State district heating and electricity company

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District heating and electricity plant

The state district heating and electricity plant was a thermal power station in Dresden . Until it was destroyed by the air raids on Dresden on February 13, 1945, it was located west of the (also destroyed) Hotel Bellevue and northwest of the Semperoper on Große Packhofstraße (roughly at the location of today's functional building on the back of the opera house on the corner of Terrassenufer and Bernhardt -von-Lindenau-Platz).

Postcard motif of the terrace bank , including the Hausmannsturm (residential palace), the Catholic court church , the Semperoper and the power station (1906)

history

In January 1895, King Albert and his ministers decided to install a heating system in the previously unheated Catholic Court Church . A first project for heating with coal was rejected by the chief building officer Julius Temper on June 8, 1895 due to fire protection considerations. Temper then came up with the idea of ​​building the heat generation system outside the court church and transporting the heat to the church with a steam pipe. This project was presented to the Saxon state parliament in 1896 as the 25th royal decree. It was considered desirable, but not necessarily urgent, to be filed away by MPs. In November 1897 the now better founded project was approved by the state parliament as the 27th royal decree; According to the revised planning, the district heating and electricity plant should serve to supply a total of 18 state buildings in its vicinity with electrical energy and district heating , including:

With regard to the other historical buildings and the works of art stored in them, the central energy supply is to be seen as a fire protection measure; the opera house previously had 24 individual fireplaces or stoves. A district heating supply to this extent and in this spatial expansion was largely new technical territory and required intensive preliminary planning.

First of all, a technical preliminary draft was drawn up in the state building administration under the direction of Temper; Then an architecture competition was announced, from which the design by the renowned Dresden architects William Lossow and Hermann Viehweger emerged victorious. Construction began in February 1899 and in December 1900 the plant was put into operation; the construction work on the building was not completed until March 1901. In order not to disturb the city silhouette (“ Canaletto view ”) too much, the industrial building was given a facade made of Elbe sandstone , and the required chimney was designed as a tower with a viewing platform. The construction costs for buildings and technical equipment were put at around 3 million marks in 1903 .

In 1928 the power station became the property of the city of Dresden. After the construction of a district heating pipeline from the Westkraftwerk on Schweriner Straße, the former heating power station was only used as a converter station. The chimney or tower that was no longer needed was removed around 1935.

The building was used by the energy supply company as a steam distribution station and functional building until 1977. On May 31, 1978 it was blown up and demolished. A modern building was inserted at this point, which is used as a rehearsal stage, functional building and administrative headquarters. To this day only the historic district heating channel to the castle has been preserved.

Trivia

In the first years of operation, oily cleaning rags were burned on the occasion of the regular photo sessions, which produced a particularly "beautiful" black smoke.

literature

  • The architecture of the XX. Century , 3rd year 1903, plate 25 (illustration).
  • Dresden. (= Values ​​of our homeland , volume 42.) Akademie Verlag, Berlin 1985
  • Tilo Richter: Industrial architecture in Dresden. Kiepenheuer, Leipzig 1997, ISBN 3-378-01019-3 , p. 73 (mentioned in the text and in note 61).
  • Helmut Gust / DREWAG-Stadtwerke Dresden GmbH: 100 years of district heating in Dresden, Dresden 2000

Web links

Commons : Former thermal power station Dresden, Altstadt  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Coordinates: 51 ° 3 '20.38 "  N , 13 ° 44' 4.76"  E