Chair of Architecture: Dr. Mertins

Dr. Detlef Mertins, an architect, historian and critic known for his reinterpretations of modernism, was appointed chair of the department of architecture and professor of architecture in the School of Design effective July 1. Dr. Mertins practiced architecture and urban design for nine years with Baird/Sampson, Jones & Kirkland and on his own, and in 1996 he completed his doctorate at Princeton University with the dissertation, Transparencies Yet to Come: Sigfried Giedion and the Prehistory of Architectural Modernity.

Over the past several years, Dr. Mertins' research has focused on the architecture of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, with major essays published in the exhibition catalogues for Mies in Berlin (MoMA, 2001) and Mies in America (CCA/Whitney Museum of Art, 2001). He is currently preparing a monograph entitled, Mies van der Rohe: The Art of Transformation (Phaidon, 2004).

Dr. Mertins came to Penn from the University of Toronto, where he received his bachelor of architecture degree in 1980, and has taught in that faculty of architecture, landscape and design since 1991, and held a Canada Research Chair in Architecture since 2001.

He has also taught at Princeton, Columbia, Harvard, Rice and the Architectural Association, London and was a visiting scholar at the Canadian Centre for Architecture.

Dr. Mertins succeeds Dr. Richard Wesley, who served as head of the department for six years and will continue as chair of the undergraduate architecture program.