_(7882268852).jpg/960px-La_colonie_dartistes_jugendstil_(Mathildenh%C3%B6he%2C_Darmstadt)_(7882268852).jpg)
Artists' Colony in Darmstadt
The number of Wikipedia languages with an article is our measure of how widely known a site is. How many people have stood at a site or want to go will be shown once enough people use the app.
Seals, your want-to-go list and the year you stood here are kept in the iPhone app.
How it came to be
Mathildenhöhe is the highest point above Darmstadt, in Hesse in west-central Germany. Here Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig of Hesse set up an artists' colony as a centre for the reform movements in architecture and the applied arts. Its leading figures were Joseph Maria Olbrich, an Austrian and a founder of the Vienna Secession, and Peter Behrens.
The colony grew with each of the international exhibitions of 1901, 1904, 1908 and 1914. Olbrich designed many of its houses and several exhibition buildings; he became a Hessian citizen in 1900 and was made a professor by the Grand Duke. In 1908 the Wedding Tower, the colony's landmark, and the large exhibition hall beside it were completed. Olbrich died that same year, aged 40.
The hill also holds the Russian Orthodox Chapel of St Mary Magdalene, built in 1897–1899 to designs by Leon Benois. It served as a private chapel for Tsar Nicholas II, whose wife Alexandra was born in Darmstadt. The site was inscribed as a World Heritage site in 2021.
Data: Wikidata (CC0). Photos: Wikimedia Commons, under each photo’s license. Prototype; may contain errors. We measure usage anonymously to improve the app (PostHog, EU).