Heroic 20th-century Modernism saw the private home as a place to first test out utopian theories - a place for free play and experimentation where new approaches could be put into action, on a small scale but no less radical. Here, where architecture and life are closely interwoven, Frank
Lloyd Wright, Gerrit Rietveld, Le Corbusier and Konstantin Melnikov found the suitable space to give their visionary concepts a plastic reality.
The house built by Fritz Barth for his own use in his home town of Fellbach places itself in an ironic, possibly melancholic distance from this kind of heroic pathos, but still has this tradition as its background. So it is considered by his builder as an experiment to determine the state of architecture at the start of the 21st century - not to apply whatever offers itself to expand the architectonic repertoire, but to find out what possibilities are still open to architecture and how far architecture still permits a concept of 'dwelling' in the sense the word was used by Heidegger.
The result is not a backward-looking homeliness, but a structure that, as a commitment to architecture in and of itself, stands his ground like few others in its time and place.
Sicherheitshinweis:
Edition Axel Menges
Esslinger Str. 24
70736 Fellbach
AxelMenges@aol.com