Meyerhaus

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Meyerhaus, garden facade before 1939. The corner pavilion on the right
is covered by the tree.
Meyerhaus, street facade today. On the right the church of St. Peter and Paul, built in 1940.

The house Laurenzenvorstadt 80, built between 1794 and 1797, is called Meyerhaus in Aarau . The family of the client Johann Rudolf Meyer Sohn sold it to the Feer family in 1830, which is why it was also called Feer (en). It has been owned by the Roman Catholic parish of Aarau since 1937, and in 1939 it was converted into a rectory.

history

In 1791, the silk ribbon manufacturer and naturalist Johann Rudolf Meyer Sohn (1768–1825) began to dump part of the land that his wife's siblings Margarete Saxer (1769–1805) owned outside the city by building the Meyer's tunnels . The following year he acquired the aforementioned land. 1794–1797 he built a villa on it. He entrusted the project planning to Johann Daniel Osterrieth (1768–1839) from Strasbourg, who had worked in Bern since 1789.

The building contained apartments for the client and his brother Hieronymus (1769–1844). Meyer's friend, the geologist Johann Samuel von Gruner , also lived here. Meyer set up a laboratory on the ground floor of the western corner pavilion, and a silk dyeing factory in the two basement floors of the villa, which was supplied with water through the tunnels and replaced that in the factory of his father of the same name (now the Golatti retirement and nursing home). During the founding phase of the Helvetic Republic , the landlord housed Pestalozzi for months . In 1809 the villa became the property of Hieronymus. Around 1810, Johann Rudolf built a silk ribbon factory behind it. This used the energy of the water in the tunnels with the help of a huge underground water wheel.

In 1818 Hieronymus sold the villa to Johann Rudolf's son Johann Gottlieb (1793–1829). He seems to have become the owner of the factory while the father was still alive. After his death, his associate Friedrich Heinrich Feer (1790–1865) took over the company. The later mayor also acquired the villa from Johann Gottlieb's widow in 1830. In 1937 the Feer family sold the property to the Roman Catholic parish of Aarau, which converted the building into a parsonage in 1939. The Church of St. Peter and Paul was built south of it in 1940. The factory and the wheel room had to give way to the extension of the main post office in the 1980s.

Building

The classicist villa presents itself on the street side in the north as a town house, on the garden side in the south, however, as a castle with a temple-like gable front and two corner pavilions. The main wing has a rectangular floor plan. A corridor runs through its center in a north-south direction. On the east side of the same is the spacious staircase with a three-armed staircase. Between the garden side wings, which are one floor lower than the main wing, there were six colossal pillars with Tuscan capitals , which supported the balconies in front of the upper floors. The latter were built into the interior of the house during the renovation in 1939, which degraded the pillars to flat pilasters . The symmetry was also lost by adding an open foyer to the western corner pavilion. The arrangement of the rooms has been changed so that no noteworthy elements of the original interior have been preserved.

During the renovation, files were found in a wall niche that the client had walled in during the revolutionary era. This shows that Osterrieth sent the first three floor plans in February 1794. The foundations were laid in September 1795 and the carpentry work was completed in June 1796. Then the interior work had to be finished, which dragged on until 1797. Original plans by the architect show that the corner pavilions were erected at the same time as the main wing, whereas the garden front with the pillars was only in a second construction phase. The garden was originally designed in classical style.

literature

Coordinates: 47 ° 23 '37.6 "  N , 8 ° 3' 1.5"  E ; CH1903:  646,190  /  249,396

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