HOUSE AND GARDEN 
EBRUARY, 1912 
the slavish adherence to historical ideals in 
art, the members of the new school adopt 
only those things of other times and other 
schools which they deem applicable to mod¬ 
ern needs and conditions. Like the present- 
day musicians and novelists, they, too, be¬ 
lieve in expressing their own age before 
' trying to interpret another for which they 
have only an imperfect understanding and 
sympathy. To put a modern man in 
sombre, straight-lined clothes and close- 
clipped hair into a Rococo house they 
would consider, for example, as a prepos¬ 
terous incongruity, and to house a suffra¬ 
gette in an Empire office, an unpardonable 
, breach of good taste. 
i “Art for art’s sake’’ has no value here. 
Art must be utilitarian. Riemerschmid is 
known as the first man who built a house . 
from the inside out; that is, with an idea of 
utilizing every inch of space to the best 
advantage and giving the first thought to 
the details of the interior arrangement. If 
I every detail fits the use to which it is to be 
'put, he contends, and each component part 
'is made in reference to every other part, 
then the whole cannot help but be a perfect, 
lartistic whole. 
I The new houses are modifications of the 
peasant house with the red roof, the chief 
characteristic of the European landscape. 
I It is the simplest house known, which has 
janswered the demands made upon it as a 
[fit dwelling place for century after century. 
The Hellerau houses are made of concrete 
A bedroom in gray and white. The furniture is gray ash in natural 
finish. Color is injected in the upholstery and lighting fixtures 
reception room in the Riemerschmid house showing the radiator 
curtain which is in vogue in Germany. This consists of brass plates 
held together by tiny chains; the radiator behind is unfinished 
without wooden trimmings unless the lumber is used in the 
actual construction; the roofs are sloping and of slate. No mat¬ 
ter how the house may be situated in respect to the street or 
the road, the most important rooms, such as the dining-room, 
the sitting-room and the bedrooms, on the upper floors, are 
given the sunny, southern exposure and the pantry, store-rooms 
and baths, the north and the west. When the garden lies at 
the back of the house, the “best side” faces it, while the more 
uninteresting rooms are left to greet the passersby, the idea 
being that the family cannot get the full enjoyment of the gar¬ 
den which they ought to have, when it lies beyond the kitchen 
and the servant quarters. The new German houses might not 
meet with the full approval of Americans because they haven't 
enough piazza, but the German, so long as he has his Balkan, 
where he can take his breakfast and supper and sip his after¬ 
noon coffee, is fully content. 
Another objection which the American housewife might make 
