House on the Alb
The house on the Alb in Bad Urach on the northern edge of the Swabian Alb was built in 1929/30 as a merchant holiday home in the classic modern style. After a varied history of use, it has been a listed building since 1983 and has been used as a conference center for the Baden-Württemberg State Center for Political Education since 1992 .
history
In 1911, the city council of Bad Urach decided to provide the German Society for Merchant Recreation Homes (DGK) with a building site for the construction of a merchant recreation home in a beautiful location free of charge. The city hoped that this would increase tourism. In 1916, the company actually decided on the location in Bad Urach. Martin Elsaesser won the first architectural competition for the house in 1916 . The foundation stone of the house on Uracher Albtrauf was laid in 1916 in the presence of King Wilhelm II of Württemberg and his wife Queen Charlotte . The house was to be named Wilhelm-Charlotte-Heim on the occasion of the twenty-five year reign . But the First World War and inflation ultimately prevented the implementation of the first plans and the company leased the Hotel Post in Urach as makeshift accommodation.
Construction could not begin until August 1929, according to new plans by the architect Adolf Gustav Schneck . This time Martin Elsaesser sat on the jury together with Peter Bruckmann from the Deutscher Werkbund , the Stuttgart architect Paul Bonatz , Georg Goldstein, Robert Bosch and Eduard Breuninger . As early as July 1930, the house on the Alb was opened as a merchant recreation home. The speech was given by the Württemberg State President Eugen Bolz , who described the house as a "symbol of peace".
The building owner and operator of the house was the German Society for Merchant Recreation Homes (DGK) based in Wiesbaden. The DGK was founded by Joseph Baum in 1910 to enable commercial employees and financially weak self-employed people to take annual vacation for little money. The managing director and director of the company since 1912 was Georg Goldstein, who had a doctorate in economics from Breslau . The company only operated the house as a holiday home for trade and industry for three years .
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Immediately after the National Socialists came to power in 1933, the Society for Merchant Recreation Homes was brought into line and integrated into the German Labor Front . The house on the Alb did not become a " Kraft-durch-Freude -Heim" and could continue to be occupied independently by the DGK, but the company's board of directors was "cleaned up": the Jewish director Georg Goldstein was released, in 1942 in a Jewish house in Admitted to Frankfurt , deported to Theresienstadt with his wife in 1943 and then murdered in Auschwitz . A stumbling block in front of the house on the Alb reminds of him .
Urach tourism experienced a significant boom with the KdF home. The number of annual overnight stays rose to 60,000.
From 1939 to 1945 the house was a reserve hospital, between 1945 and 1950, initially under French occupation for a short time, it was a holiday colony for children from France, and then a care hospital for the face and jaw injuries.
There has been a swimming pool in front of the building since 1930. After the municipal outdoor pool was destroyed in an air raid in 1945, this pool was the only usable swimming pool in Bad Urach until 1952.
After a renovation, the house was used again as a rest home for the DGK at the beginning of the 1950s. But the Spartan standard of the house and the changing holiday wishes of the population attracted fewer and fewer holidaymakers. When the DGK ceased operations in 1974 due to financial difficulties, the building was leased. The first tenant was the state insurance company, which wanted to use the property for preventive and convalescent cures, which failed due to the poor economic situation. With an occupancy of one third of the available beds, no economic operation was possible, which is why the state insurance company sold the building again in 1976. One year later, in the summer of 1977, the International Meditation Society moved in and founded the TM Academy Haus auf der Alb there . During the time of the meditation society there were other uses, such as a hotel, which was closed in 1985. The meditation society finally left the house completely in 1988.
Already in 1983 the demolition of the now neglected house was threatened, but this was prevented by the monument protection authority. It was entered in the monument book as a “cultural monument of special importance” . At the end of 1985, the state of Baden-Württemberg bought the house on the Alb and invested almost 20 million marks in its modernization and conversion into a conference center for the state center for political education in Baden-Württemberg . The architect for this conversion was Hellmut Kuby from Nürtingen. In 1990 the swimming pool was filled up. It could no longer be operated economically for the educational center. On February 6, 1992, the house was inaugurated by the then Prime Minister Erwin Teufel and handed over to the state headquarters for use. The renovation of the house received the award for exemplary building from the Association of German Architects (BDA) .
architecture
The jury of the architecture competition of 1929 had given the participants some design criteria for the construction: The house should be comfortable and cozy, sunny and airy as well as economical and simple - in order to guarantee the most stimulating and varied relaxation possible.
Adolf Gustaf Schneck, who was finally awarded the contract to build the house, developed his basic design from this: "The first thought when inspecting the building site was for the future residents, the men and women of work. They should feel comfortable here. That's why I thought I first remembered that every room had to look the same. I thought of the beautiful surroundings, of bright and friendly rooms with a large terrace, so that I could always have an unobstructed view of the woods. I also thought that every resident had their own room can bathe in the fresh air and in the sun. The lounges should be on their own, free and wide all around, protruding into the landscape. The residential wing for itself so that the guests are not disturbed by loud noise. The connection forms the economic wing in where the kitchen and administration rooms are located. That was my first thought. "
The result was a building complex that was divided into four units: According to Schneck's design, the most important area of the house was the guest wing with 36 double and 28 single rooms located in corridors over 50 meters long. There was only one row of rooms per floor. This enabled all residents to have a view to the south-east of the Seeburg valley.
To this day, the rooms have been furnished in a simple but functional way: Originally, an entrance area with a washbasin and wall cupboard was separated from the living and sleeping areas by a curtain. A bed, a bedside table, a table and a chair served as furniture. The single rooms were completed by a simple armchair, the double rooms by a " chaise longue ". Schneck, whose main focus was on furniture design, designed all the furniture in the original Haus auf der Alb himself. Furniture should have a simple shape that uses little material. They should be appropriately constructed and allow comfortable sitting or resting. The furniture also corresponded to the design specifications that the jury had made for the architectural competition.
The guest wing is oriented from south-west to north-east - in contrast to the remaining parts of the building complex, which are arranged in a north-south and east-west axis. The three-storey administration building adjoins the guest wing at a 135 ° angle - according to the course of the terrain. The offices, the administrator's apartment, the kitchen and storage rooms were originally located there.
In front of this area to the east are the common rooms (originally the dining room, foyer and sun terrace) in a flat building. It protrudes into the area on pillars, offers a clear view of the valley and the opposite rocky slopes and a view of the swimming pool in front of it. The open base floor with the pillars was used as a lounger and gymnastics hall in close connection with the swimming pool.
The bathroom was given up in 1990 when the house was converted into a conference center for economic reasons. Originally - especially in the early years - it was an unusual attraction. At the inauguration in 1930, the Cannstatt Swimming Club even came to attend water sports demonstrations.
The connecting link between the guest wing, the administration building and the common rooms is a tower, in which the staircase and the tower room as well as a small viewing platform are located. The tower room, accessible via a spiral staircase at the top of the tower, only had the function of giving the guests the best possible view of the Seeburg valley. Today there is an exhibition on the history and architecture of the house in the tower room.
Each part of the building is equipped with window types that should optimally support its respective function. The social rooms have particularly large horizontally divided glass surfaces on the three outer sides, which allow the guests as much view as possible and a close connection to nature and landscape. Through glazed partition walls inside, light penetrates all rooms, including the adjoining hallways. This allows you to see through the whole house again and again.
In the stair tower, transverse ribbon windows offer constantly changing views of the landscape from floor to floor. And in the guest wing, each guest room has a double-winged window and an adjoining glazed door that leads to the terrace. The house and its "heliotropic principle" in 1930 corresponded to the goal of the New Building , that people should expose themselves to light, sun and air, the goal of the life reform movement . The south-facing sun terrace and outdoor pool also served this purpose.
The house on the Alb was built during the Great Depression. Economy and simplicity were therefore not just aesthetic design principles, but an expression of the limited financial possibilities of the DGK. Its director Georg Goldstein pointed out this fact at the inauguration: "(...) it does not pretend to be a castle. It is, if you will, a functional building. Everything in it is primarily aimed at what is functional Certainly, some things could have been even more comfortable, outwardly more glamorous. It is not an art to build lavishly and to use noble materials and to draw on abundant resources. The difficulty of our architect's task was, with modest means, the relative To create the best. "
The footpath between Bad Urach, where many employees lived, and the house on the Alb was called the Himmelsleiter .
literature
- State Center for Civic Education Baden-Württemberg (ed.): Haus auf der Alb , Stuttgart 1994.
- State Center for Civic Education Baden-Württemberg (ed.): Sheets on the history of HOUSE ON THE ALB , sheets 1–8, 2005.
- Eberhard Grunsky: Adolf G. Schneck "House on the Alb" near Urach . In: Monument Preservation in Baden-Württemberg , 11th year 1982, issue 2, pp. 79–87 ( PDF )
- Cornelius Tafel: The architect Adolf Schneck - pioneer of modernism in Stuttgart in the 20s , dissertation Munich 1991
- Dietrich W. Schmidt: The house on the Alb - A monument of functionalism in Württemberg . In: architectura - Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Baukunst 2/1993, pp. 200–221
Web links
Coordinates: 48 ° 29 ′ 4 ″ N , 9 ° 24 ′ 1 ″ E
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d Path through the story to the house on the Alb. State Center for Civic Education Baden-Württemberg, accessed on June 8, 2019 (German).
- ↑ a b c Dietrich Heißenbüttel: "... bathe in fresh air and healing sun" The house on the Alb in Bad Urach by Adolf Gustav Schneck . In: Swabian homeland . No. 2 , 2019, p. 160-167 .
- ↑ a b State Center for Civic Education Baden-Württemberg: Sheets on the history of the HOUSE ON THE ALB . In: leaves 1-8 . Sheet 2, 2005.
- ↑ a b Der Ermstalbote: Uracher Zeitung (ed.): Inauguration ceremony of the merchant's rest home "Haus auf der Alb" . Schwäbisches Tagblatt, Urach July 28, 1930.
- ^ A b c Frank Werner, Dietrich W. Schmidt: Attempts to get closer to the architect Adolf G. Schneck . In: Arno Votteler (Ed.): Adolf G. Schneck - 1883-1971 - Life - Work - Furniture - Architecture . Stuttgart 1983, p. 112 .