Distributors Brockhaus Commission Kreidlerstrasse 9 D-70806 Kornwestheim Germany Heroic 20th-century Modernism saw the private home as a place to first test out utopian theories - a place for free play and experimentation where new approaches could be put into action, on a small scale but no less radical. Here, where architecture and life are most closely interwoven, Frank Lloyd Wright, Gerrit Rietveld, Le Corbusier and even Konstantin Melnikov found the suitable space to give their visionary concepts a plastic reality. The house built by the architect Fritz Barth for his own use in his home town of Fellbach places itself in an ironic, possibly melancholic distance from this kind of heroic pathos, but still has this tradition as its background.