19 Facts About Walter Rossow

Walter Rossow was a leading German Landscape architect and, during his later years, a university professor.

Walter Rossow was born in the Berlin inner-city district of Rixdorf.

In 1926, in defiance of the wishes of Richard Rossow, his father, Walter Rossow embarked on a two-year apprenticeship with the Berlin City Gardens Department.

Walter Rossow emerged from his time at the "LuFA" with a qualification as a "gardens technician".

Meanwhile, Walter Rossow tried to find a more permanent position as a horticultural architect, but failed on account of the Great Depression and its continuing unemployment crisis that had hit Europe after the 1929 Wall Street Crash.

Walter Rossow was classified as unfit for military service due to a lung disease, and was therefore not conscripted into the army.

Walter Rossow married Helga von Hammerstein-Equord on 7 June 1939.

Walter Rossow came from a family of minor but traditionally influential aristocrats: slightly unusually, her father's family were Protestants while her mother's family were Catholics: both Helga's parents came from army families.

The father-in-law whom Walter Rossow acquired through his marriage was Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord, before 1934 a close friend of President von Hindenburg and a career soldier with a distinguished military record on his own account.

Between 1945 and 1948 Walter Rossow was given charge of the department for open spaces in the American sector of Berlin.

Walter Rossow was closely involved from the outset, accepting an invitation to serve as deputy president under Heinrich Tessenow between 1949 and 1951.

In 1948, with most of the rubble cleared away and the slow rebuilding of the city underway, Walter Rossow began to receive freelance commissions for garden architecture projects.

The development later achieved the rare distinction of becoming part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site Between 1954 and 1957 Walter Rossow served as a member of the steering committee masterminding the "Internationale Bauausstellung".

Walter Rossow worked alongside fellow landscape gardener-architect Ernst Cramer, the architect Dieter Oesterlen and the sculptor Helmut Lander.

Walter Rossow held a number of visiting professorships in West Germany.

Walter Rossow retained the combined post till his retirement in 1975.

Walter Rossow went on to serve between 1976 and 1986 as Director of the Architecture Department at the Berlin Arts Academy.

Walter Rossow died at Berlin a few weeks short of what would otherwise have been his 82nd birthday.

Walter Rossow was a member of the Deutscher Werkbund in Berlin and, in 1961, one of the co-signatories of the strangely prescient Green Charter of Mainau.