Apartment house at Schönhausen Palace

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Coordinates: 52 ° 34 ′ 39 ″  N , 13 ° 24 ′ 13 ″  E

View from the northwest after the renovation (2013).

The apartment house at Schönhausen Palace (since 2012: guest house in Schönhausen Palace Park ) is a former guest house built from 1966 to 1967/1968 according to plans by architect Walter Schmidt in the Berlin district of Niederschönhausen , Pankow . Until 1989, the government of the German Democratic Republic housed the employees, ministers and staff of its state guests here. After years of vacancy, the listed building was converted into condominiums from 2011 to 2013 .

history

View from the northwest before the renovation (2008).

In 1964 the Council of Ministers of the GDR decided to rededicate the former official seat of the President - Schönhausen Palace - as a guest house for foreign state guests. Since the premises and the supply facilities were insufficient, the employees who were traveling with them were allowed to build their own accommodation in the palace gardens. The plans were drawn by the Berlin architect Walter Schmidt and his colleagues; the facades were designed by the sculptor Fritz Kühn . The painter Walter Womacka was responsible for the art in architecture . Interior designer Hans Hoßfeld provided the furnishings; Garden planner Karl Kirschner took care of the redesign of the surrounding castle park area. The construction work was completed by 1968 at the latest. In 1981 the kitchen wing was expanded. In the 1980s, further conversions and repairs followed, mainly affecting the interior and building services. 1980 to 1983 the concrete facade elements were given gray plaster.

In the course of its use, the ministers and employees of Indira Gandhi , Willy Brandt and Mikhail Gorbachev were accommodated in the apartment house. Fidel Castro (1972 and 1975), Leonid Brezhnev (1973) and Josip Tito (1976) were personally guests in the house.

After the turn

After reunification, the federal hotel operations in Berlin took over the guest house and continued to operate it as a hotel and event location until 1995. Vacancies and vandalism hit the building and its furnishings hard in the years that followed. During the renovation of the Schönhausen Palace Park from 2005 to 2009, the apartment house was not taken into account. In 2006, a private investor from Brandenburg bought the building to convert it into a hotel. The plan was not implemented.

Redevelopment

In 2011 the company terraplan from Nuremberg , represented by Erik Roßnagel, bought the dilapidated guest house. The interior was damaged by the weather and willful destruction and had to be restored on a large scale. On the basis of building history documentation by architect Peter Brenn, the office vangeisten.marfels from Potsdam , Eugen Gehring from Berlin (interior design) and Sibylle M. Herlan from Nuremberg (garden architecture) took on the redevelopment planning . Since its completion in 2013, the building has contained 39 condominiums with underground parking . In 2012, the client was awarded the Ferdinand von Quast Medal , the monument preservation prize of the State of Berlin, for the renovation .

architecture

Staircase with stained glass by Walter Womacka (2012).

The apartment house is located on the western edge of the Schönhausen Palace Park, in the so-called “outer palace park”. This has been separated from the “inner palace park” with Schönhausen Palace by a wall since the 1960s . An asphalt driveway connects the property with Tschaikowskistraße in the north. Schönhausen Palace is a few hundred meters to the northeast.

The building is divided into two parts, which together describe the floor plan of an "L": the cuboid block of the guest house with four full floors and a recessed top floor and the one-story kitchen wing attached to the northeast. To the east, the two components enclose a garden terrace with a pergola and a view of Schönhausen Palace. The apartment house is a steel frame building . The ground floor is clad with slate ; Ribbons of windows, which alternate with originally permanently installed aluminum facings , and concrete slabs structure the facades. In order to better light the apartments, additional windows were broken into instead of the aluminum panels during the renovation . Since then, the panels have been used as sun protection that can be electrically adjusted by the tenants; they automatically return to the positions they were in in 1968 at noon every day. Ceramic murals by Walter Womacka under the canopy in the west (globe and pigeons as symbols of peace) and on the garden side (elements earth, water and air) in the east serve as artistic accents. The stairwell shaft is inserted into the longitudinal facades in the ratio of the golden section , so that a harmonious effect is created.

On the ground floor of the guest house there was a lobby , two restaurants and a film projection room . The garden terrace was used for receptions and evening parties. A staircase with abstract stained glass by Richard O. Wilhelm led to the guest rooms on the upper floors. During the renovation, all floors were occupied with apartments, whereby the penthouses are designed as maisonettes and occupy the second upper and top floor. The reception hall with parquet floor and wooden wall panels and the stairwell have largely been preserved in their historical condition and have been restored.

  • View from the southwest before the renovation (2010).

  • Ceramic mural under the canopy before the renovation (2010).

  • Interiors before renovation (2010).

  • Garden terrace after renovation (2013).

  • Ceramic mural on the garden terrace (2010).

  • Restored suite (2012).

References and comments

  1. ↑ Entry in the Berlin monument database. In: www.stadtentwicklung.berlin.de. Retrieved February 18, 2016 .
  2. ↑ "The quality was perfect down to the last detail". In: www.morgenpost.de. Retrieved February 22, 2016 .
  3. ↑ Ascheid / Schmid, guest house , p. 11.
  4. ^ Stefan Strauss: The eyesore of Pankow. The GDR government's guest house is falling into disrepair - although it is a memorial. In: www.berliner-zeitung.de. Retrieved February 18, 2016 .
  5. ^ Lothar Heinke : Suites in Honecker's guest house. In: www.tagesspiegel.de. Retrieved February 18, 2016 .
  6. ↑ Stefanie Hildebrandt: Ex-guest house of the GDR: Live like a state guest. In: Berliner-Kurier.de. Retrieved February 18, 2016 .
  7. ↑ Berlin Monument Preservation Prize (Quast Medal). (No longer available online.) In: www.stadtentwicklung.berlin.de. Archived from the original on September 26, 2015 ; Retrieved February 25, 2016 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.stadtentwicklung.berlin.de
  8. ↑ The gray plaster applied in the 1980s was removed again during the renovation from 2010 to 2012.
  9. ^ Jaeger, Denkmalpflege , pp. 116–117.
  10. ↑ Ascheid / Schmid, guest house , p. 10.

literature

  • Ulrike Ascheid / Franz Schmid: The guest house needs help . In: Bauwelt . No. 39–40 , 2008, pp. 9–11 ( arte-bau.de [PDF]).
  • Peter Brenn: The apartment house at Schönhausen Palace. History and stories about the former guest house of the GDR government . Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg , Berlin 2014, ISBN 3-942476-99-1 .
  • Falk Jaeger: Preservation of monuments every day at twelve . In: Deutsche Bauzeitung . tape 148 , no. 9 , 2014, p. 112-117 .

Web links

Commons : Apartment house at Schönhausen Palace  - collection of images, videos and audio files