Felix von Courten

Felix von Courten (born May 15, 1877 in Munich ; † August 5, 1959 in Villars-sur-Ollon , Canton of Vaud , Switzerland ; full name Felix René Pius Joseph Graf von Courten ) was a German architect and illustrator .

family

Courten's father, Count Angelo von Courten , came from the Valais line of the originally Italian noble family and was born in Bologna as the son of a Florentine general . He married Irene von Klenze (1850–1916), a granddaughter of the Munich architect and royal Bavarian construction officer Leo von Klenze . Felix was born the third child of this marriage, with three more sons and three daughters. In 1894 the family was enrolled in the hereditary Bavarian count class, so that the title Count was also due to Felix von Courten.

Education, business and family formation

From 1888 until the end of the 7th grade in 1896, Felix von Courten attended the Maximiliansgymnasium in Munich , where the later painters Konrad von Miller and Max Köppen and the later actor Kurt Stieler were among his classmates. After passing the Abitur in a place that has not been handed down, he first did his military service and was promoted to lieutenant in the reserve . He then studied architecture - presumably at the Technical University of Munich - and was registered as an architect as early as 1905 with an office address in Munich's Adelheidstrasse. In 1924 he married Clara Rosa Jelke, née Bartholomay, from Chicago , a daughter of the Frankfurt-born beer brewer and entrepreneur Philipp Bartholomay, owner of the Bartholomay Brewing Company in Rochester (New York) and the Iroquois Brewing Company in Buffalo (New York) ) . The daughter Philippa was born in 1926 († 1946). Felix von Courten died at the age of 82 and was buried in Sierre in the Swiss canton of Valais.

Projects and artistic work

In 1905, Felix von Courten and the architect Otho Orlando Kurz took part in an architectural competition organized by the German Society for Christian Art for the church of St. Georg and the associated rectory in the Milbertshofen district of Munich . Her design submitted under the keyword “Ave Maria” received one of the first three prizes. After a re-planning by Kurz and his colleague Eduard Herbert, the foundation stone of the building was laid in 1909 . 1906 was published by Courtens "Draft of a church in the style of the old village churches, thought on a hill" . This was followed by the design of a "villa with a turret" for a private client and plans for further residential buildings.

Felix von Courten was a frequent guest of Jan Freiherr von Wendelstadt and his wife Julie, née Countess Degenfeld-Schonburg , at Neubeu Castle in the Inn Valley. In the still preserved guest books (volumes III and IV) of the lady of the castle you can find his visit entries with numerous watercolors and pen drawings by his hand, created between February 1900 and early 1906.

Archival material

• Registration documents (PMB) from Courten, Felix in the Munich City Archives.

literature

• Dressler's art manual , editions 1921 and 1930.
• Siegfried Weiß : Art career aspiration. Painter, graphic artist, sculptor. Former students of the Maximiliansgymnasium in Munich from 1849 to 1918. Allitera Verlag, Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-86906-475-8 , pp. 207–211. (Fig.)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Geneall entry.
2. ↑ Maximiliansgymnasium Munich, archive, register and annual reports 1888/89 to 1895/96.
3. ↑ 1916 promotion to captain of the reserve; No information is available about the deployment in the World War.
4. ^ A History of the City of Buffalo, It's Men and Institutions . 1908; Biographical Sketches of Leading Citizens . Buffalo, New York: Buffalo Evening News. 1908; John Devoy: Rochester and the Post Express. A history of the City of Rochester from the earliest times (1895), pp. 142-143.
5. ↑ Milbertshofen. St. George celebrates a double anniversary.
6. ↑ Architektonische Rundschau , year 1906, issue 1 (with illus. Floor plan; section with interior perspective; general view as colored watercolor, labeled: FASchuler) (Munich, city archive).
7. ↑ Guest books at Neubeu Castle.