How to build a housewe ask ourselves sometimes; The house of our dreams, a home formed with our own hands, literally. At last an expert in the field is willing to guide us in this challenge.
¿How to build a house? Anyone can do it. Walter Segal had tried himself. Its mission: demystify architecture. It would become a counterculture icon, largely forgotten by the great historiography and venerated by its spiritual descendants. Walter Segal was a modest visionary who never worried about his own name (although his most famous legacies still take him today, honor that self -construction have granted him posthumously). Until his sudden death in 1985, he worked as a single -person company; I knew that «it was not the path that leads to wealth or prominence.»
Walter Segal, pioneer of the self -construction movement
Born in a family of artists in Berlin in 1907 (his father was the Romanian painter Arthur Aron Segal), Walter Segal grew in the heart of European modernism. He spent part of his childhood near the illustrious commune of Swiss artists Monte Verità, among anarchic spiritualists, naked theosophers and avant -garde artists gathered in the early twentieth century. Hans Arp, Kurt Schwitters and Paul Klee were among family friends and formed the adolescent along with a healthy skepticism towards any type of dogmatism, which always faced with more funny ingenuity than frontal rejection. Rejected Gropius's offer to go to the Bauhausand he knew how to elegive with elegance Mendelsohn's invitation to his Palestine office so that he would not even fall on the table. Segal was an unconditional individualist who always distrusted the great movements, and his modernism was deeply social. He would find his destination in England, after scales in Berlin, Mallorca and Cairo.