Bernheimer House
The Bernheimer-Haus (also Palais Bernheimer or Bernheimer-Palais ) is a residential and commercial building in Munich , Lenbachplatz 3. It was built by Friedrich von Thiersch in 1888/89 , the facade comes from Thiersch's student at the time, Martin Dülfer . The building is considered to be the “first representative New Baroque building in Munich” and a model for a type of Munich office building. It is a listed building .
history
The Lenbachplatz was built on the abandoned western town fortifications Munich . It lies north of the Stachus and merges into Maximiliansplatz to the northeast . On the western side out of town there are three generous and stylistically coherent buildings from the period between 1887 and 1905. The Bernheimer Palais was the first of them and when the area was upgraded, it was the model for the new buildings on the neighboring properties whose earlier, simpler buildings were demolished.
Lehmann Bernheimer founded a business for high-quality textiles in Munich's old town in 1864 and constantly expanded its range to include luxury goods from the living area. From 1882 he was purveyor to the court of the Bavarian royal family. He planned a representative new building outside the old town, which is still characterized by the medieval floor plan, and in 1887 acquired a small café with a beer garden, which was run by an Englishman and was therefore called the English Café . This stretched between Ottostraße and Lenbachplatz, with the building set back on Ottostraße. The beer garden at Lenbachplatz encompassed the full width of the property and the Bernheimer office building was built on it. How much Bernheimer was integrated into the highest circles of Munich society is evident from the fact that the ceremonial opening of his office building was carried out in December 1889 by Prince Regent Luitpold . In February 1897, a fire broke out in the basement, severely damaging inventory and parts of the building. At Whitsun 1897, the shop was able to reopen; the rear café building was integrated into the building during the renovation. At the turn of the century, Bernheimer added antiques, tapestries and high-quality carpets to its range. As the business grew, the space was again insufficient. Therefore, in 1909/10, the office building was supplemented by a new building on the rear facing Ottostraße. Lehmann Bernheimer's son Otto Bernheimer has been running the company since 1918 . During National Socialism, the company was initially protected by the fact that Otto Bernheimer was the honorary consul of Mexico. After destruction and threats in the November pogroms on November 9, 1938, the company was Aryanized and the Bernheimer family were first imprisoned in the Dachau concentration camp and then forced to emigrate.
The building was damaged in the Second World War , in particular the roof structure with the tower tower collapsed. After the war, Otto Bernheimer, who had returned from Venezuela for the first time in 1946 , received the palace back as part of the restitution . He had the roof restored in a simplified form and rented out large parts of the building, while he rebuilt his business from October 1948. A cinema was installed on the ground floor, which later became a dance hall. Bernheimer increasingly developed the furniture store into an antiques and art trade. In 1977 the business was taken over by Otto Bernheimer's grandson Konrad O. Bernheimer , who specialized in old masters from the 16th to the 19th century and renamed the company Bernheimer Fine Old Masters .
In 1987 Konrad O. Bernheimer sold the building in order to be able to pay off his co-heirs and supplement his art trade. The buyer was the building contractor Jürgen Schneider . He commissioned the architect Alexander von Branca to redesign the interior of the palace in a modern way while at the same time, extremely complex and listed renovation of the exterior. When Schneider's real estate empire collapsed in 1993 due to massive fraud, Deutsche Bank took over the Bernheimer Palais as the main creditor and had it completed. The cost of the renovation is estimated at well over 100 million DM , 32 million alone amounted to outstanding craftsmen's bills from the Schneider affair. The most expensive part was the faithful reconstruction of the roof with the tower dome. It was not until 1999 that the bank was able to resell the building to Robert Arnold, the heir and then partner of Arnold & Richter Cine Technik .
