Antonsplatz (Dresden)

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Antonsplatz
Place in Dresden
Antonsplatz
Antonsplatz on a map from 1895
Basic data
place Dresden
District Inner old town
Created 1826-1828
Newly designed 1891–1893,
after 1945,
2015–2019
Confluent streets Wallstrasse , Marienstrasse , Zahnsgasse
Buildings House Merkur I,
Boulevard am Wall

The Antonsplatz is a now overbuilt square on the western edge of the inner old town in the city center of Dresden . After the fortifications had been razed , it was laid out at the beginning of the 19th century and served as a marketplace for a long time . On Antonsplatz there were two department stores and Dresden's central post office , from which the telecommunications office emerged. It was also the location of the Saxon Higher Administrative Court and of forerunners of the TU and the HfBK Dresden , and the Dresden Museum of Applied Arts was founded on Antonsplatz . In the early 1890s it was built over for the first time with the market hall at Antonsplatz . During the air raids on Dresden in 1945, all of the adjacent buildings were destroyed or at least so badly damaged that they had to be demolished in the following years.

The Antonsplatz, cleared of rubble and again vacant, served for years as a parking lot , since 2002 primarily for customers of the nearby Altmarkt-Galerie . After purchasing the property in 2013, the two construction companies Baywobau (Bavaria) and CTR-Gruppe (Czech Republic) , which are also active elsewhere in Dresden, began to rebuild the square from the south in 2015. House Merkur I was completed in November 2016, named after the Merkur bastion of the city fortifications and the only one with the address Antonsplatz (house numbers 1 and 1a). This was followed by the Merkur II and III buildings until 2019, later renamed to (Boulevard am) Wall I and II.

location

Wallstrasse , on the left Antonsplatz serving as a car park , Postplatz in the background , 2012.

The square is located in the district of Altstadt I in the area between the historic city center and the Dresden suburbs . It belongs to the district of the old town in the district of Innere Altstadt , which merges into the Seevorstadt at Antonsplatz . Antonsplatz extended elongated between Marienstraße in the west and Wallstraße in the east. Its northern end was at Scheffelgasse, the southern one at Zahnsgasse is still called Antonsplatz (Haus Merkur, house numbers 1 and 1a).

history

Beginnings

At the location of today's Antonsplatz was that section of the Dresden fortifications that lay between the western Saturn bastion and the southern Mercury bastion. They took advantage of the already existing terrain differences in this area, which resulted from the Seegrabenrinne , a natural deepening. Presumably on the orders of Napoleon Bonaparte , the demolition of the fortifications began at the end of 1809. In this way, a large open space was created south of the Wilsdruffer Tor , which was rebuilt in the further course of the 19th century and was initially called Demolitionplatz. The plan was to establish it as a new market square as well as a place for entertainment and recreation, while urban traffic should flow via the neighboring Wilsdruffer Thorplatz to the north . Antonsplatz was given its current name in 1828 in honor of King Anton, who had ruled since 1827 (* December 27, 1755 in Dresden, † June 6, 1836 in Pillnitz ), after whom Antonstadt as part of Neustadt and the Antonstrasse there were named. Until the handover of the former fortress grounds into municipal hands in 1836, Antonsplatz was under state sovereignty.

Department stores on the east and west sides

Originally one-story department store with Doric columns .
Post office building with department stores , 1832.
Post office building with department stores, 1885.

