Cannstatter Straße 84, Fellbach

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.