Finding "Ryder's House" (named after the customer - the Englishwoman Ada Ryder) was helped by researching the correspondence between Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and his friend, architect and interior designer Gerhard Severen. Architectural history professor Dietrich Neumann, who teaches at Brown University in Rhode Island (USA), was collecting material for a scientific article on a completely different topic in the archives of the New York Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), and there he came across these letters. They spoke in great detail about a joint project being implemented in Wiesbaden. At that time, Severen lived there, and Mies van der Rohe was in Berlin and was actively engaged in his project of a high-rise building on Friedrich Strasse (therefore, he could not give a lot of energy to Villa Ryder, and he needed the help of a friend).
During construction, Mies van der Rohe was only gaining prominence, so his project did not attract much public attention. And during the Second World War, all construction documents were lost, and the house “lost” its author. So Neumann had to turn to Severen's grandson to help identify that 1923 project. In the attic of the house of the latter, it was possible to find photographs of the building, and from them it was determined that Mies van der Rohe was the architect of an inconspicuous house at 20 Schönen Auszicht.
Germany was going through a severe economic crisis after the First World War, and construction was possible only because of the English currency of the foreign customer. But her funds ran out, and the villa stood until 1928 in an unfinished state, until it was bought and completed by the merchant August Zobus. Since then, it has been rebuilt several times, including, in the 1980s, the flat roof was replaced with a four-pitched one.
The two-storey rectangular villa, with a protruding roof base and windows shifted to the corners of the building, belongs to the architect's transitional works: it can be considered one of his first buildings, in which he departed from neoclassicism, turning to principles that would later develop into modernism.
It stands among the area of traditional buildings, and the fact that such a bold project at that time was allowed by the authorities to be implemented indicates that during the period of unprecedented inflation and economic decline, any construction was considered a blessing.
