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. This is not least

because its complexity its multilayered, opulent

fabric of allusions, references and quotations, only

reveals itself gradually and with close observation

behind a simple appearance targeted on the immediacy

of experience and architecture. Despite

the somewhat polemical intentions of its builder

and inhabitant, the house is not experienced as

an ideological manifesto in bricks and mortar. It is

devoted to the immediate experience of 'dwelling'

in so far as it does not allow, as Thomas Hettche

writes in his essay, any distinction between surface

and function, life and experience.

Fritz Barth, born in 1958, studied architecture

in Stuttgart. He gained his PhD at the ETH Zürich

with a study of the Villa Lante (Die Villa Lante in

Bagnaia, Edition Axel Menges, 2001). He has also

written a monograph on the late-Baroque Bohemian

architect Johann Santini Aichel (Santini,

2004). Thomas Hettche, born in 1964, is a freelance

writer living in Frankfurt. His most recent

publication was the novel Die Liebe der Väter,

published in autumn 2010. Amber Sayah, born

in 1953 in Teheran, is one of the editors of the

arts pages of the Stuttgarter Zeitung and the author

of the book Architektur in Vorarlberg. Bauten

seit 2000. Until his retirement Gerhart Schröder,

born in 1934, was professor of Romance studies

at Stuttgart University. His publications include the

work Logos und List. Zur Entwicklung der Ästhetik

in der frühen Neuzeit.