Ryder House

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Ryder House in Wiesbaden

House Ryder is a single-family house in Wiesbaden , the construction of which was planned by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in 1923 and executed by his friend and colleague Gerhard Severain (1878-1959). House Ryder is Mies van der Rohe's first building in a new, modern design language, the so-called rational international style .

history

As a result of the inflation after the First World War , foreign currencies in Germany experienced enormous solvency power, which led the Englishwoman Ada Ryder in 1923 to let Mies' childhood friend, the architect Gerhard Severain, who had lived in Wiesbaden since 1921, build a single-family house as an investment property . The house should be for a family with two to three children and a domestic worker. A building plot was found in the street "Schöne Aussicht", a villa area above the Wiesbaden spa park .

Mies himself was living in Berlin at the time when Severain asked him to help him plan the Ryder House. A detailed correspondence documented in the Mies van der Rohe archive of the Museum of Modern Art in New York shows that Mies actually provided the plans for the house while Severain was entrusted with the site management. The construction costs were estimated by Mies at 50 million marks . The building application was submitted on May 11, 1923. Mies planned his first house here with a slightly sloping flat roof. The fact that this was approved in Wiesbaden in the middle of a residential area characterized by historicism was probably a result of the inflationary period, in which everyone was grateful for any construction activity. In the period to come, Severain Mies had to keep pushing for detailed drawings to be supplied for the building, some of which were then also carried out by Mies' employee Carl Gottfried.

In September 1923 Ada Ryder got increasingly into financial difficulties so that an attempt was made to take out a mortgage in order to be able to pay the construction costs. Another problem turned out to be the conversion to the Rentenmark in November 1923, as a result of which foreign money lost its solvency. In January 1924, Severain asked Ada Ryder to first pay the remaining sum, 2551 Rentenmarks, for the house under construction, and then pay it in full. Ada Ryder refused to pay, citing construction errors and a lack of experience on the part of Severain. In order to avoid a legal dispute, Mies recommended waiving the remaining amount.

In 1925 and 1926 the house was listed as uninhabited in the address book and finally in 1927 Ada Ryder sold it to the food manufacturer August Zobus, who was named as the owner of the house from 1928 onwards.

description

House Ryder was planned and built as a two-storey, plastered cube with a flat sloping roof. The windows on the first floor were moved to the corners. The almost square floor plan of the house is strongly based on Mies' first work from 1907, the Riehl House in Neubabelsberg, which was still designed in a bourgeois country house style: In the center of the ground floor there is a living room with four open rooms (salon / library, dining area, study and closed veranda). The stairwell starting from the living hall was initially planned to be open, but at Ada Ryder's request it had to be separated from the living hall so that the domestic workers could get up through the back door without disturbing them. The upper floor has four rooms and a bathroom. Some of the major structural changes that the house has undergone date from the 1960s; the hipped roof was added in the 1980s.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ www.designklassiker.com - accessed December 28, 2013
  2. ↑ The Case of the Missing Mies ( Memento March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Emily Gold Boutilier, Brown Alumni Magazine 2006

Web links

Commons : House Ryder  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files


Coordinates: 50 ° 5 ′ 15.9 ″  N , 8 ° 14 ′ 46.6 ″  E