Teacher's house

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Teacher's house
Teacher's house

Teacher's house

Data
place Berlin center
architect Hermann Henselmann
Architectural style New Objectivity
Construction year 1961-1964
height 54 m
Floor space 660 m²
Coordinates 52 ° 31 '17 "  N , 13 ° 24' 59"  E Coordinates: 52 ° 31 '17 "  N , 13 ° 24' 59"  E

The teacher's house (short: HdL ) is a building in Berlin 's Mitte district on Alexanderplatz . It is located at Alexanderstraße 9, until June 2006 the address was Alexanderplatz 4 . The building ensemble also includes the adjacent, laterally recessed congress hall , a two-storey building with a square floor area of ​​2500 square meters, which has been called the Berlin Congress Center (bcc) since September 2003 .

history

Teachers' clubhouse

Alexanderplatz around 1908 (from left to right: teachers' association, police headquarters , Aschinger )

In October 1908, the teachers' club house , designed by Hans Toebelmann and Henry Groß , was inaugurated next to the Bunter Brettl at Alexanderstraße 41 . The client was the Berlin teachers' association , which served the commercial building with a pastry shop and restaurant on the ground floor as a source of rental income for its association. At the rear of the property up to Kurzen Strasse, the association had its administration building and a hotel wing for association members as well as a hall for events. Among other things, the funeral service for Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg took place here on February 2, 1919, and the unification party conference of the KPD and USPD on December 4, 1920 . The extensive pedagogical library of the teachers 'association survived the two world wars as the German teachers' library and is incorporated into the library for research on the history of education .

New building after the Second World War

Teacher's house during construction, 1963

After the previous building was destroyed in World War II , the teacher's house was built in 1961–1964 a little further northeast. It was the first skyscraper on Alexanderplatz. The foundation stone for the building by the team of architects Hermann Henselmann , B. Geyer and J. Streitparth was laid on December 12, 1961, and it was opened on September 9, 1964.

building

The 54 meter high house of the teacher is a twelve-storey high - rise in the shape of a box with a floor area of ​​44 mx 15 m, a typical solution for post-war modern architecture in the sense of the international style . It was built in a steel frame construction with a glass-aluminum curtain wall . The special feature of the building is a surrounding frieze made of 800,000 mosaic stones in the area of ​​the third and fourth floors, popularly known as the "belly band". This frieze with the name Our Life , designed by Walter Womacka based on Mexican murals, shows depictions of social life in the GDR . With a height of seven meters and a length of 127 meters, it is one of the largest works of art in Europe. The entire building complex has been a listed building since the 1990s .

use

The teacher's home with the installation Blinkenlights ( 3D - rendering )

The teacher's house was built as a meeting place for educators, among other things the Berlin Educators Club met here . On the third and fourth floors - behind the surrounding frieze - was the Pedagogical Central Library, one of the most important pedagogical libraries in Europe with 650,000 scripts. The associated reading room was on the fifth floor. After the end of the GDR, the library was converted into the library for research on educational history .

A café and a restaurant were located on the first and second floors. Other public areas were a bookstore , event rooms and a cabaret with a bar. At the same time as the new teacher's house was opened, the adjacent congress hall with its round dome was completed.

After the political change , the building became the property of the State of Berlin in September 1991 , which housed parts of the Senate school administration there. From 1994 the building was rented for various purposes and finally sold to the Berlin-Mitte housing association (WBM) at the end of 2001 for 8.18 million euros .

Between 2002 and 2004, the complex with the adjacent congress hall was completely restored, modernized and partially rebuilt for 49 million euros. The usable area could be doubled by reducing the size of the stairwells. A glass pavilion was built on the roof, which belongs to the offices on the twelfth floor.

In the period from September 2001 to February 2002, December 2003 to January 2004, in October 2004 and again in October 2005 the building was used for the interactive light installation Blinkenlights and from 2003 to 2011 for the annual Chaos Communication Congress of the Chaos Computer Club .

Since 2008, the building has been the corporate headquarters of the largest supra-regional German daycare provider, the Fröbel Group .

literature

  • Elmar Kossel: Hermann Henselmann and the modern age. A study on the reception of modernity in the architecture of the GDR. Edited by Adrian von Buttlar u. Kerstin Wittmann-Englert (= research on post-war modernism in the field of art history at the Institute for Art Science and Historical Urban Studies at the Technical Univ. Berlin) Langewiesche Publishing House , Königstein i. Ts. 2013, ISBN 978-3-7845-7405-9 .

Web links

Commons : House of the Teacher  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. Gernot Jochheim: Der Berliner Alexanderplatz , Links Berlin 2006, ISBN 978-3-86153-391-7 , p. 186.
  2. ^ Joachim Schulz, Werner Graebner: Berlin. Capital of the DDR. Architecture Guide GDR , VEB Verlag für Bauwesen Berlin, 1974; P. 53.
  3. The little stones are polished. In: Berliner Zeitung , October 14, 2003, accessed on June 16, 2013.