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Troost, Paul Ludwig
(b Elbersfeld, 17 Aug 1879; d Munich, 21 Jan 1934). German architect and interior designer. He studied under Ludwig Hoffmann at the Technische Hochschule in Darmstadt. After 1901 he worked in Giessen until becoming head of the Munich office of Martin Dülfer. Most of his works in this period were designs for the remodelling of the interiors of private houses. His first work was the interior (c. 1905) of the house of the painter Benno Becker at Maria-Theresien Strasse in Bogenhausen, Munich, where Troost designed the complete interior. In 1906, with Carl Jäger and August Biebricher, he won second prize in the competition for the Deutsches Museum, Munich, with a geometrical Biedermeier design. The house that he designed for Rudolf Chillingsworth (1910; destr.) at Prinzregentenufer 24, Nuremberg, was notable for its simple but elegant exterior and the elaborated and colourful, slightly historicist interiors. In 1897 Troost had been one of the founders of the Vereinigte Werkstätten für Kunst im Handwerk, Munich, modelled on English Arts and Crafts precedents. He worked closely with the workshops that executed many of his furniture designs. From 1910 Troost was the principal interior designer of the shipbuilders Lloyds in Germany. He designed the interiors of such luxury liners as the Europa, and they were executed by the Vereinigte Werkstätten. He was also responsible for the interiors of Haus Heineken (1917) in Bremen and the Jacobihalle (1925) in Bremen. As an architect he made his reputation in 1931 with the remodelling of the former Palais Barlow, Munich, into the Brown House. Troost had been a National Socialist since 1924 and as a close friend of Adolf Hitler was promoted by him as the first architect of the Reich. Troost’s work after 1931 was a celebration of the Nazi party and its ideology. In 1933 work began on the Haus der Deutschen Kunst in Munich (for illustration see NAZISM), which was to be a showpiece of Nazi painting and sculpture, and which became an icon of Nazi architecture. Its construction and eventual completion were accompanied by a huge publicity and various ceremonies and festivities, where it was always described as ‘Hitler’s work’. The large classical colonnade at the front was reminiscent of the Greco-Prussian austerity of Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Altes Museum in Berlin. Although rooted in early 20th-century neo-classicism, Troost was not oblivious to modernist developments, as can be seen from the almost cubist forms and the flat unornamented surfaces of the museum. Troost’s remodelling of the Königsplatz, Munich, into a centre for a cult of the dead was begun in 1934. His two Temples of Honour (destr. 1947), commemorating the fallen of the abortive putsch in 1923, were large open classical pavilions, austere and almost barren. Troost did not live to see the completion of these two works. His unfinished works were completed by his wife Gerdy, an interior designer, who remained a close confidante of Hitler and who published Das Bauen im Neuen Reich (Bayreuth, 1938–43) in two volumes.
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