Business and broadcasting building of the Südwestdeutsche Rundfunkdienst AG
The business and broadcasting building of the Südwestdeutsche Rundfunkdienst AG was built by the architect Willi Cahn in the 1920s. The building at Eschersheimer Landstrasse 29–33 in the west end of Frankfurt am Main is one of the most important buildings in Frankfurt in the New Objectivity style . It has been used by the Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts since 1955 .
Origin and history
Construction of the 4,000 m² business and broadcasting building of Südwestdeutsche Rundfunkdienst AG in Eschersheimer Landstrasse 29–33, which is still largely in its original state , began in April 1929; It was put into operation on December 15, 1930. The Südwestdeutsche Rundfunkdienst AG Frankfurt am Main (Radio Frankfurt, founded on December 7, 1923) had already five years earlier, on April 1, 1924, from a 57 m² studio in the old post office in Stephanstraße commenced broadcasting. Only three days after it was put into operation on December 18, the first broadcast was already broadcast from the new broadcasting station.
On August 3, 1953, the city of Frankfurt bought the property at Eschersheimer Landstrasse 29-39, including the radio house, for 3 million DM from the Hessischer Rundfunk as the owner at the time. From May 1954, the old broadcasting hall was used as an orchestra rehearsal room for today's University of Music and Performing Arts , and on September 27, 1954, the entire property was given to the university by resolution of the municipal authorities. On February 24, 1955, the university's first public concert took place in the old broadcasting hall.
Building description
From the outside, the broadcasting building looks strictly functional and cubic and has a light facade and a flat roof. The window sills and window sills are given a horizontal emphasis by means of relief-like projecting window cornices and lintels. In terms of sound technology, the building offered completely new and almost sensational solutions thanks to its internal trapezoidal floor plan: While the usual hall shape was adopted in previous similar buildings and the acoustic conditions were attempted to be improved by adding wall cladding or fabric panels, the longitudinal walls were left here not parallel, but convergent to avoid so-called standing waves and to reduce unwanted echo effects. The inner trapezoidal shape is transformed into an orthogonal system on the outside. This is achieved by recesses evenly spaced in the two longitudinal facades.
The entrance to the house was emphasized by a deep, slender canopy that rested on five supports. These supports were clad with a filigree, rectangular steel-glass construction that was backlit and gave the canopy an almost floating impression in the dark. This entrance situation was sacrificed in the context of the new building of the music college when it came to a structural connection from the old to the new building in the early 1990s.
Interior design and technical equipment
The large broadcasting hall itself inside the building has a length of 27 m, an average width of 17 m and a height of 10 m, with the organ at the head end and soundproof control rooms underneath and a gallery on the opposite side . In addition to the main hall, the building also contains two smaller broadcasting halls (one of which is 15 m long, 8 m wide and 5 m high) with a control room or a harmonium for chamber music performances, various orchestral rooms, a library, a canteen and rooms for further technical facilities.
The most modern technology was used throughout the building. The shell is made of reinforced concrete and insulated from all other rooms from the foundations to the roof, while the walls are made of hollow brick walls. In order to keep outside noise at bay, double windows and double doors were built in, and since neither windows nor doors were allowed to be opened during the recordings, a difficult heating and ventilation system was constructed. For this purpose, 30,000 m³ of air per hour were circulated through a suction system in the roof. In summer, this sucked in air was cooled by sprinkling with 70 m³ of water per hour, in winter it was heated, then cleaned and led into the rooms. With the help of this construction, not only the room temperature but also the humidity could be precisely controlled, which is particularly important for the sound purity of the organ. The side walls are paneled with wood as sound-reinforcing walls and the gallery wall is clad in a sound-absorbing manner, while the wall opposite the gallery is built with sound-reflecting material. Even the ceiling of the hall was fluted , probably in the hope of averting unwanted sound reflections . A screen is installed above the organ, which can be lowered for "cinematographic demonstrations" if necessary.
A total of 9,640 m of cable ducts were laid in the building, in which over 50,000 m of cables are housed. The pure microphone network was 18,000 m long, distributed over 28 microphone connections and 25 loudspeaker systems, and 2,700 m of wire were used to charge and discharge the batteries required for the recordings. In addition to the various recording rooms, a so-called fairy tale room was even set up with a projector attached to the ceiling in order to put the narrator in a mood appropriate to the text with the help of appropriate images.
If you go from the new building of the music college to the old building, the amber-colored travertine with a lively, almost wood-like grain immediately catches the eye. This grain is created by the vertical cutting of the rock layers of the travertine blocks; Stones with this cutting technique are called travertine naturale . In addition to the entrance area, this very conspicuous stone can also be found throughout the hallways as a base, in the main staircase as a parapet, in the window sills and in the door reveals. The floor covering in the entrance area and hallway consists of beige terrazzo , which is divided into large-format squares by embedded brass profiles, the flooring of the steps is made of black terrazzo. Black linoleum is flush-mounted in the running line to soften the reverberation and convey a more pleasant walking experience. The brass material is taken up again in the handrail.
The large broadcasting hall itself still has a lot of the original interior. The colorful ornamental window front under the ceiling along the southern long side opposite the hall entrance towards the south is striking. The small, upright yellow and blue glass rectangles form a diamond pattern in an Art Deco look. The window follows the trapezoidal inner floor plan and, together with the recesses in the outer facade, forms a cavity that accommodates a lighting system. The walnut wall paneling with rounded corners has also been preserved in the upper area. For the new ventilation system, individual panels of the paneling were replaced by protruding new ones with ventilation outlets.
The organ already mentioned is attached to the narrow head end of the hall and can disappear behind vertical wooden slats made of walnut. Occasionally, slats that were not made of wood for technical reasons are painted with walnut illusion so as not to disturb the homogeneous impression of the design. The control room and recording room below the organ are now covered by a stage in front. Opposite the organ and the stage is an auditorium and a sound engineering room; the wall here is provided with a special insulation made of Celotex and Insulite , a lightweight concrete block .
The flooring and seating in the broadcasting room have been changed or replaced several times over the years. At times, the floor was covered with a deep-pile carpet to shorten the reverberation time ; today, a parquet floor with a herringbone pattern is installed again.
literature
- Dipl. Ing. Willi Cahn, Frankfurt a. M. Aida-Verlag Gustav Ewald Konrad. Vienna-Berlin 1928.
- Nicole Kerstin Berganski and Andreas Krawczyk: The new Frankfurt transmitter house. Documentation on behalf of the University of Music and Performing Arts / HfMDK. Frankfurt am Main 2009.
- Klaus Strzyz and Roswitha Väth: Wrongly forgotten: the architect Willi Cahn. In: maybrief 52, pp. 4-9.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ The information comes from a typewritten chronicle from the years 1947–1967 from the university library and was made available by Andreas Odenkirchen, head of the university library.
- ↑ All technical information comes from various articles in the Südwestdeutsche Rundfunk-Zeitung 1930 ff., Deutsche Welle , Südfunk (the official program magazine of the Südwestdeutsche Rundfunk-AG for Württemberg and Baden), all from 1931, and the Rundfunk Jahrbuch from 1932, published by the Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft, facsimile in Nicole Kerstin Berganski and Andreas Krawczyk (2009).
Coordinates: 50 ° 7 ′ 12.3 " N , 8 ° 40 ′ 36.5" E