Museum Künstlerkolonie

The Museum Künstlerkolonie sits on the crest of Mathildenhöhe in the Ernst Ludwig House, the studio building Joseph Maria Olbrich designed for the Artists' Colony and completed in 1901. Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig of Hesse founded the colony in 1899 and gathered Olbrich, Peter Behrens, Hans Christiansen, Paul Bürck, Rudolf Bosselt, Patriz Huber and others to work art, craft and daily life into a single design. The entrance is flanked by Ludwig Habich's figures Kraft and Schönheit, strength and beauty, and the rooms behind them follow the colony's exhibitions of 1901, 1904, 1908 and 1914. Inside are model rooms and complete ensembles in which chairs, lamps, wallpaper, tableware, jewellery and typography all speak the same language. Behrens works in strict forms that point ahead to modernism, while Olbrich keeps the flowing line of Jugendstil, and the posters and graphics from the exhibitions show a new idea of what publicity could look like. The displays make the practical side clear as well: prototypes were developed here for factory production, and the notion of a consistent visual identity took hold long before anyone called it branding. The museum also places the rest of the hill, the Wedding Tower and the Exhibition Hall next door, inside the European networks of the period. Since 2021 the whole ensemble has been UNESCO World Heritage under the name Mathildenhöhe Darmstadt.

Peter Behrens rehearsed here what he later did for AEG. Before he became the first designer to give a company a single visual identity, he built a house on this hill and designed everything in it, furniture, tableware and graphics included, as one piece of work. The colony's own run ended abruptly: weeks after the 1914 exhibition opened, the First World War began.