Old Hamburg town house
The Hamburg Bürgerhaus , also known as the old Hamburg merchant's house , was a predominant type of house in Hamburg that developed here in the 13th and 14th centuries and was built into the 18th century. The houses were characterized by a high hall in the center and their elongated shape to give access to the street and the canal at the same time. At the beginning of the 19th century there were around 2000 of these houses. Due to the Hamburg fire of 1842, the bombing raids of 1943 and an ambitious demolition activity in the years in between, only a few of these houses have survived. In the interior, these have usually been changed so much that there are hardly any traces of their original use.
The houses were mainly at the mouth of the Alster , the Katharinenviertel, Grimm and Cremon . In their basic layout, they correspond to the hallway house that was developed in the Hanseatic cities of Lübeck, Bremen and Hamburg in the High Middle Ages. The houses are characterized by a division into living and working rooms, both of which are located within the house. The plots in Hamburg's old town had narrow fronts, but were very deep in order to give as many merchants as possible direct access to the water. The houses were huddled together, usually wall to wall. There were courtyard wings with rooms for the servants and large gardens behind the house on the property.
The plots were divided into a front building, courtyard wing and canal store and were up to 50 meters deep. The middle building was even narrower than the front and rear building to allow a courtyard and garden through which light could enter the houses.
Upstairs were storage tanks that bordered directly on the water (mostly canals ). The floorboards were mostly two-story, so that the goods could be loaded through the floorboards into the warehouse or brought directly onto wagons and carts. The hall was thus the central space in which goods could be sampled and sorted on the one hand, and on the other hand it served for representation and was used for parties and receptions. Richly decorated baroque portals, gables and interiors have been built since the 17th century . These were mainly based on models from the Netherlands and in particular from Amsterdam . Probably no other large German city like Hamburg was so influenced by Dutch builders and architectural styles during this time.
The types of the inner dike house and the outer dike house developed within the old Hamburg town hall . Both were similar in layout and design. The outer dyke houses were built under more cramped conditions and normally had neither courtyard wings nor large gardens. Outside dyke houses were built from the 15th century, when Hamburg's population increased, and houses began to be built on the Alster islands beyond the dyke lines.
literature
- Albert Erbe , Christian Ranck (ed.): The Hamburg community center. Its history of construction and art. Boysen & Masch, Hamburg 1911.
- Ralf Lange: Town houses and country houses in: Volker Plagemann (ed.): The art of Protestant baroque in Hamburg , Dölling and Galitz 2001
- Gisela Jaacks (ed.): Churches, cannons and commerce , Museum for Hamburg History 2003
- Wolfgang Rudhard: The community center in Hamburg . Ernst Wasmuth Publishing House, Tübingen 1975
- Ti: Althamburg community center in: Franklin Kopitzsch and Daniel Tilgner (eds.): Hamburg Lexikon