West office building

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West office building, former single home
Western staircase with original railing

The West office building in Essen 's Frohnhausen district was built in the second half of the 1910s as a single home at Westbahnhof for the workers of the neighboring Krupp cast steel factory. After various uses over the years, the building complex , which has been a listed building since 1990, now serves as an office building. It still shows its almost original shape, as it hardly sustained any damage from the Second World War .

Single home

In the years 1916 to 1920, the building complex was built to the southeast of what is now the Essen-West S-Bahn station as a replacement for a barrack camp that served the unmarried workers of Friedrich Krupp AG as a boarding house and sleeping quarters . This single home provided accommodation for around 750 people who, as workers who immigrated to Essen, could not afford their own household. There were corresponding living rooms and bedrooms as well as utility and common rooms as well as a large dining room for up to 1000 people. The Krupp housing administration was located in one wing of the building.

Seat of the Ruhrland Museum

From 1927, the building housed the Museum of Natural History and Ethnology of the Essen Museum Association , which was named Ruhrland Museum in 1934 and is now part of the Ruhr Museum . On an exhibition area of ​​around 7000 square meters in the former single home, stocks on regional zoology, botany, geology, mineralogy, prehistory and early history as well as technology and ethnology were shown. In 1939 the museum had to move out of the building because the Krupp company claimed it again.

Todays use

After the relatively minor war damage had been repaired and the circular building at the western end of the building complex had been expanded, it was used again by Krupp. Until the mid-1990s, the two largest users of the building, the then Krupp-Wohnungsbau GmbH and the then company health insurance fund Krupp (BKK), who had moved out at that time, were located. After various renovations, taking into account the preservation of historical monuments, the offices of the office building are still used by various companies and doctors. The original facade is still visible inside the western rotunda. The gate entrance there with its columns has been preserved.

Web links

Commons : Bürohaus West  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Coordinates: 51 ° 27 ′ 12.7 "  N , 6 ° 58 ′ 56.7"  E