(b Hörde, 4 May 1874; d Interlaken, 1949). German architect and sculptor. As a youth he worked as a stonecutter. In 1897 he enrolled as a sculpture student in the Kunstakademie, Düsseldorf. In 1900 he went to Paris and stayed there for seven years. He was initially influenced by the work of Rodin but later looked to archaic Greek sculpture. In 1905 he participated in the first Salon d’Automne and in 1907 he returned to Germany. He became a member of the artists’ colony in Darmstadt in 1911. The colony transformed the Mathildenhöhe, a ducal estate, into a display of Art Nouveau architecture and design. His contribution was a set of sculptures (1912–14) in the grove of plane trees planted in the park’s main terrace, which stood in front of the Wedding Tower and Exhibition Hall, built by Joseph Maria Olbrich in 1908. The sculptures include a fountain decorated with four reliefs entitled Sleep, Resurrection, Life and Spring. At the end of the terrace his sculpture of a dying mother and her child, a classically inspired grouping, looks back at the tower. Elsewhere in the grove, friezes of standing and crouching nude youths hint at the beginning of his appreciation of German Expressionism, the movement with which most of his architecture is associated. Their self-consciously awkward forms suit their folkloric themes.