State House of Cologne

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State House of Cologne, 2010

The Landeshaus Köln is the main building of the Rhineland Regional Association . The administration building of the central administration of this higher municipal association is located on Kennedy-Ufer 2 in Cologne - Deutz , directly on the Rhine . It was built between 1956 and 1959 according to plans by the architects Eckhard Schulze-Fielitz and Ernst von Rudloff, with the collaboration of Ulrich Schmidt von Altenstadt, in the modern style .

history

After the Landtag of North Rhine-Westphalia established the regional associations in North Rhine-Westphalia as a regional level of local self-government in 1953, the regional association founded for the Rhineland initially took its seat in the Düsseldorf State House . The Cologne politician Theo Burauen , chairman of the Rhineland Regional Assembly , and from 1956 also the mayor of Cologne, soon raised the question of relocating the administrative headquarters to Cologne and finally prevailed on March 27, 1957 in the dispute that this triggered. The question also led to controversial discussions and two votes in the landscape assembly because of the additional costs and the impact on around 1,600 officials. Because of procedural deficiencies in the first decision in 1954, an administrative complaint was even filed.

The city of Cologne made the property of the House of Rhenish History on the Deutz riverside promenade, which was destroyed in World War II, available free of charge. An architecture competition was held in 1955, in which 91 architecture firms took part. In 1956, the jury did not award a first prize, but rather two second prizes for designs that instead of a high-rise, each had low, but elongated structures. One of the runners-up, the Schulze-Fielitz architects from Rudloff and Schmidt von Altenstadt from Essen , received the building contract in 1956. Their design, which followed the functionalist design principles of the Bauhaus in the line of the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe ( international style ), had proposed a four-wing steel frame building with an external dimension of 112 by 64 meters, the free-standing ground floor of which would have partly towered over the promenade. About 45 meters from the Rhine reset - - derogation but was a reinforced concrete in frame construction built. The foundation stone was laid on October 29, 1957, the property was inaugurated on November 6, 1959 and the building was occupied until January 27, 1960.

Rhine side, 2010
Rhine side, 2020, after the construction of the Rhine Boulevard

The five-storey four-wing structure built around an inner courtyard shows a column system on the ground floor in a grid of 7 by 7 meters, which serves to reveal the view below the building from east to west of the Rhine. The office floors are accessed by stairs in the corners of the building. The curtain wall made of glass and aluminum shows blue-green panels in the parapets. The large-format glazed foyers on the north and south sides, which flank the inner courtyard on the ground floor, were originally furnished with armchairs based on a design by Mies van der Rohe. The building is embedded in a green area that extends from Mindener Strasse to Kennedy-Ufer.

On November 2, 1987, the city of Cologne entered the property in its list of monuments , as an "example of the avant-garde West German architectural movement of the post-war period , which was directly linked to the modern architecture that was further developed in the USA, with detailed application of the principles of Mies van der Rohe" .

The building was extensively renovated between 1997 and 1999, taking into account the requirements of the historical monuments.

literature

  • Ulrich Conrads : masterpiece = lesson. Comments on the new state house in Cologne . In: Bauwelt , Volume 51 (1960), Issue 30, pp. 859–861 ( PDF ).
  • Thomas Goege: The Deutz bank of the Rhine. From the cuirassier barracks to the state house . In: In focus: The preservation of monuments , Cologne 2001, pp. 20–29.
  • Barbara Kaulhausen: The State House . Cologne 1999.
  • Hans Kisky: On historical ground. The state house in Cologne . Cologne 1959.
  • Udo Mainzer : The State House in Cologne . Rheinische Kunststätten, issue 475, Cologne 2003.

Web links

Commons : Landeshaus Köln  - Collection of images

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ "We are deported to Cologne". October 29, 1957: For the laying of the foundation stone of the new state house in Cologne-Deutz , website in the afz.lvr.de portal , accessed on June 29, 2018

Coordinates: 50 ° 56 ′ 21 ″  N , 6 ° 58 ′ 10.6 ″  E