SEIFERT A

GERMANY (see also List of Individuals)

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31.5.1890 Munich/D - 27.2.1972 Diessen/D

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Alwin Seifert graduated in 1913 from the Technical University of Munich TUM as an architect and continued there after having participated in World War I. In 1923 he founded his office for landscape gardening. He was a Lecturer at TUM for this branch from 1932 to 1944, and then from 1949 until retirement in 1955. In 1933 Seifert was appointed a national adviser for landscape engineering and there had a significant impact on the preservation of nature of the many structures completed by the government. He was awarded the Schumacher Prize in 1960 and the Great Cross of Merits from the Federal Republic of Germany in 1961.

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Seifert may be considered a founder of modern German landscape engineering. He sought the relation between structure and nature and thus proposed to reestablish its original state in terms of plantations and flora. He tried as much as possible to integrate all engineering structures into a given landscape. Of particular relevance were rivers and canals having been corrected in the 19th century, thereby looking for a straight uniform design instead of including elements of nature, such as curves, local enlargements and inclusion of morphological elements. Modern hydraulic structures in Germany thus received an additional impact that is currently widely accepted but was sometimes heavily neglected prior to World War II. Seifert will be remembered for his integration of landscape for ten weir sites of Mosel Canal initiated in 1957 and completed in 1965. According to a review, "a landscape engineer has successfully redesigned a complete river system in Germany". In the past decades environmental engineering has become a complementary subject to hydraulic engineering, and actually is an issue that has a significant impact on engineering designs. Seifert was at the forefront of these considerations and developments, and thus a distinguished individual in water sciences.

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_{Anonymous (1940). Alwin Seifert. Der Deutsche Baumeister 2(6): 28. P}

_{Fuchs, H. (1972). Nekrolog für Prof. Alwin Seifert. Wasserwirtschaft 62(6): 189-190. Grodau, X. (1972). Prof. Alwin Seifert. Wasser und Boden 24(9): 289. P}

_{Seifert, A. (1938). Naturnäherer Wasserbau. Deutsche Wasserwirtschaft 33(12): 361-366. Seifert, A. (1942). Im Zeitalter des Lebendigen: Natur - Heimat - Technik. Müller: Planegg. Seifert, A. (1962). Ein Leben für die Landschaft. Diedrichs: Düsseldorf.}

_{Seifert, A. (1966). Mensch und Landschaft im technischen Zeitalter. Oldenbourg: München.}