Even though he had made a name for himself in
the 1930s with his Berlin single-family homes, Eiermann
later on found it difficult to accept commissions
for this building type when, during the period
of the »economic miracle«, he was approached
by numerous people interested to get a design by
him. Only the Hardenberg House in Baden-Baden
satisfied him, but above all his own house, which
he also built in Baden-Baden in 1959-62.
This house in particular, built after his success
with the German Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels
World's Fair and at the same time as the Berlin
Gedächtniskirche and the German Embassy in
Washington, was to become one of the main
works of his post-war creative output. As a builder
in his own right, he was able here to uncompromisingly
realize his ideal image of living for himself
and his family in architecture.
Eiermann himself tried to explain the house,
which only crystallized in a longer planning genesis,
primarily from the functional side: main house and
annexe, the latter for garage, studio and guest
apartment, the elongated main house in bulkhead
construction under a flat sloping roof. In fact, the
house is convincing in its sophisticated functionality.
But it does not stop there. The complex group
of buildings on a steep hillside site with its stagelike
terraces, the staged interplay of views from the
inside to the outside and, at night, also from the
outside to the inside, is an extremely artificial structure
even from its basic disposition. The Eiermanntypical
façade, with its exterior walkway and white
linkage as well as the corrugated Eternit roof
provide a ponderous contrast. Together with echoes
of traditional Japanese houses and gardens,
but above all with the adoption of motifs from sailing-
ship building give this house an unmistakable
character. Since 2020, the house has new owners,
on whose behalf the Stuttgart architects »no
w here« (Henning Volpp and Karl Amann) have undertaken
an extremely careful renovation.
Eiermann's estate, which is kept at saai, the Archive
for Architecture and Engineering at the Karlsruhe
Institute of Technology (KIT), provided the historical
drawings and photographs for this volume.
The photographs were primarily taken by Horstheinz
Neuendorff, an architectural photographer
who was on friendly terms with the architect. Since
the early sixties, Neuendorff had been commissioned
by Eiermann to capture his new buildings
in black-and-white photographs of a high artistic
standard. Color photographs of the current condition
were newly made by Olaf Becker from Munich.
Gerhard Kabierske is an art historian specializing
in architectural history and monument preservation.
1993-2020 he worked at the saai in
Karlsruhe where he was responsible, among other
things, for the Eiermann archive.