House to light
The Haus zum Licht is one of the last late Gothic and therefore most valuable buildings in Frauenfeld , Freiestrasse 4. To the east is the Haus zum Schwert (house numbers 6–8). According to the inscription on the reconstructed archway "Zum Licht 1598", it was one of the few buildings to survive the two city fires of 1771 and 1788 unscathed. In 1969 it was placed under federal protection as "particularly valuable".
Building description
The four-storey, massive sandstone building, which was originally built as a mansion, now forms the corner house of the southern row of houses in Freiestrasse as an eaves head building facing west. While the two fronts on the ground floor were converted several times - last reduced again after 1880 in 1968/69 - the window structure on the upper floors is still true to the original: two symmetrically mirrored staggered windows on the first floor are particularly worth mentioning. On the second floor, the window structure is recorded without graduation. This artfully divides the front of the house. The window areas are unusually large for the time, so the light entering the house should have been remarkably bright. A connection to the name of the house is obvious, but cannot be proven.
The building, which is now plastered white, had various historicizing, ornamental grisaille paintings up until 1939 as well as three scenic representations of the Frauenfeld founding legend above the windows of the second floor: “v. Seeing Br [a] utwerbung ”,“ Building the Castle ”and“ v. Kyburg's handover ”.
In the 1950s and 1960s the house was about to be demolished because the city council believed that the building, which had become dilapidated, should give way to a road widening. With the help of the federal government, it was placed under protection and restored, primarily through the commitment of the city keeper Albert Knoepfli. In 2010 it turns out that the restoration from the 1960s was not carried out professionally. In particular, the windows and Gothic window reveals on the upper floor had serious damage, which made a complete renovation necessary. Obviously, cement-based fillers were used at the time. The color gray was recognized as originally after the completion of the partly massive surface treatment of window profiles and walls and was therefore used again in summer 2011.
The rooms on the aisle side have been preserved, the rear rooms were "rebuilt in 1969 in an undemanding manner".
history
The house stands in a place that has always been considered built on since Frauenfeld was founded. At that time it belonged to the influential, noble Hofmeister family, from whose line Nikolaus , Bishop of Constance, also emerged. When the Hofmeister family died out, ownership passed to Heinrich Muntprat IV (1450–1501). As early as 1458, his family had acquired the Spiegelberg property near Wetzikon TG , which is why the neighboring house, which also belonged to the Muntprat property, was called “Spiegelhof” in Frauenfeld. A house by Uli Wüest, which Mundprat had demolished and rebuilt in 1498, was attached to the Spiegelhof. From then on, the Muntprats no longer lived in the Spiegelhof, which became the bailiff's residence from 1504, but in their new building called “Licht”. Frauenfeld had become the permanent seat of the federal Vogt in Thurgau at exactly the turn of the century, namely in 1499.
From 1546 ownership of the “Licht” was passed to the Landenberg family of ministers, and in 1592 to Caspar Müller, who rebuilt or expanded the property until 1598 and used it as a mansion. Müller had been a member of the Small Council since 1591, governor from 1599–1609 and mayor of Frauenfeld in 1610 and 1611. He probably succumbed to the plague in 1611, which claimed 326 lives that year. In the English manor house Nonsuch Mansion in Cheam , a district of the London borough of Sutton , Surrey , near London, a glass window donated by a Caspar Müller and his wife has been preserved, the inscription reads: “Caspar Müller Lieutenants vñd des Raths zu Frawenfelld vnd Ellsbeth Gsellhenßin sin marital Gmahell · 1601 ”. The window is part of a three-winged window immediately to the right of the main entrance and probably came to England through the antique trade as early as the 19th century in the course of secularization .
After Caspar's death, the property passed to his son Hans Melchior (1596–1660), who also held high offices in the city: town bailiff, judge, town ensign, builder and councilor. His son Hans (1618–1668) was also a councilor as a goldsmith. Hans' heirs, his sons Melchior (1649–1734) and Leonhard, were craftsmen and each shared the house in half. With such a house purchase, high city offices were open to the residents, which was otherwise only the right of the citizens belonging to the Frauenfeld community.
This division into the upper floor "with fire and smoke", i.e. the right to be elected to the Small Council, and the lower floor, where the descendants of the millers lived until well into the 19th century and some of their crafts there exercised, these two halves of the house even passed to different families.
The gable side of the Haus zum Licht was supplemented in 1794 by a new corner house, the "New Spiegelhofhaus". The narrow passage Holdertor was narrowed to only five meters to the bear opposite. With the Wilerbahn established in 1878 and a little later increasing car traffic, the building became a serious obstacle to traffic. With the planned demolition of the Spiegelhof, in the course of urban expansion and urbanism , there was a threat that the house would also be included in the light in Frauenfeld. Ten competition designs were submitted in 1926. First place went to the local architecture firm Brenner & Stutz , which had planned according to the “old German style” with arcades on the ground floor, rich windows and tiered bay windows. The basic value for the Spiegelhof at that time was around 62,000 francs, for the Haus zum Licht it was 99,000 francs. However, the municipal administration only opted for the "small solution" without a light house, and in the vote as a citizens' proposal it was then completely rejected. In 1944 a new ideas competition came up, as a result of which in 1950 the Spiegelhof was bought by the building insurance company of the canton of Thurgau with the aim of expanding the passage. The small solution was not implemented until 1969, the Haus zum Licht remained unaffected despite massive structural damage, but it was placed under protection by the monument office as part of the investigations of the building substance.
With the demolition of the New Spiegelhof, the house towards the light received its free gable side to the west again.
literature
- INSA , Volume 4, p. 112
- Urs Frankhauser: A case for ... The Thurgau Memorial Foundation. Office for the Preservation of Monuments of the Canton of Thurgau. Schwabe Verlag, Basel 2012, ISBN 978-3-7965-2887-3 , p. 94f.
- Angelus Hux : Frauenfeld that's how it used to be. Bürgergemeinde Frauenfeld 2013, ISBN 978-3-0378-9006-6 , pp. 243-258
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d Angelus Hux: Frauenfeld that's how it used to be.
- ↑ a b inventory of old buildings and sites in the canton of Thurgau. Editor: Preservation of monuments and inventory of art monuments in the canton of Thurgau, Frauenfeld, September 1991, Volume 2
- ↑ INSA, p. 112
- ^ Franz Karl: The great Ravensburger trading company . franz-karl.net, October 4, 2012
- ^ History of the Bürgergemeinde Frauenfeld , Bürgergemeinde Frauenfeld. P. 3
- ↑ Helmut Maurer : The St. Stephan Abbey in Konstanz , Volume 1. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 1981, ISBN 3-11-008386-8 , p. 256
Coordinates: 47 ° 33 '20 " N , 8 ° 53' 53" E ; CH1903: 709 835 / two hundred sixty-eight thousand two hundred and twenty-five