Sep Ruf

Sep Ruf (full name Franz Joseph Ruf; 9 March 1908, in Munich – 29 July 1982, in Munich) was a German architect and designer strongly associated with the Bauhaus group.

He was one of the representatives of modern architecture in Germany after World War II.

His elegant buildings received high credits in Germany and Europe and his German pavilion of the Expo 58 in Brussels, built together with Egon Eiermann, achieved worldwide recognition.

He had a brother Franz Ruf born 1909.

His first years at school he spent in a primary school in Munich.

He was a Roman Catholic and went to the boy scouts, where he met friends, he had for his lifetime: Golo Mann, the son of the famous German writer and Nobel laureate in literature Thomas Mann and the later physicist and Nobel Prize laureate Werner Heisenberg.

Until his years of study he went to the Luitpold-Oberrealschule and he loved skiing and climbing in the mountains.

During this time he met his later fiancée, Aloisia Ruf, née Mayer, born in Munich, 2 April 1910, a daughter of a factory owner.

He studied architecture and city planning at the Technical University Munich from 1926 until 1931.

Then he opened his own bureau.

One year later his brother spent a year in his bureau before he opened his own.

Ruf began to build houses for doctors, actors and manufacturers and they loved his light and bright buildings.

In 1933, when he was 23 years old, he built a flat-roof house for Karl Schwend in Munich and was cautioned from the new authorities, because from 1933 on the building of a flat-roof house was forbidden.

He continued building houses and now he had to build them with pitched roofs, but the interior did not change and was still bright and had wide rooms and large windows.

From 1934 to 1936, one year before his death, Junkers had allowed the 26-year-old architect to build an estate for his workers in Grünwald, Bavaria.

Hugo Junkers, who had lost nearly all of his inventions and his factory in Dessau to the new authorities and now lived near Munich under surveillance, now did research for metal-housing.

From 1936-1938 he was ordered to build parts of the Werdenfels and the Kemmel barracks in Murnau, after the war they were used by the US army and German troops.

As soon as possible he went back to the building of private houses.

They married 1938, built a home in Gmund am Tegernsee and had two children.

His bureau was in Munich.

Ruf loved to travel and he visited Austria, Italy, Greece, France, Belgium, Switzerland, the United States and Norway.

In 1939 Ruf had to go to war.

From 1940 to 1942 he was allowed to stay at home because he worked as an independent architect with the family of Hugo Junkers.

In 1942 Ruf had to go to the Russian front and after the war had ended, he went back to Germany by foot and directly began his work of rebuilding Germany with the Church Christkönig in Munich.

One of his first works were buildings for the HICOG (High Commissioner of Germany), the Allied High Commission at the palace Deichmannsaue in Bad-Godesberg/Bonn together with the architects Otto Apel, Rudolf Letocha, Rohrer and Herdt.

From 1949 till 1951 he built the Bayerische Staatsbank in Nuremberg an atrium-building with a large glass-ceiling.

The tower-building of the HICOG went to be the Embassy of the United States in Bonn from 1955 until 1999.

After the Embassy moved to Berlin the two parts became two ministries.

They also built the residential estates of Plittersdorf, Tannenbusch and Muffendorf, where the German and American staff lived.

Every estate had about 400 houses, wide streets and an apartment tower in the middle.

Ruf made the development plan.

He attended the Interbau 1957 in Berlin-Hansaviertel and was one of the three architects who had the top secret order to create the governmental buildings in the new capital city of the Federal Republic of Germany, Bonn.

His best known building was the residence for the Federal Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, built for Ludwig Erhard, the so-called Chancellor's Bungalow.

His father was Josef Ruf and his mother was Wilhelmine Mina Ruf (née Scharrer).

The family of his father came from Dinkelsbühl and his mother's family lived in Weißenburg in Bayern, both in middle Franconia.

1969 he bought a winery in Italy and renovated the house.

He became friend with many artists like Marino Marini and Bruno Pulga and had guests in Italy such as Henry Moore.

He also kept in touch with Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Richard Neutra and Romano Guardini.

He is called to be the German architect, who realized the ideas of the Bauhaus most consequent.

In 1982 he died in Munich and was buried at the mountain cemetery of Gmund am Tegernsee.