Imaginary Practice: Ideology and Form in the Unlived-in House of Peter Behrens on the Mathildenhöhe in Darmstadt

Abstract

This article focuses on Peter Behrens’s first building, the house on the Mathildenhöhe in Darmstadt (1901), which was never occupied by the Behrens family. It took on a more disinterested role as a showcase of progressive design, and was praised as such by the historian Tilmann Buddensieg. Deicher sets this position against a Marxist reading, which interprets the relation between Behrens and his aristocratic patron as “feudal,” and sees the Behrens work as a new construct of domination rather than as the harbinger of a new and democratic design practice for the twentieth century.

KEYWORDS:

• aesthetics
• design
• architecture
• Hegel
• Nietzsche
• Albert Speer
• Peter Behrens
• Tilmann Buddensieg
• Marxist critique
• praxis
• Darmstadt Artists’ Colony