Shortly after the fortress was abandoned , the city wanted to move the weekly market from the old market to the demolition square in 1812 , but the plans failed several times due to resistance from traders. After a few changes to the plans, King Friedrich August I approved the construction of two long sales halls with arcades in 1822 , which, however, remained undone for several years. The court architect Anton Ludwig Blaßmann (1784–1843) provided the drafts for the two buildings, each 280 cubits long, which were relatively inexpensive compared to other proposals. They were flat and single-storey, were intended to serve the purpose of a department store and architecturally followed models of the 18th century. First, in 1826, “the upper department stores” were built on the east side of the square along the west side of Wallstrasse. Two years later, the counterpart “the lower department stores” was built on the west side of the square and along the city-facing side of Marienstraße. However, the halls blocked the entrances to the square, which residents protested. Therefore a breakthrough was built on the east side at Webergasse . Because the business figures fell short of expectations, the city council approved the addition of a further floor a few years later. Columns and gable-topped head structures emphasized the department stores. Both department store complexes consisted of three three-storey building blocks - two of which were at the top and one in the middle - with hipped roofs and two two-storey connecting buildings with gable roofs between the three -storeys . The buildings fell victim to the air raids on Dresden in February 1945 , burned down and their ruins were torn down in 1950.

Original square design and artesian fountain

Passage of the market hall at Antonsplatz , 1898.

The overall design for the square was provided by Gottlob Friedrich Thormeyer in 1826 , who created "the only more extensive urban development in the early Dresden Biedermeier in the old town", which was retained in this form until 1891. Fritz Löffler described the ensemble as an "excellent solution of the Biedermeier in the sense of the Dresden tradition". Earlier plans had already considered building a special, rare entertainment building between Antonsplatz and Postplatz for cultural use and as a counterbalance to the courtly festival culture. The first international architecture competition in Saxony was announced for this show building as part of a larger urban development concept , from which Carl August Peter Menzel emerged as the winner with his design. In the Leipziger Zeitung of August 26, 1826, the Count von Hohenthal and the Lord von Carlowitz wrote that "Proposals to your Royal Majesty for the construction of a building intended to accommodate public display objects" have been submitted. "The purpose of the building is to contain a circus for tightrope walkers [...]". A water basin was to adorn the center of the square, the price of which was 50 thalers. On April 30, 1827, there were 25 submissions. Neither the show building nor the water basin were ultimately implemented. For this purpose, Carl Adolph Terscheck designed a green area on the square.

In order to be able to provide the place with a central public water connection, the drilling of an artesian well began on July 31, 1832 . The aim was to find a layer deep in the middle of the square that carries water under high pressure, which reaches the surface without the use of pumps according to the physical principle of communicating pipes . The drilling work carried out at the same time near today's Albertplatz succeeded in doing this: the artesian well there is still in operation today. At Antonsplatz, on the other hand, after almost a year, on July 4, 1833, three springs were found at a depth of more than 100 meters, but the drilling continued to a depth of over 200 meters in the hope of even greater amounts of water. However, the desired effect was not achieved; the water stayed just below the surface of the earth. As a result, the project, into which around 7,000 thalers had flowed from the state treasury by 1834, was canceled. Instead, the city dropped the centrally located on the square fountain at one in Plauen beginning Röhrfahrt connect him anyway in the vernacular known as artesian wells. After a few decades, however, it proved to be a traffic obstacle, which led to its demolition in 1871.

Telephone exchange on the north side

After the previous post office on Landhausstrasse had become too small, the state had a new post house built with a sandstone façade designed by Joseph Thürmer on the north side of Antonsplatz. The building was built from 1830 according to plans by Albert Geutebrück and was handed over to its destination on October 8, 1832. The actual rear front, which faced Wilsdruffer Thorplatz, soon became the new front of the house for logistical reasons. This also shifted the overall focus of Dresden's urban planning from Antons to the later Postplatz. At the end of the 1840s there was a first extension, in 1893/94 the building was extended and two corner towers for the telegraph line were built on the rear side at Antonsplatz. The building, officially designated as a telephone exchange from 1904, was given a new south wing between the inlet towers on Antonsplatz in 1911/12. As a result of the air raids on Dresden in February 1945, the telephone exchange burned down, and the south side with the towers in particular was severely damaged. After a continuous deterioration of the ruinous building fabric, it was demolished at the end of February 1952.

