1. Adam Gottlieb Hermann Muthesius, known as Hermann Muthesius, was a German architect, author and diplomat, perhaps best known for promoting many of the ideas of the English Arts and Crafts movement within Germany and for his subsequent influence on early pioneers of German architectural modernism such as the Bauhaus.
Hermann Muthesius returned to Germany in 1891 where he worked for the Prussian Ministry of Public Works, studied for a time in Italy on stipend, and served for almost two years as the editor of a pair of official construction journals.
In 1896, Hermann Muthesius was offered a position as cultural attache at the German Embassy in London.
Hermann Muthesius married Anna Trippenbach who was a fashion designer and singer.
Hermann Muthesius focused the next six years investigating residential architecture and domestic lifestyle and design, ending with a three-volume report published in 1904 and 1905 as, his most famous work.
Hermann Muthesius visited Glasgow to investigate the innovative work of the Glasgow School exemplified by the designs of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and wrote about houses in Birmingham by William Bidlake.
Hermann Muthesius's wife wrote about Anti-fashion and how she felt that women were being exploited by German clothing industrialists.
Hermann Muthesius returned to Germany in 1904 and established himself as an architect in private practice, while retaining a role as an official advisor to the Government of Prussia focusing his time on reforming art and design education in order that more emphasis be put on workshop training.
The Deutscher Werkbund was a major influence on the early careers of Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe, but although Hermann Muthesius was in many ways its spiritual father and served as its chairman from 1910 until 1916, he had little sympathy with the emerging early-modernism, considering both Art Nouveau and the later designs of the Bauhaus to be just as much superficial styles as those of the nineteenth century.
Hermann Muthesius was one of the major architects who built Germany's first Garden City, Hellerau, a suburb of Dresden, founded in 1909.
Hermann Muthesius continued designing houses and writing about domestic architecture until 29 October 1927, when he died in a road accident after a site visit in Berlin.