Ernst Neufert

Ernst Neufert (15 March 1900 – 23 February 1986) was a German architect who is known as an assistant of Walter Gropius, as a teacher and member of various standardization organizations, and especially for his essential handbook Architects' data.

Ernst Neufert was born in Freyburg an der Unstrut. At the age of 17, after five years of working as a bricklayer, Neufert entered the school of construction (Baugewerbeschule) in Weimar. His teacher recommended him to Walter Gropius in 1919 as one of his first students of the Bauhaus. He finished his studies in 1920, and together with the expressionist architect Paul Linder (1897-1968) embarked on a year-long study tour of Spain, where he sketched medieval churches. In Barcelona he met Antonio Gaudi, whose architecture made a deep impression on the young student. Neufert later became one of the first advocates of Gaudi in Germany. After 1921 he returned to the Bauhaus and became chief architect under Gropius in one of the most prominent architecture studios of the Weimar Republic.

In 1923 he met the painter Alice Spies-Neufert, a student of the Bauhaus masters Georg Muche and Paul Klee, and married her in 1924. They had four children (Peter, Christa, Ingrid and Ilas).

In 1925 Neufert worked in close collaboration with Gropius on the realization of the new Bauhaus buildings in Dessau and the completion of the masters' houses for Muche, Klee, and Wassily Kandinsky. In 1926 he returned to Weimar and became a teacher under Otto Bartning at the Bauhochschule (Building College), known as "the other Bauhaus". From 1928 to 1930 he realized various projects, such as the Mensa am Philosophenweg and the Abbeanum in Jena . In 1929 he built his private home in Gelmeroda, a village near Weimar (today the home of the Neufert Foundation and Neufert Box, a small museum with changing exhibitions). After closure of the Bauhochschule by the Nazis, he moved to Berlin and worked in a private school for art and architecture founded by Johannes Itten, which was forced to close as well in 1934.

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