On the ground floor of the building, now also known as the Lenbach-Palais or Palais am Lenbachplatz , there are shops facing Lenbachplatz in the direction of Ottostraße. There are offices above.
architecture
The office building on Lenbachplatz
Lehmann Bernheimer commissioned the prominent Munich architect and professor Friedrich von Thiersch with his office building. Thiersch's student at the time, Martin Dülfer, designed the facade as his first work. Thiersch valued his colleague so much that he decided to forego his own, already finished facade design in Dülfer's favor. This is considered unusual, as the design of the facades was considered particularly demanding at the time and was reserved for experienced architects. The cost of the construction is put at 900,000 marks. Dülfer is said to have been the site manager for the project.
structure
The building is characterized by a shop zone extending over two floors with an unusually large shop window for the time. There are three residential floors above it. The facade to Lenbachplatz is structured by three risalits . The central risalit extends the full height and ends in a semicircular gable. A slender roof turret with a lantern and an onion helmet rises from the roof in the form of semitons based on the French model . The building has three window axes to the left and right of the central projection. The left corner risalit is rounded because of the shape of the property, on the right side a courtyard passage was necessary on the ground floor, which is integrated into the corner risalits. The facade is made of light limestone from the Danube and is considered the first significant Neo-Baroque in Munich.
The central projection is strongly structured and protrudes twice in front of the facade. Above the portal with a large arch are two allegorical figures on a blown gable , trade on the left, art on the right. The gable parts are supported by Ionic double columns. Further Ionic double columns flank the central axis on the second and third floors. They carry the cornice with cranked ends. Above the center window of the first floor, a name tag says L. Bernheimer - K. b. Purveyors to the court above are two lions holding the Bavarian coat of arms. The large semicircular gable protrudes over the eaves. A sculptor Vogel is named as the creator of the relief, who could be August Vogel . The illustration shows personifications of the four continents as a motif of world trade in front of a rising sun.
The two-storey shopping area is a skeleton construction on beams made of rolled iron . Therefore, the sales rooms could be designed without partition walls, which is expressed in a spaciousness of the spatial effect that could not previously be achieved. On the back, the space between the adjoining café building as a sales hall for carpets was covered with a glass roof that broke through a curved, cantilevered iron staircase with two arms that connected the sales floors.
The three full floors above the shop were inhabited. Each of the floors consisted of two upper-class apartments, which were accessed by two stairwells with spiral staircases on the narrow sides. On the lower floor, the royal chamberlain, Karl Fugger von Babenhausen, moved into the two combined apartments with a total of 28 rooms, the two apartments on the middle floor were occupied by the Bernheimer family themselves, and Lujo Brentano moved into the third .
Influences
The first draft showed a central square dome and a tower with another dome at the southeast corner. Thiersch then took up the square dome in the immediate vicinity of the Palace of Justice, which was built between 1890 and 1897 . The slim roof turret was finally created for the Bernheimer house. Von Thiersch mentions the guild house of the builders on the Grote Markt in Brussels as a model for the cubature and the semicircular gable . The central projection adopts the Baroque forms of the palace in the Great Garden in Dresden and thus indirectly from the Louvre in Paris. The tower dome is considered an elegant further development of the Asamkirche in Münchner Sendlinger Straße.
Dülfer's facade combines traditional baroque motifs with innovative eclecticism . The individual elements of the facade are baroque, but the asymmetry of the left corner risalit would not have been possible if it had been baroque. The iron girders of the shop zone, which surround the large window areas without cladding, are eminently modern design features.
The building became the model for the subsequent redevelopment of the two neighboring properties, as well as the Mathäser and the “Russischer Hof” hotel in the neighborhood , both of which were destroyed in the war. The building also shaped the style of large parts of Munich's architecture. The clear separation between the ground floor with shops and large-format shop windows and the clad floors above with apartments or offices became the model for the typical Munich commercial building.
But the Bernheimer house also looked exemplary across the region. It was featured and praised in all the specialist magazines. An office building in Budapest for New York Insurance is a replica of the Bernheimer house in Munich. The Budapest building comes from Flóris Korb , who knew Dülfer from a joint training station.
The new building on Ottostraße
Shortly after 1895, the café closed on the rear part of the property on Ottostraße. Bernheimer bought it and in the following years also the two neighboring properties, so that the entire block between Lenbachplatz and Ottostraße belonged to him. The café building was a neo-renaissance building with large arched windows and a ground floor in a rustic style. Bernheimer initially used the ground floor and the first floor of the former café as additional sales areas for his ever-expanding trade in carpets and art objects. Then he had the two neighboring buildings torn down and in 1907 commissioned a new building to extend the building from Lenbachplatz to Ottostraße and to integrate the former café. The order was again received from Thiersch, with his employee Heinrich Lömpel taking over the preparatory work .