Polytechnic school, later arts and crafts school and higher administrative court, on the south side

The technical educational institute founded in 1828 in the Brühl Garden Pavilion , the forerunner of the Technical University of Dresden , expanded rapidly. On September 2, 1846, she moved from the former armory building near the Jüdenhof to a new building on the south side of Antonsplatz, which was newly completed after two years of construction. After King Friedrich August II had named the facility the Royal Polytechnic School in 1851, the building was known as the Polytechnic School. The design came from the architecture professor Gustav Heine and was revised by Gottfried Semper . The front of this building, which is considered to be one of the models for the main building of the RWTH Aachen , was on Antonsplatz, the address was Antonsplatz 1. During the Dresden May uprising, the house was the last bastion of the rebels; After a hard fight, Prussian troops did not take it until the evening of May 9, 1849, after which the rebels withdrew from the city towards the southwest. From 1869, Rudolf Heyn directed a renovation of the building. Renamed the Royal Saxon Polytechnic in 1871, the facility moved in 1875 to an even larger, appropriately named Polytechnic , on the south side of Bismarckplatz, today's Friedrich-List-Platz .

Immediately afterwards, the architect and designer Carl Graff (1844–1906) built the Royal Saxon School of Applied Arts in the building of the Polytechnic School , which began teaching on April 1, 1876. In the same year he founded the Museum of Applied Arts , which, as a new department of this arts and crafts school , was supposed to support the students with illustrative material. Ermenegildo Antonio Donadini was an outstanding figure who taught at the arts and crafts school during this period . But even after a few decades the building proved to be too small for its new use, so that after the completion of the new building of the same name in 1908, the School of Applied Arts and the Museum of Applied Arts moved to Güntzstraße. Since its merger with the Art Academy in 1950, the School of Applied Arts has been part of the Dresden University of Fine Arts . The Kunstgewerbemuseum has been located in Pillnitz Castle since 1964 .

After the arts and crafts school moved out, the Saxon Higher Administrative Court moved into the building on Antonsplatz in 1909 and formally remained there until 1945, although it experienced institutional decline during the Nazi era . In addition, the Sächsische Altersrentenbank had its headquarters in the building, and several studios were located in it for subsequent use of the arts and crafts classrooms. One of them belonged from 1919 to 1922 to the important painter and graphic artist Otto Dix (1891–1969). The house subsequently developed into an important location for the Dresden Secession . Also Bernhard Kretzschmar (1930), Kurt Guenther , Willy Wolff , Peter August Böckstiegel , Joachim Heuer , Theodor Rosenhauer , Fritz Skade and Paul Berger-Bergner had studios in the building - in many cases in 1945, so that the affected artists at the Air raids on Dresden, which destroyed the former polytechnic school on Antonsplatz, each forfeited almost all of its entire work.

Overbuilding of the square by Anton's market hall

Ruins of the market hall at Antonsplatz after the air raids on Dresden , 1945.

In the 1880s, plans were made to cover the Antonsplatz, which was frequently used by market traders, except for the existing lanes, because there was no alternative, centrally located building site for a market hall. The building permit was available at the beginning of 1890, and after a few rescheduling work, construction finally began a year later. Wilhelm Rettig and Theodor Friedrich provided the designs . On July 5, 1893, the market hall at Antonsplatz, popularly known as Anton’s market hall after the place who gave it its name , was opened. They had almost completely built over the open space on Antonsplatz, which thus lost its overall appearance. The art historian Fritz Löffler criticized: "The hall just took up the wrong place between the post office and the technical educational institute and thus destroyed the classicist-Biedermeier Antonsplatz that had just been won." However, Löffler also attested to the building that it was "one of the best of its time". This building, one of three market halls in Dresden along with the Neustädter Markthalle and the Großmarkthalle on Weißeritzstrasse , was badly damaged in 1945 and its ruins were finally blown up in 1951.

Situation after 1945

View from Webergasse onto Antonsplatz, around 1970.

