In 1926, Wachsmann moved to Lower Silesia, where Poelzig helped him to obtain a job at Christoph and Unmack, the largest European manufacturer of timber houses at that time. Recognizing the potential of industrial manufacturing processes and mass production, Wachsmann was in his element and soon rose to become chief architect of the company. He built schools, hospitals, offices and pavilions using standardized elements, and he was particularly proud of a hotel he developed for a Dutch oil concern in Curaçao. The entire construction elements, including the fittings, were prefabricated in the factory, shipped abroad and assembled on site.
In 1929, he obtained the commission to build a summer house for Albert Einstein, with which the client was extremely satisfied. Indeed, it was Einstein’s recognition of these services that saved the architect’s life in 1941, when the former urged the US president to help Wachsmann flee German-occupied France and emigrate to America.
Shortly after his arrival in that country, Wachsmann – together with Walter Gropius – founded the General Panel Corporation, with a factory in which elements for the General Panel House were manufactured in an almost fully automated process. The house was based on a unit construction system that allowed a wide range of variations with a minimum number of components. The system was enormously successful in the post-war construction period and made Wachsmann a millionaire.
In 1949, he accepted an invitation to teach at the Institute of Design in Chicago. From there, he went on to become a professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago and to establish the Graduate Program in Industrialization at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Finally, in Chicago, he collaborated with Mies van der Rohe, with whom he spent three years developing a tubular steel building system in which his previous experience in prefabricated serial construction came to fruition.
His outstanding contributions in this field include the Mobilar Structures and the so-called “Wachsmann node”, with which as many as 20 stave-like elements can be connected at a single point, facilitating a wide range of space-frame forms. Among the huge load-bearing structures that were realized with this system were hangars for the US Air Force, halls and large cantilevered roofs.
Wachsmann continued to teach and research up to his death in 1980, and his writings are still of relevance to architects today.
