Skyscraper on the Weberwiese

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Skyscraper on the Weberwiese
Skyscraper on the Weberwiese
The building as seen from Weberwiese
, 2006
Basic data
Place: Berlin-Friedrichshain
Construction time : 1951-1952
Opening: May 1, 1952
Renovation: after 1990
Status : monument
Architectural style : Modern and Neoclassicism
Architects : Architects collectively around Hermann Henselmann , Hanns Hopp and Richard Paulick
Use / legal
Usage : Residential building
Apartments : 33
Owner : City of Berlin
Client : Magistrate of Berlin
Technical specifications
Height : 35 m
Floors : 9
Elevators : 1
Building material : Bricks,
facade clad with ceramics
Building-costs: approx. 3 million marks
address
City: 10243 Berlin, Marchlewskistraße 25
Country: Germany

The skyscraper on Weberwiese is a listed residential building at Marchlewskistraße  25 in the Berlin district of Friedrichshain . It is considered the first socialist house in Berlin, was built mostly from reused bricks from the rubble and was ceremonially handed over to the future residents on May 1, 1952.

architecture

Street side of the skyscraper

The skyscraper on Weberwiese is a 35 meter high nine-storey building. The rectangular body shows symmetries on both axes , which are also evident on the exterior. Up to the seventh floor, plastered corners frame the actual, rib-like structure. On the eighth floor, the cladding made of high-quality white ceramic plates and decorative elements from the Meissen porcelain factory emerges freely all around. Above is the roof terrace surrounded by a balustrade . In the middle there is a lantern-like structure with corner acroteries .

The eight upper floors each contain four 96 square meter three-room apartments with kitchen and storage room, grouped around an inner staircase . Together with the top floor there are a total of 33 apartments. The ground floor houses retail space . The architect collective around Hermann Henselmann took up elements of Schinkel's classicism , which it varied and adapted to the peculiarities of a high-rise building. With the design and production of wrought-iron work (window grilles, roof balustrade, radiator covers) was Fritz Kühn commissioned.

From the point of view of the 21st century, the term high-rise for this 35-meter-high building no longer appears contemporary. However, the stipulations of the German building regulations are met, since it is a house in which “the floor of at least one lounge is more than 22 meters above the surface of the site”.

Background and history of the creation

April 25, 1952: The scaffolding work on the Weberwiese skyscraper is almost finished (south side).
Example of the original kitchen equipment

The skyscraper on the Weberwiese was to serve as the lead building for the immediately adjacent Stalinallee, i.e. to provide its architectural guidelines. The first drafts of all participating architects for the area followed the modern style . Then came the recommendation from the Soviet Union, to be understood as an order, to study the national and regional building traditions in urban planning projects and to include their typical characteristics in the design and structure of the new buildings and their facades . Objective, functionalist architecture, for example in the Bauhaus tradition , was considered bourgeois , decadent and formalistic (emphasis on the external shape).

The party and state leadership then rejected all previous plans and demanded that the three architects collectively around Hermann Henselmann , Hanns Hopp and Richard Paulick submit new concepts for the house within eight days. During the presentation, Henselmann verbatim emphasized the architectural references to Karl Friedrich Schinkel . On the one hand, his classicism could be regarded as typical of Berlin and thus rooted in the regional and national building tradition; on the other hand, the approval of the Soviet experts was certain, since Russian classicism was, in a comparable way, the most important model of socialist classicism . Josef Stalin also preferred this representative style. In August 1951 the Politburo of the SED and the magistrate of East Berlin decided in favor of the Henselmann group's design.

In addition to the purely architectural role model function, the high-rise also played an important propaganda role. It should serve as an outstanding example of the standard of future housing construction and thus arouse enthusiasm , commitment and confidence. As a promise made in stone, the skyscraper was supposed to clearly demonstrate the standard of living and thus the superiority of socialism . For these reasons, the apartments were generously furnished according to the standards of the time and received, for example, intercom systems , telephones and fitted kitchens with electric stoves without exception . An elevator and central heating were provided for convenience. The community antenna stood for the television technology that had just been developed . The complex equipment made the construction significantly more expensive than conventional residential buildings. While the GDR Ministry of Construction normally estimated construction costs of 10,000  marks per apartment, despite all attempts at savings they were over 90,000 marks, which is why the exemplary function of the building was economically problematic, but was not denied.

Construction and completion

12 + 3 Pfennig - surcharge stamp of the GDR Post 1952 with the high-rise from the Nationales Aufbauwerk series

The foundation stone was laid on September 1, 1951 by the Lord Mayor of East Berlin , Friedrich Ebert . Construction began on October 12th and continued uninterrupted in all weathers and around the clock, at night with artificial lighting from 20  floodlights . Large proportions of old bricks recovered from the demolition of houses were worked into the masonry . The columns at the house entrance come from the demolished Reich Chancellery .

During the removal of the rubble and the construction work in the vicinity, organized by the NAW , a song was played that describes the construction of this high-rise and the last stanza of which has the following text:

Memorial stone

A
giant made of stone in Stalinallee grows in Berlin, in Berlin on the Spree . [...] Alex's
sparrows , they whistle loudly: Our new Berlin is being built here!

After 141 days, on January 19, 1952, the topping-out ceremony took place, and symbolically the then chairman of the FDJ , Erich Honecker , walled up the last brick. On May 1, 1952, the first tenants moved into their apartments. There were a total of 30 working-class families, a people's policeman , a teacher and an architect.

Bertolt Brecht , who was particularly enthusiastic about the building, wrote at Henselmann's request for the main portal the inscription “This house was built for the comfort of the residents and the pleasure of passers-by.” However, these words were ultimately not used. Instead, another Brecht verse was carved into the black marble - which came from Hermann Göring's country home in Carinhall : "Peace in our country, peace in our city, that it may well house the man who built it."

Place in front of the skyscraper - the Weberwiese

Container for construction management, 1949

The house was named after its location on the Weberwiese, where families of dyers and weavers lived in miserable huts at the end of the 19th century . The lawn served as bleach for the fabrics produced. The poor cemetery located here was closed in 1879.

During the Weimar Republic , this area between Marchlewskistraße (until 1950 Memeler Straße ) and Gubener Straße - Hildegard-Jadamowitz-Straße, which closed off both streets, was not built until 1957 - as a parking space and starting point for demonstrations and parades. The Berliners therefore also spoke of Red Square .

The Weberwiese, which was officially named in 1925, was planted with 220 maple trees as early as 1840. A paddling pool and children's playground were built here in the 1920s. At the western corner of the square (Frankfurter Allee and Memeler Straße), a small garden was created on behalf of the city in 1929, in which an ornamental fountain was set up, the central figure of which was a stone-throwing bronze boy with a dog. The sculpture came from the workshop of Georges Morin (1874–1950). The fountain basin was made of shell limestone.

Boy in the park on the Weberwiese

With the construction of the skyscraper, the square was redesigned from 1952–1954 from the design office for building construction to a green area based on the concept of the garden architect Helmut Kruse. It received a natural pond, surrounding gravel paths with seating, some trees and bushes and the bronze sculpture Boy with Duck on a limestone plinth by the pond, which was also designed by Georges Morin (between 1920 and 1930). Some also see Hans in happiness in the figure . In 1988 a multi-jet fountain was put into operation in the pond .

The State Monuments Office characterizes the connection between the park and the skyscraper achieved by Kruse as follows: "The skyscraper was staged here in the spirit of the traditional landscape garden as a park building that can be experienced in changing views."

The subway station of the U 5 on Karl-Marx-Allee has been run as "Weberwiese" since 1992. Before that, when it opened in 1930, it was called “U-Bahnhof Memeler Straße” and when the street was renamed in 1950 “U-Bahnhof Marchlewskistraße”.

On the western edge of the green area (Gubener Straße 3) a neighborhood restaurant is called Weberwiese .

The building since the 1990s

The skyscraper has been used as a residential building since its renovation in the 1990s. However, the roof terrace and the winter garden are no longer accessible, as the load-bearing capacity of the roof is not guaranteed.

literature

  • Herbert Nicolaus, Alexander Obeth: The Stalinallee - history of a German street . Verlag für Bauwesen, 1997, ISBN 3-345-00605-7
  • Elmar Kossel: Hermann Henselmann and the modern age. A study on the reception of modernity in the architecture of the GDR. Ed .: Adrian von Buttlar, Kerstin Wittmann-Englert (= research on post-war modernism in the field of art history at the Institute for Art 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 : Topping-out ceremony Hochhaus Weberwiese  - collection of images, videos and audio files
Commons : Hochhaus Weberwiese  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Residential buildings on Weberwiese: design 1950, executed 1951–1952, design collective Hermann Henselmann (collective of architects)
  2. ^ A b c Institute for the Preservation of Monuments (ed.): The architectural and art monuments of the GDR. Capital Berlin-II . Henschelverlag, Berlin 1984, p. 158 f .
  3. ↑ a b c Karl-Heinz Hüter, Doris Mollenschott, Paul Sigel, Martin Wörner: 540th high-rise building on Weberwiese. In: Architectural Guide Berlin. 7th edition. Reimer Verlag, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-496-01380-8 , p. 329.
  4. ↑ The skyscraper on Weberwiese. In: Die Welt , August 1, 2004
  5. ↑ Inge Kiessig: Misery huts on the Lausewiese. In the grandstand series: Berlin Street Stories  (1) from October 5, 1983
  6. ↑ Songs from the GDR: The Sparrows from Alex
  7. ↑ Hildegard-Jadamowitz-Strasse. In: Street name lexicon of the Luisenstädtischer Bildungsverein (near  Kaupert )
  8. ↑ Katrin Chod, Herbert Schwenk, Hainer Weißpflug: Berlin District Lexicon Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg. Haude & Spener, Berlin 2003, p. 392.
  9. ↑ Urban free-standing sculptures . In: Berliner Adreßbuch , 1933, III, p. 189 (District 5, Friedrichshain → Weberwiese).
  10. ↑ Willi gene switch, Hans Liesigk, Hans Michael (Editor): The East Berlin. Berliner Handelsdruckerei, Berlin 1930, pp. 281–282 with illustration 114.
  11. ↑ The urban greenery of the post-war period as a conservator's task on Uni-Heidelberg.de, accessed on May 28, 2020.
  12. ↑ Weberwiese garden monument: designed 1952–1953, executed 1953–1954 by garden architect Helmut Kruse
  13. ↑ Landesdenkmalamt Berlin (Ed.): Monument topography Federal Republic of Germany. Architectural monuments in Berlin, Friedrichshain district. Berlin, 1996, p. 151 with ill. 197.
  14. ↑ Boy with a duck - sculpture in Berlin. Retrieved on May 28, 2020 (German).
  15. ↑ Karl-G Eick Hunter: Berlin-Friedrichshain. Architectural monuments, memorials, sculptures in the city district. Berlin, 1979, p. 92.
  16. ↑ Multi-jet fountain in the artificial pond on the Weberwiese. stadtentwicklung.berlin.de
  17. ↑ Weberwiese. March 20, 2020, accessed May 28, 2020 .

Coordinates: 52 ° 30 ′ 54.1 ″  N , 13 ° 26 ′ 38 ″  E