Koehler's house

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Koehler House (2011)
portal

The Köhlersche Haus at Frauenstrasse 14 is a residential building in Dresden that was built around 1749 in the Dresden Rococo style . The building is considered the most important rococo house in Dresden and at the same time one of the most beautiful bourgeois buildings in the city. It was destroyed in 1945, but reconstructed from 2007 to 2008 together with the directly adjoining Heinrich Schütz House in the so-called Quartier V.

history

Facade detail
Facade against Frauenstrasse

In 1746, master cooper and wine merchant Johannes Köhler acquired the property and commissioned a new building for the house. The renovation took place in 1749/1750. While the older literature did not want to give any information about the architect, since Fritz Löffler one suspected the master builder Samuel Locke , who was a student of Johann Christoph Knöffel . Stefan Hertzig, however, considers Locke's authorship "on closer inspection of the house [for] more than dubious and in no way verifiable" and even goes as far as to say: "The only thing that is certain is that it [...] could not have been Samuel Locke". On the basis of various indications, he considers Andreas Adam to be possible as an architect. Motifs that speak for Adam are the elaborate rocailles decor, the false balustrade in the roof area and the design of the high mansard roof. But he also gives reasons that speak against Adam - for example the rococo decor combined with traditional gables and not tied to mirror fields.

The client Johannes Köhler will have used at least the first floor of the house for his wine trade. The owner of the house changed several times until the middle of the 19th century. In 1797, the "maidens" Christiane Charlotte and Karoline Sophie Fleischer are registered as owners, "Fleischer's heirs" are entered in the 1804 address book, then the Schwätzke and Consorten company and then, since the early 1840s, the businessman J. Carl Michael Schmidt.

In the house there are always shops, but also a café in the Dresden address books. In 1797, for example, the glass merchant Christian Gottlob Vetter had his business premises on the ground floor, and from around 1857 to the mid-1870s, the French Charles Deville's Café de l'Europe was on the ground floor and first floor. It took up the right side of the building, while on the left there was a grocery store, which the owner of the house, the aforementioned Mr. Schmidt, ran together with his partner Christian Gottlob Siedel, whose descendants owned the house in the 20th century.

The Deutsche Bekleidungs-Academie operated by Johann Heinrich Klemm (1819–1886) and Gustav Adolph Müller , which also published the European fashion newspaper and had been selling it from Frauenstrasse 14 since the 1850s, was certainly of greater importance beyond the borders of Dresden .

Other residents of the house on the lower floors were well-respected Dresden citizens such as the conductor and composer Carl Riccius (1830-1893). As usual in bourgeois apartment buildings, smaller people lived on the upper floors. In the address book from 1901, the company Schmidt & Co. (purveyors to the court) is still recorded for the ground floor and the owner of a piano dealer on the third floor. The widow of a city policeman, a teacher and a senior postal assistant lived on the fourth floor. Two locksmith's assistants, two market workers and two widows are registered in the attic.

The ruins of the Köhler house, burned out in 1945 as a result of the air raids on Dresden, were blown up in December 1949 as part of the scheduled clearing of rubble.

Building description

Fragment from the portal in the Lapidarium Dresden
Detail of the corner bay

The five-storey building, which was very high for the time, has two facades: the richly decorated, only five-axis-wide facade facing Frauenstrasse and the almost completely unadorned front facing narrow Schuhmachergasse with 15 axes.

Since the builder was a master cooper and wine merchant by profession, the putti in the corner dungeon were depicted as wine and cooper workers. Above the entrance portal you can see a sandstone vineyard that is being worked on by putti . The top of the portal shows a basket arch with a shell as a keystone, above it a Janus-headed figure with a key and staff in front of the vineyard. The keystone bore the slogan "Sudore Benedictione".

All windows of the three-axis central projection on the front side are decorated with profiled walls and various roof gables. On the first floor, a tail gable is framed by two segmental arches and contains a cartouche with the owner's initials. On the second floor there are triangular gables on the sides, which are connected to the windows by fine rocaille work. The central window is covered by a blasted segmented gable, in the middle of which there is a richly decorated rococo cartridge with flowers and a woman's mask. The windows of the third floor are suspected, on the fourth floor there is further jewelry in the form of shells and flower chains.

According to Hertzig, the most important decoration of the house is the three-story corner bay window, which shows groups of putti making a barrel. So the planing of the staves, the sulphurizing and the hammering of the tires are represented. On the openwork parapet of the arbor, children are shown playing with the tools of the cooper. The side entrance under the bay window is also richly furnished. It is framed by two volute consoles, and above its lintel there is a large decorative cartouche that is curved down to the bottom of the bay window. The bay window is structured by pilasters, the groups of putti are in its parapet areas.

literature

  • Fritz Löffler: The old Dresden - history of its buildings . EA Seemann, Leipzig 1981, ISBN 3-363-00007-3 , pp. 272, 280, 317.
  • Cornelius Gurlitt: Descriptive representation of the older architectural and art monuments of the Kingdom of Saxony . Volume 23: City of Dresden, Part 2. In Commission at CC Meinhold & Söhne, Dresden 1903, pp. 565–569 ( online ).

Web links

Commons : Köhlersches Haus  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c Stefan Hertzig: The late Baroque town house in Dresden 1738–1790 . Society of Historical Neumarkt Dresden e. V., Dresden 2007, ISBN 3-9807739-4-9 , pp. 118 ff .
  2. ^ Fritz Löffler: The old Dresden - history of its buildings . EA Seemann, Leipzig 1981, ISBN 3-363-00007-3 , p. 272.
  3. a b Hertzig, page 229.
  4. Dresden for useful knowledge of its houses and their inhabitants. Dresden 1797, p. 97.
  5. see e.g. B. the address and business manual of the royal capital and residence city of Dresden from 1863, p. 329.
  6. inter alia in: Address book for Dresden and its suburbs 1914 , part III, p. 184.
  7. Address and business manual of the royal capital and residence city of Dresden 1857. Page 280.
  8. Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie , Volume 51, pp. 204–208.
  9. ^ Address and business manual of the royal capital and residence of Dresden. Dresden, 1870, p. 240.
  10. ^ Address and business manual of the royal residence and capital Dresden. Dresden, 1884, p. 569.
  11. Address book for Dresden and its suburbs, 1901. P. 134.
  12. cf. Löffler, p. 272.

Coordinates: 51 ° 3 ′ 2.9 "  N , 13 ° 44 ′ 24.3"  E