Old Town Hall (Gütersloh)

The postcard postmarked on August 17, 1943 shows the old town hall in Gütersloh. In the background the district court, built in the neo-renaissance style between 1906 and 1908.

Main front of the old Gütersloh town hall after the renovation, photo around 1912

Ground plan of the first and second floors of the old Gütersloh town hall, drawing by Friedrich Viemann in 1909

Gütersloh emergency money , approx. 1923: 100 billion mark note with a view of the old Gütersloh town hall on the left and the district court on the right

The old town hall Gütersloh was a neo-Gothic administrative building built between 1863 and 1864 by the architect Christian Heyden . It was located on today's Berliner Platz in the East Westphalian district town of Gütersloh and was demolished in 1971.

history

The town hall in Gütersloh, which was built during the reign of Wilhelm I, King of Prussia , occupies a special position in German architectural and social history thanks to its special neo-Gothic style with the two castle-like front towers. Because all subsequent town halls were only equipped with one tower, which was usually decorated with a clock. This first town hall in the up-and-coming East Westphalian town of Gütersloh was built in the center opposite the Martin Luther Church (1859–1861), which was also recently completed by Christian Heyden in neo-Gothic architecture . The town, which had around 4,000 inhabitants at the time, had an administrative building in a prominent architectural language that was to remain unique. It embodied his civil and sovereign tasks such as the city treasury, tax and police authorities as well as a council chamber visible in an elaborate facade. In addition to the two towers, it consisted of a double flight of stairs, two associated entrance halls above the basement and elaborate window axes on the left and right sides of the building.

architecture

The two-part architectural design and the construction management of the town hall and the Protestant church were in the hands of the master builder Christian Heyden (1806–1869) from Barmen , a student of the Düsseldorf architect and town planner Adolph von Vagedes (1777–1842). With him an important Rhenish architect had been won, who was to give the center of the small heath town a representative face shortly before the founding of the German Empire. The financial means for this had been provided by the Gütersloh merchant Karl Barth (1791–1858) foundation.

The Gütersloh town hall can be regarded as a unique type of building for the historicist architecture of the 19th century , which was still committed to late romanticism . Mainly Gothic influences rhythmically pervade the two-storey building, which is divided into seven window axes, above a basement on a rectangular floor plan on the market square at that time. The facade, dominated by the two front towers, is characterized on the ground floor by double arcade windows and the open staircase, which lead to the two vestibules covered with blind arches. They correspond on the upper floor with a band of rectangular, partly three-sashed windows. The end of the two rectangular front towers is a neo-Gothic cornice with beveled corner posts. In 1909 they were symbolically decorated in Art Nouveau style with four imperial eagles each . The gable roof is crowned by long, pointed dormer windows above the cornice, which majestically tower above the roof ridge.

The northern narrow side of the town hall on Königstrasse was originally dominated by large neo-Gothic double windows. As a result of renovation and modernization work on behalf of the Gütersloh magistrate, in 1909 the city architect Friedrich Viemann (1876–1934) designed a five-section high rectangular ribbon window with an ornamental balcony for the meeting room on the first floor. Above that, the cornice is crowned by a decorative rosette in which the city's coat of arms is set.

Not only the predominantly neo-Gothic architectural language, but also the two-part structure of the floor plan shows a sophisticated functional room division for the already diverse municipal administrative tasks: offices for the magistrate and various offices in the right wing and in the left rooms for the police, the court commission, detention cells and Housing for the prison guards. In the attic, the Gütersloh town hall still offered space for the mayor's apartment.

With the structural room structure, the master builder basically adopted the compositional scheme of the late Gothic resurrection paintings : an example of this is the winged altarpiece The Last Judgment by Rogier van der Weyden (1399–1464), which he painted for the Hôtel Dieu in Beaune ( Burgundy ) . In the opposite sense, they show the way to heavenly paradise on the left and the fall into hell on the right. The symbiosis of the town hall with its two towers with the towering tower of the Martin Luther Church opposite was ingeniously emphasized.

Controversy and Demolition

In 1963 it was decided to demolish the town hall, following an urban planning favored in the early 1960s for a car-friendly city . A lengthy controversy ensued, because the imminent demolition of the memorable town hall was publicly criticized as a high level of cultural loss and desolation of the cityscape. Nevertheless, the Gütersloh planning committee stuck to the decision to demolish it in 1963. This was justified now with the creation of “an architecture square instead of the old town hall in the center of the city”. The old town hall in Gütersloh was demolished in 1971.

Even almost fifty years later, the spacious architecture square that was announced at the time did not come about: Berliner Platz has remained an unstructured area in the center of Gütersloh. In 2006, in memory of the builder of the Gütersloh town hall, Axel Hinrich Murken initiated the Christian Heyden Prize for Building Culture.

swell

Martin Damus: The town hall. Architectural and social history from the early days to postmodernism. Berlin 1988.
Hermann Eickhoff: History of the city of Gütersloh. Gütersloh 1903.
Stephan Grimm, Heinrich Lakämper – Lührs: Gütersloher write history. Gudensberg-Gleichen 2005.
Heinrich Hübsch : In which style should we build? Karlsruhe 1825.
Werner Lenz: Gütersloh - as it was. 3. Edition. Gütersloh 1976.
Axel Hinrich Murken: Chronicle of a lost battle. The demolition of the old Gütersloh town hall and the attempted demolition of the old district court. A look back after 33 years. In: Neue Westfälische (Gütersloh). No. 206, September 1, 2002.
Axel and Christa Murken: The building history of the old Gütersloh town hall. Gütersloher contributions to local history and regional studies. (1971). Issue 24. Pages 481–486.
Jürgen Paul: The “new town hall” - a building project of the 19th century. In: Ekkehart Mai, Jürgen Paul (ed.): The town hall in the Kaiserreich. Art-political aspects of a building project in the 19th century. Berlin 1982, p. 58 ff.

Individual evidence

↑ Axel Hinrich Murken : worries about the existence of the old town hall. Dr. Axel Hinrich Murken means: "Valuable building". In: Neue Westfälische (Gütersloh). No. 259, November 7, 1970
↑ Axel Hinrich Murken : About the demolition of the Gütersloh town hall. Bell readers give their opinion. In: The Bell (Gütersloh), November 10, 1970
↑ “The old town hall is being demolished. Planning committee completely agreed. Gütersloh municipal politicians stick to their decisions. "(Die Glocke, 14./15.11.1970)