Ernst L. Freud, Architect: The Case of the Modern Bourgeois Home

Volker M. Welter

tet 2011 · Space and Place Libri 5 · Berghahn Books

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Ernst L. Freud (1892–1970) was a son of Sigmund Freud and the father of painter Lucian Freud and the late Sir Clement Freud, politician and broadcaster. After his studies in Munich and Vienna, where he and his friend Richard Neutra attended Adolf Loos’s private Bauschule, Freud practiced in Berlin and, after 1933, in London. Even though his work focused on domestic architecture and interiors, Freud was possibly the first architect to design psychoanalytical consulting rooms—including the customary couches—a subject dealt with here for the first time. By interweaving an account of Freud’s professional and personal life in Vienna, Berlin, and London with a critical discussion of selected examples of his domestic architecture, interior designs, and psychoanalytic consulting rooms, the author offers a rich tapestry of Ernst L. Freud’s world. His clients constituted a “Who’s Who” of the Jewish and non-Jewish bourgeoisie in 1920s Berlin and later in London, among them the S. Fischer publisher family, Melanie Klein, Ernest Jones, the Spenders, and Julian Huxley. While moving within a social class known for its cultural and avant-garde activities, Freud refrained from spatial, formal, or technological experiments. Instead, he focused on creating modern homes for his bourgeois clients.

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Volker M. Welter is an architectural historian who has studied and worked in Germany, Scotland, and England. Currently he is Associate Professor in the Department of the History of Art & Architecture, University of California, Santa Barbara. His research interests include domestic architecture, modern and contemporary Western architecture, architectural philosophy and theory, and the debate about the modern city. He has been awarded a Senior Research Grant from the Getty, Los Angeles, a Senior Fellowship of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London/Yale University, and a visiting scholar fellowship at the Centre Canadien d’Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montréal. His publications include Biopolis-Patrick Geddes and the City of Life (MIT Press, 2002), and articles in academic journals, including Israel Studies and the Oxford Art Journal