Baedeker house

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Baedeker house

The Baedekerhaus was built in 1927 and 1928 on Kettwiger Strasse (then Burgstrasse) in the center of Essen as a commercial building for GD Baedeker Verlag . It was placed under monument protection in 1987 .

History and architecture

Former Von Harrach'sche Kuria , from 1817 printer and bookstore Baedeker

The so-called Von Harrach'sche Kuria , a residential building of Essen canons , was previously in the same place . The company founder and publisher Gottschalk Diedrich Baedeker bought it in 1817 and ran the GD Baedeker publishing house's printing and bookshop there .

The Baedekerhaus is a six-storey reinforced concrete building with a cladding of embossed shell limestone slabs under a flat roof. It was built from 1927 to 1928 as part of the Burgplatz competition by the municipal building authority under the direction of Ernst Bode . The house is an example of the so-called new monumentality; a recourse by traditionalist architects to the monumental style around 1900, which has been cultivated since the second half of the 1920s. The sole owner of the publishing house, Alfred Baedeker , played a key role in furnishing the house .

The facade of the square is enhanced by a kind of pillar portico and four 3.6 meter high figures by Joseph Enseling . Two of these figures were unveiled in March 1927. The male figure with a globe in her right hand symbolizes trade, the female figure with a book in hand, science. Two figures revealed afterwards stand for art and work. The one meter high bronze lettering Baedekerhaus was mounted on the upper front of the house in 1930.

The building was repaired after being damaged in the Second World War , whereby the massive facade was hardly damaged. There are shop fittings on the ground floor of the house. The windows on the first floor above are rectangular and combined to form a ribbon of windows; the three floors above have almost square windows. There are two entrances in the lateral axes of the main building.

The former Loosen department store (formerly Blum, now Peek & Cloppenburg) , which is now also a listed building, was added to the Baedekerhaus around 1928 . On the upper floors of the Baedekerhaus was the Ruhr coal district settlement association , which later became the Ruhr area municipal association , until it moved to its building on Kurfürstenstrasse in 1929.

A branch of the Thalia bookstore chain had been located in Baedekerhaus since June 2008 and closed on September 15, 2012. In July 2014, the LVR Office for the Preservation of Monuments in the Rhineland agreed that the neighboring clothing store Peek & Cloppenburg may set up a passage into the Baedekerhaus and may use it after internal renovations. The outer facade would have remained unaffected by the renovation. It never came to that.

On January 16, 2018, Mayersche Buchhandlung opened its branch in the Baedekerhaus, which is owned by the National Bank , as a tenant .

  • Sculptures by Joseph Enseling

  • Man symbolizes work

  • Woman symbolizes art

  • Woman with book symbolizes science

  • Man with globe symbolizes trade

literature

Web links

Commons : Baedekerhaus  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Excerpt from the list of monuments of the city of Essen ; accessed on October 8, 2016
  2. ↑ Walter Bacmeister: Alfred Baedeker, in: Nekrologe from the Rheinisch-Westphalian industrial area . Essener Verlag-Anst., Essen 1940, p. 12 .
  3. ↑ NRZ of May 27, 2008: Baedeker is now called Thalia ; Retrieved June 9, 2016
  4. ↑ DerWesten.de of June 4, 2014: Baedekerhaus - the way for the renovation is free ; Retrieved July 9, 2016

Coordinates: 51 ° 27 ′ 18.8 ″  N , 7 ° 0 ′ 45.7 ″  E