House Minerva

The Minerva house is a residential building in the old town of Konstanz (Hüetlinstraße 21), which has preserved a façade design of late historicism that has largely been preserved. Contemporary interior fittings and a “photographic studio” in the rear building document living and working in the late 19th century. The quality and completeness of the historical substance justified the inclusion of the house in the list of monuments.

description

The Minerva house is located in a late medieval street in the southern Konstanz suburb of Stadelhofen. The simple building is three-storey and eaves with a central axis accentuated by a dwelling. The facade painting, kept in the forms of the Neo-Renaissance, served as an advertisement for a painting shop in the house; therefore it shows a painter's palette, the guild coat of arms of the painters and the house names in Renaissance cartouches, which are connected by garlands. Other decorative elements are baroque putti and women's faces in contemporary Art Nouveau style.

history

The house was built in 1895/96 according to plans by the Konstanz architects Ehinger and Walther on behalf of the decorative painter Hermann Apel, who designed the street facade and the stairwell as an advertising medium. He used mineral colors , which are also called germ colors after their inventor Adolf Wilhelm Keim (1851–1913) and which are characterized by their special weather resistance. Around 1970 the facade was clad in Eternit . After its removal in 2008, the largely preserved layer of paint underneath was carefully consolidated, cleaned and only punctually repaired. This makes it one of the very rare examples of a facade painting from the end of the 19th century that has been preserved in its original state without later revisions.

literature

• Dörthe Jakobs, Robert Lung, Frank Mienhardt: Rediscovered behind Eternit shingles . Preservation of a painted Wilhelminian style facade in the old town of Constance . In: Preservation of monuments in Baden-Württemberg . Vol. 41, Issue 3, 2012, pp. 167-172. Available at: [1]

Coordinates: 47 ° 39 '24.5 "  N , 9 ° 10' 25.7"  E