Ernst L. Freud, Domestic Architect: Zuhause in Berlin, at Home in London

Abstract

Throughout his career Ernst L. Freud, the architect-son of Sigmund Freud, mostly worked as a domestic architect and interior designer. Psychoanalytical consulting rooms are the only other sustained area of his practice. This chapter understands Freud’s architectural œuvre as an attempt to create homes (Zuhause) for his clients, for his own family, and for the extended Freud family, which included professional and private spaces for colleagues of Sigmund Freud. Before 1933, the architect’s peripatetic life already posed questions about the where of one’s home and what, architecturally speaking, constitutes a home? Once in England, Freud occasionally designed new homes for former Berlin clients, who had also managed to escape to Great Britain, exiled psychoanalysts, and the larger Freud family, who all struggled with the practical consequences of being an émigré and had to cope with the loss of friends, homes, and ways of life. The exile experience made Freud’s architectural focus on the home even more pressing and relevant; a challenge to which the architect responded by inserting into his designs memories and allusions to German and Austrian modern architecture.