Georg de Lalande

Georg Karl Adolph Guido de Lalande was a German architect who lived and worked in Imperial Japan from 1903 until his death, and whose Jugendstil-influenced buildings stand among the most significant works of Western architecture produced in East Asia in the late Meiji period. Born in Hirschberg in Prussian Silesia as the eldest son of the building contractor Eugen de Lalande, he studied architecture at the Königlich Technische Hochschule Charlottenburg, graduating in 1894, and worked in the municipal building administrations of Breslau and Glogau and in architectural offices in Vienna, Berlin, Shanghai and Tianjin before being invited to Yokohama in 1903 by the German architect Richard Seel, whose practice he took over the same year. From offices in Yokohama and later Tokyo he designed European-style commercial, banking and residential buildings in Kobe, Osaka and the treaty ports, including the 1904 Thomas Residence in Kobe, the 1907 administrative building of the German trading firm C. Illies & Co. in Yokohama, and the 1914 Tokyo headquarters of the Takata Trading Company. He was appointed Königlich-Preußischer Baurat, and in 1912 was commissioned by the Government-General of Chōsen to design what would become his two best-known buildings on the Korean peninsula, the Chosun Hotel in Seoul, opened in October 1914, and the monumental Government-General Building in Gyeongbokgung palace, the design of which was completed after his death by Nomura Ichirō and Kunieda Hiroshi and the building dedicated in 1926. De Lalande died of pneumonia in Tokyo on 5 August 1914 at the age of 41, before either of the Seoul commissions was completed; his own residence in Shinanomachi, Shinjuku, where he had lived from 1910, is preserved at the Edo-Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum.