Building of the Federal Ministry for Post and Telecommunications

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Federal Audit Office (former Federal Ministry for Post and Telecommunications), Rhine side (2013)
Entrance of the building
Town house from 1897

The building of the Federal Ministry for the Post and Telecommunications (officially the property Adenauerallee-Nord ; Adenauerallee 81-83) in Bonn was the seat of the Federal Ministry for the Post and Telecommunications from 1954 to 1988 and the seat of the Foreign Office from 1989 to 1999 . Since 2000 it has been the seat of the Federal Audit Office .

The building complex of 1953-54 stands today as monument under monument protection . It is a stop on the Path of Democracy History Trail .

location

The property is located between Adenauerallee ( Bundesstrasse 9 ) and the banks of the Rhine (Wilhelm-Spiritus-Ufer) south of the Second Fährgasse in the extreme north of the Gronau district and the federal district (former parliament and government district).

history

After its establishment, the Federal Ministry for Post and Telecommunications, like the other ministries that already existed when Bonn was the provisional seat of government of the Federal Republic of Germany, with around 400 employees, was initially based in Frankfurt am Main , the administrative seat of Trizone . According to a decision of January 19, 1950, due to its relatively apolitical character, the Ministry of Post was to be one of the last to move completely to the city of Bonn, which at the time was at full capacity with the accommodation of the federal institutions. Initially, several buildings in Bonn's city center were planned to be the temporary seat of the post office , the core of which was to form the town house (today the old town house ) along with a new building that had yet to be built. As a special federal fund, the Bundespost took part in the reconstruction of the city's old town hall with an interest-bearing loan so that the city administration could vacate parts of the old town hall in the summer of 1950 in favor of the post office. At the end of October 1950, the Federal Cabinet passed the resolution for a new building for the Ministry of Post, which was to be built on land acquired by the federal government at the beginning of the year between Second Fährgasse, Koblenzer Strasse (today Adenauerallee) and the Rhine.

After the classicist Villa Sell / Zitelmann (built in 1843/44) on the building site was torn down, construction began on the new post office in May 1953, based on a design by the architect Josef Trimborn . For the dining room, Charles Crodel created ten cut glass columns. In November 1954, the new building (buildings 08 and 20) was completed, so that the provisional housing of the ministry - until then the official headquarters were on Graurheindorfer Straße in Bonn-Nord - could be completed. It was the first new ministry building in Bonn, but in contrast to the subsequent federal buildings, it was financed from the Bundespost's own funds. The former residential building Adenauerallee 85 from 1897 (building 21) was also included in it.

From 1954 on, the building was initially the seat of the Federal Ministry for Post and Telecommunications, the highest authority in the area of ​​the Deutsche Bundespost . In 1960 the wing on the Rhine was raised by one floor. In 1988 the ministry moved into a new building in the ministerial site Godesberg-Nord ( Robert-Schuman-Platz ) in the district of Hochkreuz on the edge of the Rheinaue , which today houses the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Building and Nuclear Safety . The location on Adenauerallee was abandoned and left to the immediately neighboring Foreign Office , for which the building complex was expanded and expanded to include an underground car park, a canteen section facing the Rhine and a data center on the basis of a 1986/87 two-stage architectural competition among twelve participants the building 08 was completely renovated.

On October 11, 1996, the federal government decided to move the Federal Audit Office, which was moving from Frankfurt am Main to Bonn on the basis of the Berlin / Bonn Act , to the Adenauerallee-Nord property . The office capacities required for this were freed up by the complete move out of the Foreign Office, which relocated its headquarters to Berlin . The second seat of the Foreign Office in Bonn was not located in the Adenauerallee-Nord property, but in the neighboring former main building of the Foreign Office.

Before the Federal Audit Office moved in, only minor renovation work had to be carried out, as the majority had been prepared for the Foreign Office at the end of the 1980s. The necessary work, which was carried out from January to June 2000 and cost 3.9 million euros, included the renewal of the information technology, the replacement of the carpets and the renewal of the paintwork. The so-called “Continent Hall”, formerly a conference room, was converted into a library and a room of the former postage stamp museum ( postage stamp archive ) into a seminar room. Buildings 20 and 21, which were not taken into account in 1988/1989, had to be completely renovated. After the Federal Audit Office moved in, the elevators, the kitchen and the air conditioning were also renovated.

architecture

The former building of the Federal Post Office is a three- or five-story, four-wing and self-contained complex on a square floor plan, which includes 350 office rooms, a conference room, a casino , a library and an exhibition room (building 08). A supplementary wing is attached to it, which can be reached via a bridge (building 21). The three storeys of the main building have identical rows of windows that contribute to the sober appearance of the white plastered building. As an allusion to the worldwide connections of the Post, five bronze animals by the artist Hans Wimmer , which symbolize the five continents, are the only decoration of the building on the upper floor of the conference room wing on the Rhine side . The garden architect Friedrich Schaub from Cologne was responsible for the design of the outdoor facilities .

“The building typical of 1950s architecture with a large entrance hall, the canopy of which rests on thin concrete pillars, is unique today in Bonn. The surrounding green hides the size of the facility. "

- Ingeborg flag (1984)

“As one of the earliest ministries, the architecturally high-quality building of the Federal Post Office is one of the most important testimonies to German post-war history. It combines sophisticated, but the »provisional federal capital« appropriate representation with the functionality of an office building (...). "

- Gisbert Knopp (1986)

“[E] in a massive, broad architectural block with a monotonous facade structure. Only the monumental main entrance hall protruding towards Adenauerallee, the canopy of which rests on slender concrete pillars at the height of the whole building, gives the building its own character and may have contributed to placing the building under monument protection. "

- Frank-Lothar Kroll (1989)

"The Federal Post Office is the first and one of the architecturally most beautiful and authentic monuments of our early Bonn Federal Republic."

- Walter von Lom (2004)

literature

Web links

Commons : Adenauerallee 81–83  - Collection of images

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ List of monuments of the city of Bonn (as of March 15, 2019), p. 3, number A 1111
  2. ↑ a b c d City of Bonn, City Archives (ed.); Helmut Vogt: "The Minister lives in a company car on platform 4": The beginnings of the federal government in Bonn 1949/50
  3. ↑ Olga Sonntag : Villas on the banks of the Rhine in Bonn: 1819–1914 , Bouvier Verlag, Bonn 1998, ISBN 3-416-02618-7 , Volume 2, Catalog (1), pp. 154–158. (also dissertation University of Bonn, 1994)
  4. ^ Address book of the federal capital Bonn 1949/50 . In: City of Bonn, City Archives (ed.); Helmut Vogt: "The Minister lives in a company car on platform 4". The beginnings of the federal government in Bonn 1949/50 , Bonn 1999, ISBN 3-922832-21-0 , p. 208.
  5. ↑ Helmut Vogt: Guardians of the Bonn Republic. The Allied High Commissioners 1949–1955 , Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 2004, ISBN 3-506-70139-8 , p. 226.
  6. ^ A b Gisbert Knopp: Federal Post Office in Danger.
  7. ↑ The Lord Mayor of Bonn (Ed.); Friedrich Busmann : From the parliament and government district to the federal district. A Bonn development measure 1974-2004 . Bonn, June 2004, p. 45.
  8. ^ Hermann Josef Roth : DuMont art travel guide Bonn: from the Roman garrison to the federal capital - art and nature between the Voreifel and the Siebengebirge . DuMont, Cologne 1988, ISBN 978-3-7701-1970-7 , pp. 148/149.
  9. ^ A b Walter von Lom : Foreign Office and Federal Audit Office in Bonn - conversion and redevelopment . In: Federal Office for Building and Regional Planning : Building and Space. Yearbook 2004 , Ernst Wasmuth, Tübingen 2004, ISBN 3-8030-0640-6 , pp. 42–49.
  10. ^ Ingeborg flag: Architecture in Bonn after 1945 .
  11. ^ Frank-Lothar Kroll: Federal capital Bonn. A Danaer present? In: Federal Ministry for Building, Regional Planning and Urban Development (Ed.): Forty Years Federal Capital Bonn 1949–1989 . CF Müller, Karlsruhe 1989, ISBN 3-7880-9780-9 , pp. 92-115 (here: pp. 99/100).

Coordinates: 50 ° 43 ′ 40.9 ″  N , 7 ° 6 ′ 39.6 ″  E