Residency in Börstingen - 7

The Haus Sommerfeld was designed by Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyers in 1920-22 in Berlin. This wooden house belongs to an expressionist strand of architecture at the time that later disappeared. It echoes Gothic architecture and its spaces are distinctive and humanist in tone, with space for the imagination.

The building is a sort of Gesamtkunstwerk: the sculptural beams of the house were made by Joost Schmidt, Josef Albers designed the stained glass windows while Marcel Breuer designed some of the furniture.

This type of experimental expressionist architecture later died out in the early modernist period, where the emphasis shifted to functional spaces.