After all the adjacent building ruins had been torn down, Antonsplatz formed part of the large, contiguous wasteland in Dresden's city center. At first it continued to serve as a marketplace and was then converted into a parking lot. In December 1992, a multi-week Christmas fair took place on it for the first time, which was still held in 1999. In 2002 the city added 88 parking spaces to the number of parking spaces available. Until the new development, the square consisted of an oblong, rectangular asphalt surface, which served as a parking lot with 260 parking spaces and from which several access roads led to Wallstrasse and Marienstrasse. At its edges there were lawns with rows of trees. The square was undeveloped on all sides until 2015. The buildings closest to Antonsplatz were the rows of houses on the opposite side of the street on Marienstraße and Wallstraße; The Altmarkt-Galerie also extends behind the latter .

Rebuilding

Already from the early days of the GDR , the city ​​planners planned to keep the area free from development and to integrate it into a green belt around the inner old town, which allows the location of the old fortifications to be experienced again. With this in mind, the Dresden city council passed a resolution in 1990 to draw up the development plan “Dresden-Altstadt - No. 6 - Postplatz / Wallstraße”. For the Postplatz / Wallstraße area, the city carried out an urban planning ideas competition in 1991 with international participation. The aim was to develop the Postplatz and Wallstrasse and thus also Antonsplatz; the competition should lay the foundations for developments over the next few years. Joachim Schürmann's architectural office in Cologne emerged as the winner of the 33 works submitted . Schürmann's concept was the basis for the development of the development plan “No. 54, Postplatz / Wallstrasse ”, which has been in force as the state capital's statute since May 5, 2000.

An elementary part of the planning was the creation of a green promenade ring around the inner old town, which, with adaptations of the earlier fortifications, depicts their old course. The area along Marienstraße would therefore form the southern continuation of Ostra-Allee and Zwingerteich . Schürmann wanted to "make the city's memory visible". A long wing of the building is to be built along the west side of Wallstrasse - and thus also on the old open space of Antonsplatz. According to Schürmann's plans, two rows of avenue trees are to be laid out in parallel. In the middle, they border a 20 meter wide and 300 meter long moat, which is spanned by five walkways. Road traffic will then be bundled in Wallstrasse. When the tram junction at Postplatz was reorganized in 2005 , the Dresden public transport company moved its tram tracks from Marienstrasse to Wallstrasse.

At the beginning of 2013, the city of Dresden sold the two quarters IX.1 and IX.2 that form Antonsplatz, each with a total area of ​​around 6000 m² and each consisting of five parcels, from their property. She recommended building residential buildings with integrated office and business use. The eaves height of the new buildings should be between 18 and 23 meters, flat roofs were planned. A Dresden architecture office created three variants of a development on the future promenade ring according to these specifications. The preferred variant consisted of two meandering building structures that created several courtyards open to Wallstrasse and Marienstraße and made Antonsplatz completely disappear in its old dimensions. An alternative, ultimately designed in a modified form, provided for the development with rows at the edge of the parcels, which would have created an elongated open space in the middle, reminiscent of the old Antonsplatz.

In 2016, the first residential and commercial building was completed on the south side of Antonsplatz. It is roughly on the site of the former Polytechnic and is the only one that still has the address Antonsplatz. Further projects in the northern part had been under construction since 2017. They were completed in 2020 and their house numbers are assigned to Wallstrasse and Marienstraße. The Antonsplatz was completely built over.

literature

  • Thomas Mertel: The Antonsplatz in Dresden. Urban planning and architecture between urban utopia and utilitarianism. Diss., Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg , self-published, Halle 2006.
  • Karlheinz Kregelin: The name book of the streets and places in the 26er Ring , Fly Head Verlag, Halle 1993, ISBN 978-3-930195-01-5 .

