Bernhard Hans Henry Scharoun (20 September 1893 – 25 November 1972) was a German architect best known for designing the Berliner Philharmonie (home to the Berlin Philharmonic) and the Schminke House in Löbau, Saxony. He was an important exponent of organic and expressionist architecture. Life 1893 to 1924 Scharoun was born in Bremen. After passing his Abitur in Bremerhaven in 1912, Scharoun studied architecture at the Technical University of Berlin until 1914 (at the time called Königliche Technische Hochschule, the Royal Technical University of Berlin), but he did not complete his studies. He had already shown an interest in architecture during his school years. At the age of 16 he drafted his first designs, and at 18 he entered for the first time an architectural competition for the modernisation of a church in Bremerhaven. In 1914 he volunteered to serve in the First World War. Paul Kruchen, his mentor from his time in Berlin, had asked him to assist in a reconstruction program for East Prussia. In 1919, after the war, Scharoun assumed responsibility for its office as a freelance architect in Breslau (Wrocław). There and in Insterburg (Chernyakhovsk), he realised numerous projects and organised art exhibitions, such as the first exhibition of the expressionist group of artists, Die Brücke, in East Prussia. 1925 to 1932 He received a professorship at the Staatliche Akademie für Kunst und Kunstgewerbe Breslau (Breslau Academy for Arts and Crafts) where he taught until its closure in 1932. In 1919 he had joined Bruno Taut's expressionist architects group the Glass Chain. In 1926 he entered the architects association Der Ring. In 1927 Scharoun built a house in the Stuttgart Weissenhof Estate. He had responsibility at the end of the twenties for the development plan of a large housing estate, Großsiedlung Siemensstadt, in Berlin. Hugo Häring's theory of the new building inspired Scharoun in a new architectural direction that departed from rationalism and from preformulated schemata, in order to develop buildings starting in each case from a unique functional character. The organization of social living space played a central role. 1933 to 1945 During the Nazi era he remained in Germany, whilst many of his friends and colleagues from the Glass Chain or Der Ring went abroad. In this time he only built a few family houses, one of which is the remarkable Schminke house (publicly accessible) in the city of Löbau in Saxony (1933). Subsequent