Ministerial Building (Wiesbaden)

Ministerial building Wiesbaden

The ministerial building in Wiesbaden is a classical building erected by Carl Boos between 1838 and 1842 , which has housed the Hessian Ministry of Justice since 1968. It is located on the corner of Bahnhofstrasse and Luisenstrasse and was built at the same time as the Ducal Nassau City Palace on Schlossplatz .

The Nassau Ministerial Building

Since the new city palace in the heart of Nassau's royal seat was only intended to serve as a residence for the duke , a separate building was to be built for the civil servants who were previously housed in the Biebrich palace . In addition to the government of the Duchy of Nassau , the estates of the Duchy of Nassau also used the house from 1844 .

For this, Duke Wilhelm acquired the said property from Minister of State Ernst Franz Ludwig Marschall von Bieberstein after his death in the 1830s. The still young Carl Boos emerged victorious from the upcoming architectural competition for the new building, and later also built the Wiesbaden market church . He designed a building that was strongly based on the Florentine Renaissance . Whether he used the Florentine originals, such as the Palazzo Medici Riccardi from 1444 to 1452 , as a model, or the Munich copies made almost simultaneously with the ministerial building , such as the head building of the Residenz (1826–1835) or the Bavarian State Library (1832–1843) , is unknown.

Work on the three-wing complex began in 1838; the completion was delayed until 1842 due to the simultaneous construction of the castle. The building consists of three storeys of the same height with a cantilevered eaves cornice. The façade in the “round arch style”, as it was called at the time, is clearly divided into the three floors and thus has a strong horizontal orientation.

In 1854 the building burned out. The architect Philipp Hoffmann restored the interior in the rich Pompeian style, which he studied on his trip to Italy in 1834 and which he had already realized at the city palace. The former throne room is especially worth seeing.

After the annexation of Nassau by Prussia after the German War in 1866, the Nassau government was replaced by the Prussian administration in the form of the district president for the Wiesbaden district . Its administration was also housed in the ministerial building. After the First World War, the French occupation forces took possession of the building until they were withdrawn in 1925 and the officials of the regional council moved in again. In 1928, the building received a fourth wing at the rear as an extension, which was based on the architecture of the old building, but had one storey more than it with the same eaves height.

The building was not damaged in World War II. After the war ended, the Americans took over the government building. Until 1953 it housed the high command of the American Air Force in Europe and from 1954 the Hessian Ministry of the Interior before it moved to a new building near the main train station in 1968 . Since then, the building has been the seat of the Hessian Ministry of Justice.

literature

Gottfried Kiesow: The misunderstood century - Historicism using the example of Wiesbaden. German Foundation for Monument Protection, Bonn 2004, ISBN 3-936942-53-6 .
Rolf Faber, Georg Schmidt-von Rhein (ed.): The government building in Wiesbaden: A contribution to its 150th anniversary. Schellenberg'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Taunusstein 1993, ISBN 978-3922027904 .

swell

^ Gottfried Kiesow : Architectural Guide Wiesbaden - Through the City of Historicism , German Foundation for Monument Protection, Bonn 2006, ISBN 3-936942-71-4 , p. 82 f

^ Karl Baedeker : Baedeker Wiesbaden Rheingau , Ostfildern-Kemnat 2001, ISBN 3-87954-076-4 , p. 62

↑ Homepage of the Hessian Ministry of Justice ( Memento of the original from January 18, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2