Web links

Commons : Antonsplatz, Dresden  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Adolf Hantzsch : Name book of the streets and squares of Dresden (=  messages of the Society for the History of Dresden . No. 17, 18 ). Wilhelm Baensch, Dresden 1905, p. 6 f . ( Digitized version ).
  2. ↑ G. Feuker: When the city and traders were still fighting over the old market. Webergasse and Gewandhausstrasse were nightmare projects for the King of Saxony and Dresden's councilors 175 years ago. In: Dresdner Latest News , ed. November 2, 1998, p. 18.
  3. ^ The Pfennig magazine of the society for the dissemination of non-profit knowledge , 9th vol., Leipzig 1841, p. 49 ( digitized in the Google book search).
  4. ↑ a b Fritz Löffler : The old Dresden - history of its buildings . EA Seemann, Leipzig 1981, ISBN 3-363-00007-3 , p. 363 f .
  5. ↑ a b Fritz Löffler : The old Dresden - history of its buildings . EA Seemann, Leipzig 1981, ISBN 3-363-00007-3 , p. 350 .
  6. ↑ Jochen Hänsch: Dresden's first artesian well. In: Dresdner Latest News , ed. April 28, 1997, p. 9.
  7. ^ Siegfried Bannack: Water expectations at Antonplatz did not come true. The Artesian Fountain on Albertplatz has been bubbling for 165 years. In: Dresdner Latest News , February 25, 2002, p. 7.
  8. ↑ postplatz.starkes-dresden.de: The post office building. Retrieved March 14, 2013.
  9. ↑ Reiner Pommerin : 175 years of TU Dresden. Volume 1: History of the TU Dresden 1828–2003. Edited on behalf of the Society of Friends and Supporters of the TU Dresden e. V. von Reiner Pommerin, Böhlau, Cologne a. a. 2003, ISBN 3-412-02303-5 , p. 39 ( limited preview in Google book search).
  10. ↑ Günter Holfert: A city full of barricades. 150 years ago - the stormy events in Dresden in May 1849. In: Dresdner Latest News , ed. May 3, 1999, p. 13.
  11. ↑ Wolfgang Rother: The arts and crafts school and the arts and crafts museum in Dresden. A building somewhere between late historicism and modernity. Verlag der Kunst, Dresden 1999, ISBN 978-3-865300-39-3 .
  12. ^ Friedrich Kummer: Guide through Dresden and the Elbe area. Selbstverlag, Dresden 1913, p. 112 ( digitized in the Google book search).
  13. ↑ Gunter Ziller: Kokoschka's master student Joachim Heuer for the 100th In: Dresdner Latest News , ed. May 27, 2000, p. 20.
  14. ^ Fritz Löffler : The old Dresden. History of his buildings . EA Seemann, Leipzig 1981, ISBN 3-363-00007-3 , p. 415 .
  15. ↑ Elke Egger: The Christmas fair opens - for the first time without a Ferris wheel. Instead, modern rides dominate / half prices on Wednesdays. In: Dresdner Latest News , ed. November 26, 1999, p. 13.
  16. ↑ More parking spaces on Antonsplatz. In: dresden.de. State capital Dresden, December 4, 2002, accessed on August 15, 2015 .
  17. ↑ dresden.de: Striezelmarkt 2012 - how to get there, where to park? ( Memento of December 10, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 3.5 MB). Retrieved March 14, 2013.
  18. ↑ Focal points: Postplatz on dresden.de. Retrieved March 15, 2013.
  19. ↑ Peter Bäumler: Vision and reality of the redesign of Postplatz and Wallstraße. In: top magazin Dresden , edition 3/2005, pp. 70–72.
  20. ^ Postplatz Dresden. Development on the promenade ring. on dresden.de ( Memento from April 19, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
  21. ^ State capital Dresden (Ed.): Postplatz Dresden. Development on the promenade ring. Dresden 2012 (detailed synopsis).
  22. ↑ Miriam Harner: A luxurious face for the Dresden Antonsplatz - laying of the foundation stone for a 16.5 million euro building project. In: Dresdner Latest News . August 26, 2015, accessed June 26, 2016 .
  23. ^ Haus Merkur I, II and III - New apartments for sale in the center of Dresden and location. In: Haus-Merkur.de. Retrieved December 14, 2018 .

Coordinates: 51 ° 2 ′ 56 ″  N , 13 ° 44 ′ 1 ″  E