hear of his passing. I studied at University of Toronto while he was a professor and critic at my studio reviews. The book and exhibition the Presence of Mies was one of his memorable contributions to architectural discourse and to my bookshelf. But above all, I will remember him as a genuine and approachable person without pretense whose knowledge of late 19th and early 20th century architecture was without equal at the school of Architecture.
He will be missed.
Truly sad news. I think it's not a stretch to claim Detlef was among the finest historians writing today. As his student, and later teaching assistant, at the University of Toronto I saw first hand what a transformation he brought to that school. I would echo Mr. Castel-Branco, Detlef was unfailingly generous to his students and his departure from UofT was deeply felt.
It's heartbreaking to think he has died so young, condolences to his family and colleagues at Penn.
I was very lucky to have met him, even got to hang out with him a few times. He was a very warm, smart, and funny guy. He told me that he had visited Baltimore to study our Mies tower at One Charles Center: "it is one of very few Mies buildings with an inside corner."
His work as a scholar and teacher is a great inspiration, it's fantastic to read that interview from Geoff again. Detlef will be very well remembered and very missed.
I met Detlef when we were students and later punk faculty members at the University of Toronto in the 1970's and '80's. With George Baird, he formed the core of the school's truest scholars for many years.
The city of Toronto also owes him a debt of gratitude for his careful documenting and publishing the small and threatened collection of early Modernist pieces, built while the city's sensibilities still seemed inextricably rooted in its English colonial mire.
Detlef's approachability and openness as a teacher always willing to help sometimes masked the tower of academic strength (and salesmanship) he brought to both Toronto and Penn. About 25 years after our U of T experinces, he convinced me to return to grad school and handed me my diploma in 2008; although the administrative load of the director's position too often took him away from his teaching and writing, he was unfailingly generous with his time. Everyone will remember the incredible precision and enthusiasm of his speach whenever he was really on topic about anything architectural. He was the real thing.
Gerry Lang - U of T '78, Penn '08
Detlef’s death so young is a great loss to architectural writing and education.
His presence at the school was one of the highlights of my education at UofT. His intellectual excitement, and engagement with history and criticism as vital aspects of architectural culture and practice, were always inspiring. In addition he was an encouraging and caring teacher, a pleasure to talk to and to work for as a research assistant. My thoughts go to his family, friends and colleagues.
As a student of his in the mid-90s at U of T, I didn't truly appreciate his scholarship nor the intensity of his history classes until I began working. All those readings crammed into my head came to practical use for precedence after graduation! I am sorry to hear of his passing.I have a fond memory of sitting with Detlef in the school bar over cappuccinos and just being amazed at how down to earth he could be.
I knew Detlef from the time we were students - he at the uofT an myself at the University of Waterloo. We worked together at Jones and Kirkland in Toronto and taught together at the University of Waterloo. I count Detlef as one of the few true scholars that I have known. He was one of those people that in a discussion on any subject was truly generous with his intellect and with his enthusiasm. I will remember him with great fondness and will miss his energy and his commitment to our common obsession.
Mark Sterling, Toronto
Detlef was a exquisitely insightful scholar, and a generous, humane colleague.
Episodes:
As a young teacher amidst turbulent Architecture at Toronto in the 1980’s, he offered vivid curiosity and insight, and his ironic levity leavened our lamentably polarized stand-offs at the divided school. I remember him sharing his absurdly brilliant design thesis featuring cartoon characters, and bounding up and down the room in Converse running shoes. I remember him standing on the steps just above the school lobby and sternly lecturing me on my sweeping judgements, saying ‘you can never generalize!’; then relieving my fall by teaching how you could build knowledge in a hermeneutic dance of woven references, invitations to look and look again.
At Penn in thesis critiques two years ago: admonishing a student showed billowing, exotic forms ex nihilo with smiling understatement (still in Converse shoes ): ‘there are quite a few things you could read about the history of your work’.
Reviewing Diamond’s York Student Centre in late 80’s, he offered Piranesi’s many-centred compositions and suggested they might offer a reconciliation of classical and modern space. His brilliant mid ‘90s Glass Architecture exhibition retraced designs around Taut and Scheerbart’s Glass Crystal Chain and demonstrated how spiritualist and vitalist visions ran cheek-by-jowl alongside emerging modernism. His ‘Anything but Literal’ essay for Eve Blau’s Architecture and Cubism offered a delicious vertigo: ‘a liquid matrix of unstable yet constitutive relationships’. In ‘Bioconstructivisms’ of '04 he set out a core reference for emerging kinetic architecture, retracing Kant’s play between immanence and transcendence with assurance: ‘there is no need for closure, unity, or system that assimilates but only the many’. And, in brief new writing this year, speaking ‘not of the supposed authority of biomorphic forms, but rather of nature’s inclusiveness’.
Perhaps revision of history was something that characterized his work as a whole. He seemed to find inspiration in revealing oscillating, charged ambivalence. Perhaps he reclaimed ‘ambivalence’ as a strategy for finding nuanced truth. He earned that state at every step with rigorous precision.
I think his refusal to rest with certainty came from his fundamental humanism. My view of the world has been enriched in a host of ways by this remarkable man. My heart breaks in losing him.
Philip Beesley
Detlef generated a transformation in an entire culture at Penn. Not without blowback, not without missteps.
But what emerged before our eyes was a unique and special place, that for a time at least, married the best parts of the old and new modes of thinking about and making architecture.
His imprint is indelible on all who knew him, and all who learned from him.
He will be missed.
Eric Spencer, PennDesign '05
I was enormously saddened to learn of the passing of Detlef Mertins. Detlef and I were the best of friends during the brief and tumultuous period of our youth, from 1969 to 1974. I cherish those years as among the most stimulating of my life.
We were inseparable companions. We went to movies and played tennis like ordinary teenagers. But we were not quite ordinary. Fuelled by a diet of Heinlein and Rand, we scaled the mountain of Objectivism. Armed with the absolute certainty of our convictions, we stormed through our high school years like intellectual cyclones, leaving fuzzy thinking and collectivist dogma shattered in our wake.
Like all young idealists we set out to change the world. We participated in founding Libertarian parties in Canada, actively campaigned during elections and contributed to Libertarian publications. And, like all young idealists, we were impatient for change.
Of course, we soon discovered that change did not come easily. After the heady days of high school we became disappointed by the apathy of the world. Withdrawing from politics, we immersed ourselves in our respective studies, met new people and each began to see the world in a different way.
During our years of friendship, Detlef and I chummed with a small knot of like-minded peers, always referring to each other by surname only. Among friends we were all masters of wry wit and pointed sarcasm. Everyone waited to pounce on a misspoken word or clumsy error in order to skewer the perpetrator with a pointed barb that left us all in stitches. No one escaped ridicule.
I always felt that Detlef possessed an intellect superior to his peers — certainly to mine. He excelled in all subjects throughout school and often volunteered to help others. He approached everything he did with an intensity, passion and rigour that was sometimes intimidating.
I fondly remember “Mertins” and the many good times we shared during our years together. I think Detlef would appreciate me closing with the quotation he selected for his high school yearbook graduation photo:
"What would you have me do? Make my knees callous, and cultivate a supple spine — wear out my belly grovelling in the dust? No thank you! But ... to sing, to laugh, to dream, to walk in my own way and be alone, free, with an eye to see things as they are; to travel any road under the sun, under the stars. A hundred against one. Surrender? Never! I fight on.” Edmond Rostand (1897)
pkeerma@gmail.com
Block this user
Are you sure you want to block this user and hide all related comments throughout the site?
Archinect
This is your first comment on Archinect. Your comment will be visible once approved.