Iris Dullin-Grund

Iris Dullin-Grund was born in 1933 in Berlin. Like her grandfather, her father was a mason from Silesia who came to Berlin to find work, like many young construction workers from this region. He bought land in Berlin-Niederschönhausen, later belonging to the German Democratic Republic (GDR), and built a house for his family. In 1939, as the Second World War was declared, her father was sent by his company to work in Poland to reconstruct destroyed bridges and build production and storage facilities for armaments in Polish forests. Gradually, he became the construction manager and could be exempted from military service, avoiding being sent to the front. Iris Dullin-Grund spent the years of the war in between Poland and Germany. In her autobiography, she tells that shortly before the end of the war, her family moved back into their family house in Berlin. Because of the daily damages caused by the bombs, the family had to repair the house constantly. These memories depict her first encounter with construction, which she enjoyed greatly. Although she writes that since her early childhood, she always had the romantic idea of being an architect, she does not deny that the context of living in a city in ruins influenced her decision to take on this profession (Dullin-Grund 2004).

After the end of the war, she finished high school, and in 1952, she entered the freshly opened Kunsthochschule in Weißensee in Berlin. The Bauhaus inspired the education program due to the many former teachers from the famous school who came back after the war. The Dutch architect Mart Stam directed it for two years from 1950 and established interdisciplinary core courses. The Bosnian architect Selman Selmanagić has been a key figure for Iris Dullin during her studies. Thanks to his encouragement, she holds him accountable for her being an architect today (Dullin-Grund 2004). Of 30 students, she was one of the only two women. After graduation, she and her five graduate fellows were offered a job at Hermann Henselmann’s office and could follow important milestones of Berlin’s reconstruction after the war. At the time, Henselmann was the Chief Architect from East Berlin, and he initiated significant urban planning competitions in the city. The team of university fellows worked on various projects like the competition for the development of Berlin’s city centre around Alexanderplatz or the design of a brand-new residential area in the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen situated in the eastern part of the city. When the architect Ernst May won the first prize for the creation of a housing district in Berlin-Fennpfuhl, his Bauhaus approach and his ideas about standardisation inspired by his experience in the Soviet Union made an impression on Iris Dullin-Grund. After Henselmann lost his position, she sent a letter to Ernst May asking to work for for some months in his office in Hamburg, West Germany. She was curious about how life and work in a capitalist country would be. Disappointed and feeling deeply lonely, after Ernst May offered her a permanent position, she decided to go back to East Germany. The lack of enthusiasm from her colleagues, the missing comradeship and above all, the lingering fascist mentality confirmed her desire to work in a state with socialist ideals. Back in Berlin, her design for the Haus der Kultur und Bildung (House of Culture and Education) in Neubrandenburg, a city located 150 km north of Berlin, won the competition and was successfully completed in 1965. From 1970 until the Fall of the Wall, she was the Chief Architect of Neubrandenburg. There was no higher position to reach as an architect in the GDR, only two other women reached it, Helge Hüller in Greifswald and Sabine Rohleder in Zwickau (Scheffler 2017).

The architectural tendencies in the early GDR followed the soviet principles based on the aesthetic of socialist realism. Architectural modernism, and especially the Bauhaus style, was vilified. Kurt Liebknecht, at that time director of the Bauakademie, declared it “hostile to the nation” and a “characteristic manifestation of the rotting capitalist society” (Schätzke 2016). Nevertheless, this changed after the Soviet Union drastically reduced the building sector’s cost, prioritising standardisation.

Fig. 1 - Iris Dullin-Grund in her kitchen, n. d. (left) Fig. 2 - Newspaper article about Iris Dullin-Grund winning the cultural center competition in Neubrandenburg "Hoch Hinaus", 1964 (right)

Iris Dullin-Grund’s first building illustrates this intention. It clearly uses modernist features like curtain wall facades and a precast concrete skeleton.

Another facet of Iris Dullin-Grund’s life is her life as a mother. Her story shows how constant support from her family, as well as state childcare, allowed her to pass essential steps toward an ambitious carrier. After she met and married her first husband, she started her architecture studies despite her family and husband’s opinion. In her third year, she gave birth to her daughter and only thanks to her mother and mother-in-law’s help, she could continue to go to the classes. At the beginning of the GDR, places at the daycare were still insufficient, and she had to wait. Later, both her children were placed at the daycare, and she recalls both her mother and mother-in-law called her Rabenmutter1 (raven mutter), but she was convinced that it would be best for children to grow up with other children. As she worked in Hamburg at the office of the prominent Ernst May, she was already divorced. She commuted every weekend to see her children, flying from Hamburg to Berlin Tempelhof (Dullin-Grund 2004).

1 A derogatory term in Germany used to describe a working mother who supposedly does not care enough and lets them in daycare facilities. Iris Dullin-Grund’s persona is also characterized by her representation in the media as an emancipated figure. Especially after winning the cultural centre competition in Neubrandenburg. Various media presented her to the large public. For example, Petra Lohmann analysed two movies about Iris Dullin-Grund produced during the same period from the GDR and the FRG (2018). The GDR state-run film studio shows that in a socialist state, a young woman architect can work and be successful, thus emphasising gender equality. Still, Petra Lohmann argues that the movie does not achieve a complete deconstruction of gender stereotypes. Iris Dullin-Grund is shown as an attractive, good-looking woman who knows how to dress in a maledominated industry which could be interpreted as the reason for her success and not her abilities (2018).

After the Fall of the Wall, Iris Dullin-Grund continued to work as an self-employed architect and recalls encountering a particular disdain towards architects from the GDR. The most recent notable design she planned was a sports hall in Lychen in 1995. From 1999 to 2008, she worked and lived in the south of France. Nowadays, Iris Dullin-Grund resides in Glienicke in Berlin (Dullin-Grund 2004).