Great House of Aachen

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Great House of Aachen
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The Great House of Aachen is probably the oldest surviving residential building in the city of Aachen . Its importance as an architectural monument is that it survived the Aachen city fire of 1656 largely undamaged. The building now houses the International Newspaper Museum .

history

The Great House is located on Pontstrasse , a connecting road that goes back to the Roman settlement plan between the market square and the northern fortifications of the medieval city. The building was created around 1495 by merging two older houses, as evidenced by the inscription in a basket arch of a walled-up door. Heinrich Dollart had bought the so-called House Rupenstein and the neighboring house in 1493 , had both houses demolished and a new house built on the double plot. The two lower floors of today's building date from this period, while the upper floor is from the Renaissance period . The history of the Great House is closely linked to the metal industry , which played an important role in Aachen's economic history. The builder Heinrich Dollart founded a metal works with blast furnace and forge in nearby Stolberg in 1497 , which still bears his name today: Dollart hammer . He himself was executed in 1506 for stealing silver. In the 16th century the house became the property of a trading company from Antwerp and served as a transshipment point for calamine .

After the city ​​fire of 1656 , the city of Aachen acquired the building on Saturday, May 29, 1666. She exchanged it for the Haus zum Pfau and used it as a horse stable and since 1717 as the installation site of the city ​​scales , which had previously been in the large Klüppel since 1656 . During the French and Prussian epochs, the Great House served as a customs office, salt factory, police headquarters, prison and arts and crafts museum. In 1828 Adam Franz Friedrich Leydel drafted a plan to transform it into a girls' school. It was converted into a police headquarters with a prison from 1851 to 1854 by city ​​architect Friedrich Joseph Ark . During the occupation after the end of the First World War, it was the seat of the Belgian army and later the city history museum. The newspaper museum of the city of Aachen has been housed here since 1931.

Comprehensive renovation work brought new details of the building history to light in 2009. So the roof structure of the rear part of the building could be dated to the time immediately after the city fire. A floor from the time the house was built was discovered in the basement.

The renovation of the Great House is part of the Route Charlemagne project , which links the most important monuments and museums of Aachen city center.

List of monuments

In 1977 the Great House of Aachen was entered in the register of monuments by the Rhineland State Conservator :

“Pontstrasse 13 Large House of Aachen, now newspaper
museum 1495;
3-storey late Gothic brick building in 6 wide axes; the window zone of the ground floor (with portal) and the 1st floor faced with bluestone ; Cross-frame window ; on the courtyard side, two-storey wing with stone facing "

Web links

Commons : Newspaper  Museum Aachen - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. Helga Giersiepen: Pontstr. 13 . In: The German inscriptions . DI 32, City of Aachen (1993), No. 44 ( digitized version ).
  2. ^ Hermann Friedrich Macco : The house Klüppel . In: From Aachen's prehistory. Announcements from the association for customers of the Aachen prehistory . Volume 16, No. 1/3, 1903, pp. 9-25, here p. 23 ( digitized version ).
  3. ^ Günther Borchers (Ed.): Landeskonservator Rheinland. List of monuments. 1.1 Aachen city center with Frankenberg quarter . Edited by Volker Osteneck with the assistance of Hans Königs . Rheinland Verlag, Cologne 1977, p. 139.

Coordinates: 50 ° 46 ′ 38.5 "  N , 6 ° 4 ′ 58"  E