The extension extends over 81 m along Ottostraße and takes up the structure of the café building. Thiersch designed a structure that appears symmetrical at first glance. A middle section was placed on the building in the southwest, on the other side of which another wing of not quite the same length as the café follows. The wings are four-story, the corners and the middle are five-story. Complete symmetry was not achieved, because so that the new north-west wing could have modern, large-format windows, it only has six window axes, compared to seven in the former café. In addition, two small, coupled windows have been preserved for each window axis in the former café building.
While the facade of the main areas is plastered and only slightly structured, the corner projections and above all the central section have been designed more elaborately. All three have fluted pilasters over the full height of the upper floors, which end in indicated Corinthian capitals . The three window axes of the central part are also decorated with stucco. Here on the first floor there is the tapestry hall, which extends over two floors and which is also lit through arched windows that extend over the full height of the room. The area above the arches is adorned with stucco fields with fruit baskets surrounded by putti . On the fourth floor, which only the middle section and the corner projections reach, the windows are delimited by shield-shaped pilaster strips . Sample rooms on the 4th floor were an exceptional offer to customers. With strips of fabric that could be moved in ceiling rails, rooms the size of the customer's apartment were divided off. Furniture and home textiles could then give the customer the impression of the pieces in his own house. The cost of the new building is given as 1,050,000 marks.
At Bernheimer's request, the courtyard between the original commercial building and the extension was designed in the Italian Renaissance style based on the model of the Bargello in Florence. It was given a flight of stairs, several loggias and columns. Its purpose was to present art objects particularly effectively in this environment. Spolia of old portals, coats of arms and reliefs were built into the facades .
literature
- Dieter Klein: Martin Dülfer. Pioneer of German Art Nouveau architecture. (= Workbooks of the Bavarian State Office for Monument Preservation , Volume 8.), Verlag Lipp, Munich 1981, ISBN 3-87490-531-4
- Konrad O. Bernheimer: Narwhal Tooth and Old Masters . Hoffmann and Campe 2013, ISBN 978-3-455-50280-0
- Heinrich Habel, Johannes Hallinger, Timm Weski: State capital Munich - center (= Bavarian State Office for Monument Preservation [Hrsg.]: Monuments in Bavaria . Volume I.2 / 1 ). Karl M. Lipp Verlag, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-87490-586-2 , p. 457-461 .
- Martin Höppl: Change in square design concepts in the 19th century. The Max-Joseph-Platz and the Lenbachplatz in Munich . Munich 2009, especially pp. 66–130. (pdf of the text part of the master’s thesis on the homepage of the university library of the LMU Munich)
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Klein 1981, p. 24 f.
- ↑ List of monuments Munich 303890
- ^ Richard Bauer , Michael Brenner : Jewish Munich . CH Beck 2006, ISBN 978-3-406-54979-3 , p. 129
- ↑ Bavarian State Library online: Ludwig Bernheimer , as of March 20, 2014
- ↑ Süddeutsche Zeitung: New Lord in the Palace , April 20, 2004, page 34
- ↑ a b Klein 1981, p. 8
- ↑ a b Klein 1981, p. 24
- ↑ a b c Bavarian Architects and Engineers Association (Ed.): Munich and its buildings 1912, pp. 337–339
- ↑ a b c Klein 1981, p. 25
- ↑ Konrad O. Bernheimer: Narwal Tooth and Old Masters . Hoffmann and Campe 2013, ISBN 978-3-455-50280-0 , p. 33
- ↑ Konrad O. Bernheimer: Narwal Tooth and Old Masters . Hoffmann and Campe 2013, ISBN 978-3-455-50280-0 , pp. 35f., 57
Coordinates: 48 ° 8 ′ 28.3 " N , 11 ° 34 ′ 5.4" E