French embassy in Saarbrücken
Coordinates: 49 ° 14 ′ 8 ″ N , 6 ° 59 ′ 6 ″ E
The French Embassy in Saarbrücken , which the French architect and urban planner Georges-Henri Pingusson created in the Mouvement Moderne style 19 years after his early and sensational masterpiece, the Hotel Latitude 43 in Saint-Tropez, is one of his most important buildings. The Ministry for Education and Culture of the Saarland was last housed in the building.
history
After the Second World War , the Saarland received an autonomous status, which secured French influence through a currency, economic and defense union with France. The French military governor on the Saar, Gilbert Grandval (1904–1981), who had been in the resistance against the German occupation of France since 1941 , met the architect Jean Prouvé , an advocate of modern architecture , in the Ceux de la Résistance group . In 1945 he supported Grandval in appointing suitable town planners and architects to rebuild the heavily bombed cities of Saarbrücken, Saarlouis and the districts of Ottweiler, St. Wendel, Homburg, St. Ingbert, Merzig and Saarburg, which belong to the Saar. Georges-Henri Pingusson was appointed to the team of Section Urbanisme et Reconstruction of the Saar military government under the direction of Marcel Roux and his deputy André Sive . They belonged to the Union des Artistes Modernes (UAM) founded by Robert Mallet-Stevens and René Herbst and were participants in the Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM). This most striking building from that period was built between 1951 and 1954 based on a design by Pingusson with the collaboration of Bernhard Schultheis and Hans Bert Baur .
There are now clear signs of static problems as well as externally visible damage to reinforced concrete . The use of the building is impaired as a result, so that in 2014 the state ministry based there moved to the Alte Hauptpost , which is also listed . In view of the financial situation in Saarland, it is still unclear whether and when the deficiencies will be rectified.
Floor plan and design
The building of the former French embassy is located on a 25,000 square meter site on the southern bank of the Saar. The building complex is divided into the narrow, one-hip, eight-storey administration high-rise and the three-storey low-rise building attached to the east, which is used for representation and gathering, living and management. The distribution of the elevated administration high-rise in the north towards the Saar enabled a spacious garden in the south. The representative access was from the north via Saaruferstraße into the courtyard of honor formed by the U-shaped arrangement of the low-rise buildings, which was once closed to the north by a 25-meter-long greenhouse. The high-rise was served from the former Weststrasse along a long, narrow pergola running in north-south direction to the adjacent park. The residential and commercial wing to the east was accessed from the east via Keplerstrasse.
The 100-meter-long and only eight-meter-wide high-rise slab is closed vertically in the northwest by the staircase tower with the elevator and sanitary rooms protruding from the facade. The two-hip low-rise building attached to the east is divided into five three-story components. The connecting tract between the administration tower and the reception building delimits the courtyard to the west and was used as the seat of the consul general, as an office and archive building. The reception building forms the central axis of the courtyard with the two-story foyer and the halls facing the garden with the ambassador's room and the associated ancillary rooms. The garden hall can be used together with the foyer as the central reception room of the embassy, which at the same time can be divided into smaller halls by the folding walls that extend across the longitudinal walls to the reception hall. The farm building, arranged between the reception building and the representative residential wing, closes the courtyard off to the east.
The high-rise slab rests on the pylon-like pillars arranged in the ground floor zone at a center distance of 9.20 meters, which clearly separate the administration floors from the garden zone. Only part of the ground floor, the staircase in the north-west and the part of the building between the three-flight main staircase and the eastern side staircase to the adjoining three-story low-rise building, has been expanded. The so-called “fifth facade” (top view of the roof) is formed by the recessed elevated flat roof of the eighth floor with the canteen and a dining room that opens onto the roof terrace.
Facades
The horizontal floor slabs with the ribbon windows of the south-facing office rooms are vertically subdivided by slim reinforced concrete columns in a grid of 1.20 meters. The ceilings with integrated sun protection that can be seen on the facade are set back between the vertical supports in the south - in contrast to the north facade, where the windows are framed by parapets. The stairwell on the west facade is illuminated over all floors through a vertical window wall, filled with a delicate concrete frame construction. The location of the access corridor along the north facade, the vertical stair tower in the west and the low-rise buildings with different uses require differently designed facades. Structured window areas alternate excitingly with closed or high-rectangular perforated facades.
Monument value
The embassy building, created by Georges-Henri Pingusson in masterful architectural detail of the modern, breaks away from the traditional existing norms and conventions of the time. The building complex, which is strictly designed in terms of aesthetics and asceticism, impressively documents the age of speed and technology.
literature
- Simon Texier: Georges-Henri Pingusson Architecte (1894-1978). Éditions Verdier, ISBN 2-86432-480-6 .
- Marlen Dittmann, Dietmar Kolling: Georges-Henri Pingusson and the building of the French embassy in Saarbrücken , Verlag St. Johann, ISBN 3-938070-67-6 .
- Alfred Werner Maurer : Georges-Henri Pingusson - an architect of the Union des Artistes Modernes (UAM). Philologus Verlag, Basel.
- Nils Minkmar: Asking for a Moses from outside . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of October 28, 2014
- Commerçon advertises the former French embassy: “Pingusson building is built history.” Press release from the Saarland Ministry of Education and Culture of October 17, 2014, accessed on April 12, 2017.
- Burgard, Paul: "The Message from Another World". In: Saargeschichte | n , No. 1.17 (issue 46), published by the Historical Association for the Saar Region eV and the State Association of the Historical-Cultural Associations of the Saarland eV, ISSN 1866-573x, pp. 20–24