Richard Riemerschmid
Richard Riemerschmid (20 June 1868 – 13 April 1957) was a German architect, painter, designer and city planner from Munich. He was a leading figure in Jugendstil, the German form of Art Nouveau, and helped shape architecture in that style. He helped found the United Workshops for Art in Handcrafts and the Deutscher Werkbund, and he led art and design groups in Munich and Cologne.
Riemerschmid studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich, and began as an Impressionist and Symbolist painter. He did advertising art for various clients, including Stollwerck chocolate. He believed in high craftsmanship but also promoted machine production of art objects. He designed furniture, carpets, fabrics, wallpaper, glass and porcelain with the idea of clear, simple, affordable design.
He created interior designs, including for the Munich Kammerspiele. He worked on the interiors of the ocean liner SS Kronprinzessin Cecilie in 1906 and helped plan the Hellerau garden city near Dresden. He also designed a Meissen dinner and coffee service in 1903–04, which was later reissued as Blaue Rispe. He is known for pushing the idea of art furniture that could be produced in quantity.
Riemerschmid held important teaching and leadership roles, directing Munich’s Kunstgewerbeschule (1913–1924) and the Cologne-based Kölner Werkschulen (1926–1931). After 1933 he was forced out of the Werkbund, and in 1943 Hitler briefly forbade the Goethe Medal, though Riemerschmid eventually received it. He is buried in Gräfelfing, where he also laid out the cemetery in 1913.
His drawings are in the architectural museum at the Technical University Munich, and other papers are in the German Art Archive of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg. The Richard-Riemerschmid-Berufskolleg, a vocational school in Cologne, is named in his honor.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 05:13 (CET).