KOCH, Alexander; [Fritz August BREUHAUS]. Das Haus Eines Kunstfreundes.

Designed by the Architect of the Hindenburg

KOCH, Alexander; [Fritz August BREUHAUS]. Das Haus Eines Kunstfreundes. Darmstadt: Verlagsanstalt Alexander Koch. 1926.

Folio. Publisher’s original decorative beige cloth, upper board decorated to a geometric design, spine and upper board lettered in brown; pp. [24], 15, [1], 146 pp. photographic plates (of which some in colour), [6], additional photographic plate facing Koch’s introduction; foxing to first few leaves; else a very good copy; Christmas gift inscription (‘Weihnachten 1939 …’) to half-title, ink stamp of the State Scientific Library of Zvolen, Slovakia to title (not before 1954).

First edition, lavishly illustrated, of this work on the house built by the architect Fritz August Breuhaus (1883–1960) for editor and publisher Alexander Koch (1860–1939), a leading figure in the decorative arts.

This monograph takes its name from Koch’s 1901 architectural competition for the design of a Haus eines Kunstfreundes (House for an Art Lover), advertised in his prominent monthly design and architectural magazine Zeitschrift für Innendekoration. It is for this competition that Charles Rennie Mackintosh submitted incomplete plans for a magnificent Art Nouveau building, later reconstructed in Glasgow from Mackintosh’s designs between 1989 and 1996; he received a prize despite having been officially disqualified due to unfinished drawings.

‘Koch’s journals promoted and were supported by the avant-garde fine and decorative art and architecture movement at the Darmstadt Artists’ Colony on the Mathildenhöhe, established in 1898 under the patronage of Duke Ernst Ludwig of Hessen. It is thought that the Mathildenhöhe may have been the site envisaged for the House for an Art Lover, should a design ever have been selected for construction, and that behind the competition’s notional client was Koch himself, revealed in the provision in the competition conditions of bedrooms and living rooms for specific family members on the first floor of the house’ (University of Glasgow, online).

Das Haus eines Kunstfreundes comprises an introduction by Koch celebrating the ‘creative joy’ present in all features of his new home and how it fits with the artwork and crafts he had collected over the course of decades; there follows a piece on the house by the visual artist Kuno von Hardenberg, founder of the Hessian bibliophiles’ society in 1918 (Gesellschaft Hessischer Bücherfreunde), and an afterword by Breuhaus, the architect. Koch’s house in Darmstadt was destroyed in 1944.

Breuhaus went on to become a major interwar architect, his most famous work being the interior passenger spaces of the zeppelin Hindenburg, the largest airship ever built. Launched as a Nazi propaganda vessel in March 1936, it notoriously burst into flames on 6 May 1937 in an attempt to land at Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey in what is now known as the Hindenburg Disaster.

SKU: 2090468