Youth Center Wiesloch
The youth center in Wiesloch in the Rhein-Neckar district in Baden-Württemberg is located in the listed former home of the sculptor Conrad Keller , from which the Art Nouveau decorations of the building come.
history
After the sculptor Conrad Keller (1879–1948) had rented a few years with his family in Wiesloch from 1904, he bought a plot of land on Hauptstrasse in 1908 for 1,000 marks, adjacent to the branch line from Wiesloch to Waldangelloch, which was built in 1901 . The Wiesloch town builder Franz Fischer, with whom Keller had already worked on the expansion of the city in Gerbersruhstrasse and on the construction of the Wiesloch sanatorium and nursing home , created the construction plans for a residential building.
The plans submitted with the building application envisaged a massive one to two-story building with a knee floor and a loft. The western part of the building was covered by a mansard roof with dormer windows, the south side received a large curved and decorated gable and a protruding risalit with a round gable also decorated. On the south side there are also two decorated window frames made of sandstone on the ground floor. On the east side, gable and window shapes on the south side were repeated in a simplified design language without any architectural decoration. The building authority made various conditions that were also taken into account in the plans. These included not expanding the eastern half of the roof (instead, storage space), creating a cesspool in accordance with state building regulations, maintaining the building lines and building the building in brick and brickwork with a rusty sandstone base .
Philipp Vogt, who had submitted the cheapest offer, was hired as master bricklayer. Rudolph & Fischer was responsible for building supervision. The construction costs without earthworks and interior decoration amounted to 12,000 RM. The masonry work began on June 26, 1908, and October 1, 1909 was planned as the reference date. In the course of 1909 a workshop building was added to the house, in which Keller set up his stonemasonry. Keller himself took on the artistic design of the facade decoration. Despite the baroque cubature of the house with protruding risalit with ox-eye , curved gables and mansard roof, Keller mainly used the design language of Art Nouveau for the decoration . The large south gable is adorned with floral ornaments and crowned by a lion's head above the coat of arms of the stonemasons. The gable of the risalit shows two horns of plenty with flowers and fruits, which together with garlands frame the ox's eye. A head of envy is emblazoned between garlands above the ox's eye . Another head of envy forms the connection of the downpipe at the lower right end of the large south gable. The window frames, on the other hand, have tracery and allegorical decorations such as a bird's nest and oak branches. The year of construction 1908 can also be seen in one of the window frames on the upper floor.
The architectural decoration of the building certainly had representative reasons; Thanks to him, customers could see before entering the office or the workshop what kind of work Conrad Keller was able to do and that he could use both a historical and a contemporary design language.
The house was inhabited by the Keller family until 1958 and then sold to the Deutsche Bundespost , which installed telecommunications equipment in it. However, it was only used by the Bundespost for a few years, after which the house was empty and left to decay. In 1972 there were even plans to demolish it because of its desolate condition. In 1981 the city of Wiesloch acquired the building and set up the youth center that still exists today.
literature
- Karin Hirn: “Let the body's form be the mirror of its being” - the work and life of the Wiesloch sculptor Conrad Keller , in: Kurpfälzer Winzerfestanzeiger 1998, pp. 34–52.
Web links
Coordinates: 49 ° 17 ′ 29.3 " N , 8 ° 41 ′ 50.1" E