(b Cologne, 20 Feb 1886; d 1969). German architect. He first worked as an architect for the firm of Karl Moritz in Cologne before working for Lossow & Kühne and for Schilling & Gräbner in Dresden. In 1908 he won a competition for two large country-house complexes at the Deutscher Ring, Cologne, and in 1912 he opened his own private practice. During World War I he served at the Front. After 1919 he returned to Cologne and concentrated mainly on designing private houses and housing estates, for example the tenement block at Sülzgürtel and Zülpicher Strasse (1926–7) and the housing estate for the company of Felten & Guilleaumme in Buchheim, Cologne. He designed a number of villas in the upper middle-class suburbs of Braunfels, Marienburg and Lindenthal (e.g. Eugen-Lange-Strasse 11–13, Cologne, c. 1925; Lutherhaus, Mehlemer Strasse, Cologne, 1934). In 1925 his neo-Gothic design won the second prize for a new building for the Kölner Lesegesellschaft. Information about his later life is scanty. After 1933 he was commissioned to provide designs for the Ordensburgen, elite schools for military and ideological education. Klotz eventually designed two, Vogelsang (1936–8) near Gmünd, and another at Crössinsee (1937). Despite the evocation of an idealized medieval past through the use of a modified Romanesque style and indigenous materials, both designs were indebted to the Modern Movement through the unornamented stone surfaces as well as the asymmetrical window patterns and continuous bay windows. His designs for a large leisure complex for 20,000 people on Rügen (1936; see Petsch, pl. 108) and a House of German Crafts in Frankfurt am Main (see Schulte-Frohlinde, pp. 92–3) were not executed.

• Klotz, Clemens
  • Mantz, Werner
  • Nazism, §2: Art and architecture