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Klein, Alexander
(b Odessa, 17 June 1879; d New York, 15 Nov 1961). Russian architect and urban planner, also active in Germany and Israel. He graduated in architecture (1904) from the Institute of Technology, St Petersburg, and soon afterwards won a competition to build the city’s new Peter the Great Hospital (1908–16; with Lev Il’in and A. V. Rozenberg), which he planned as a series of separate pavilions. During the next decade he designed factory buildings, workers’ and civil servants’ housing and clubhouses, all in an opulent, almost ostentatious neo-classical style. He also undertook study tours of Italy and Western Europe in 1906, 1910 and 1914 and in 1917 he moved to Kislovodsk, a fashionable resort in the Caucasus, where he won a competition for an urban expansion scheme. In 1921 he moved to Berlin for political reasons. There he came into contact with the avant-garde Neues Bauen movement; while his first buildings in Berlin reveal traces of neo-classicism, he began to adopt a scientific approach, undertaking systematic, mathematical analyses of ground-plans, which he published in 1927. This functional approach was used in the design of residential developments in Berlin, including those at Wilmersdorf (1927) and Zehlendorf (1928–9). His largest commission in Germany was a 1000-unit housing estate (1928) at Bad Dürrenburg, near Leipzig. In 1933, when Hitler came to power, Klein left Germany and moved to France and then to Palestine (1935), where he became a professor at the Technion, Haifa (1935), and founded a research institute for urban planning and housing (1943), pursuing the research he had begun in Germany. He also worked on several building projects, including housing estates at Tiberias (1928–47) and Kiriat Yam, Haifa (1938–50); the garden city of Kiriat Bialik (1934); the urban plan for Tivon (1940–50); and the campus of Haifa University (1953). A house he designed for the Hansaviertel district of Berlin as part of the Interbau Exhibition (1957) was never executed. Klein remained active in professional and academic circles in Israel, as he had in Germany, until he moved to New York in 1960, a year before his death.
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