Plärrer machine

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Plärrer machine was a tram waiting hall at Plärrer in Nuremberg that was put into operation in 1932 and was combined with a machine restaurant and what was then known as a "silent post office" (with a letter box, stamp machine and payphone ). The vending machine restaurant was called “Plärrer Automat”, and in popular usage the name was carried over to the entire building.

The building, based on a design by the city's building officer Walter Brugmann , looked almost futuristic at this central local traffic junction on the southwestern edge of the old town and therefore attracted a lot of attention. In addition to the self-service principle of vending machines and payphones, which was not an everyday occurrence at the time, the simple architectural design in the classic modern style , which also included a strip of advertising light running around the roof edge , contributed to this. The Plärrer machine was broken off in 1977 when the Plärrer was redesigned.

Building history

The building owner was the city of Nuremberg, planning and construction management were the responsibility of the municipal building department. Construction work began in the autumn of 1931; due to a long period of frost in the winter of 1931/1932, the facility could only be put into operation on May 4, 1932. The Plärrer machine was created shortly before the end of the era of the mayor Hermann Luppe , who was open to other modern trends and the architecture of the New Building .

According to the standards of National Socialist views of art, this architecture was considered " degenerate ", and it was locally strongly associated with Luppe, who, as a staunch democrat, had long been the personalized enemy of National Socialist propaganda. However, while the Nuremberg planetarium was demolished only a few years after its construction under these ideological circumstances, the Plärrer machine survived the “ Third Reich ” - even despite concrete plans for a redesign of the Plärrer around 1939 to cater to the increased traffic . During the Second World War, the elongated waiting hall wing was destroyed by bombs in an air raid in 1944, but the rotunda of the restaurant remained undamaged. The originally almost completely open waiting hall area was rebuilt in a closed construction after the end of the war, a branch of the official Bavarian travel agency later moved into it . In 1946/1947 the restaurant was temporarily used for a sales exhibition with works by Nuremberg artists and designers.

As early as the mid-1960s, the rear part of the waiting area, in which the machine post office was originally located, was demolished in favor of relocating the tram tracks on the north side of the square. When in 1977 the Plärrer machine stood in the way of the subway stairs as part of the subway construction , the building was dismantled despite ongoing protests. An initially discussed transfer that would have been technically possible was not carried out.

architecture

The building had an emphatically functional floor plan: the circular structure of the vending machine restaurant was joined tangentially on one hip by an elongated wing, which with covered seating and wind protection represented the actual waiting room. At its other end, the “silent post office” was housed in a semicircular pavilion, with the glazed telephone booths on the round outside. The rotunda was built with a cellar to accommodate the kitchen of the vending machine restaurant and the corresponding ancillary rooms. Apart from this basement and the foundations, the building was a steel frame construction , the walls were largely dissolved into windows.

Photographs from the period after 1945 show that the original chrome-plated capital letters "Plärrer Automat" on the ventilation attachment of the rotunda were removed and the surrounding light band on the roof edge (with dark letters on opaque glass illuminated from behind ) was replaced by an advertisement made of illuminated letters on a light background, while the rotunda was now crowned in the middle by an illuminated, four-sided normal clock . The illuminated letters advertised “Plärrer-Automat” and “Amtl. Bavarian Travel Agency "; For the travel agency, when the waiting hall wing was rebuilt, a large part of the open waiting area was converted into a closed sales pavilion using window walls. However, these changes have not yet alienated the character of the architecture. It was only the later shortening of the waiting hall wing that caused an architectural distortion of the original intention of the building to stylize the letter "P" for Plärrer when viewed from the air.

The round basic shape of the almost cheerful, fully transparent building shows the clear influence of Italian modernism (Italian rationalism around Giuseppe Terragni ) on Brugmann. With its floating, rounded roof over the heavily dematerialized, transparent steel-and-glass construction, the tram waiting hall on the Plärrer is considered to be a pioneering transport structure of classic modernism. Based on the model of the Plärrer machine, type-like transfer and waiting halls were built in several cities, for example the Bellevue in Zurich.

literature

  • N / A : Tram waiting hall at Plärrer in Nuremberg with a silent post office and vending machine restaurant. In: Deutsche Bauzeitung , 68th year 1934, No. 7 (from February 14, 1934), pp. 129–132.
  • Center for Industrial Culture (Ed.): Architektur Nürnberg 1904–1994. Nuremberg 1994, ISBN 3-921590-21-3 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Manfred Jehle: A client and his architects. Dedicated to Hermann Luppe. In: Architektur Nürnberg 1904-1994. Nuremberg 1994. (see literature )
  2. ^ Clemens Wachter: Culture in Nuremberg 1945–1950. (= Nürnberger Werkstücke zur Stadt- und Landesgeschichte , Volume 59.) Nuremberg 1999, ISBN 3874321363 , p. 207.
  3. ^ City Archives Nuremberg: The Plärrer before the last renovation in 1977. Retrieved on October 18, 2017 .
  4. ↑ Plärrer-Automat after 1945, photo by day and photo by night at www.nuernberginfos.de , accessed on September 10, 2017