Lotte Stam-Beese

Lotte Stam-Beese was born as Charlotte Ida Anna Beese in Rokitki (then German Silesia, now Poland) on 28 January 1903. Beginning in 1921, she briefly studied at the Wrocław State Academy of Arts and Crafts and then worked in the offices of the Deutsche Werkstätten interior construction company in Dresden-Hellerau. That is where she learned the fundamentals of weaving. In 1926 she went to the Bauhaus Dessau. In addition to training in the weaving workshop, she began to take photographs. One of her pictures from 1928 was featured as a cover image on the Bauhaus magazine. That same year, Stam-Beese transferred to become the first woman in the department of architecture and interior design. It was during this period that she began having an affair with the director of the Bauhaus, the married Hannes Meyer. This led to her having to leave the school without graduating in 1929. She probably also stopped taking photographs at that time. When Hannes Meyer went to Moscow in 1930, she followed him there. One year later, she had their child, whom she raised by herself. A devoted communist, she additionally worked as an architect in various places within the Soviet Union. In Hungary in 1932, she met the architect and former Bauhaus teacher Mart Stam, whom she later married. In 1934 they immigrated to the Netherlands and opened an architectural office together; they divorced in 1943. Stam-Beese successfully completed her studies at the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture in 1944. After the Second World War, she made a substantial contribution to the rebuilding of Rotterdam as an architect. She died in Krimpen aan den IJssel on 18 November 1988.