Heinrich de Fries was primarily a publicist and also a leading architectural critic. He also worked as university lecturer in architecture and urban planning at the Academy of Arts in Düsseldorf. His main interests were the new trends in architecture in the years after World War I. His studies brought him to Hannover, Düsseldorf, Charlottenburg and Bonn. In 1929, he designed an extension of the Reichstag building in Berlin together with Emil Fahrenkamp, but it was not built due to the Great Depression. He drowned in Lake Glindow and his body was found dead on the shore. In the German catalog for the art competitions, his contribution was described as “Plans for a stadium using the substructures for commercial purposes”.