Round barn

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Restored round barn by Fincken
Round barn in Cornwall

Round barns are agricultural buildings ( barns , sheds or stables ) in a round or polygonal shape ( rotunda ).

Round barns in Northern Germany

Round barns are among the seldom erected building forms in the northern German coastal states. In Mecklenburg they were in about 20 villages. With a few exceptions, they were built in pairs. They flanked the driveways to the manor houses . The buildings with a diameter of 20 to 25 m were mostly built between 1800 and 1835.

As a rule, they were made of solid brick on field stone plinths or as rammed earth buildings. In Groß Lüsewitz (Mecklenburg), hewn field stones were used in a solitary, archaic building that then served as a shelter for young cattle. In the Fincken round stable , the upper parts of the surrounding wall were made of half-timbering . On the foundations rests a mushroom-shaped, spitzkegeliges with thatch -roofed or thatched roof. The roofs are also covered with roof tiles or roofing felt. The complex roof structures of the round buildings are built using log construction and are reminiscent of baroque spiers .

The first round barn in Mecklenburg was built in 1814 by A. von Bülow auf Groß Kelle. If one evaluates the documents of the Ritterschaftliche Brandversicherungsgesellschaft in the state archive in Schwerin, one finds round barns and round cottages in more than 30 places in Mecklenburg. The specified use was exclusively that of a grain barn or a sheepfold or both.

Groß Lüsewitz does not belong in the round barns category, as this building was only built in 1905 and thus at a time when people in Mecklenburg were again wondering where this architectural style came from.

The round barn of Gostorf Amt Grevesmühlen stood on a leasehold as a single property and was built in 1819. The round barn in Finken no longer has its original appearance. The half-timbered structure and the roof do not correspond to the construction at that time and were changed in the shape of the roof, as in the Große Luckow Amt Stavenhagen (here after a fire in 1917). Cone-shaped roofs were made of solid squared timber (rafter roof) and dome-shaped roofs were made of double planks (plank roof).

Round barns cannot be classified into well-known architectural styles. They are a specialty of agricultural buildings in Mecklenburg and were inspired by the round churches from Mecklenburg Strelitz. (Gramelow 1805, Dolgen 1806, Hohenzieritz 1806)

The round barn in Bollbrügge

The only remaining round barn in Schleswig-Holstein is on the Bollbrügge farm in Gremersdorf, in the Ostholstein district . In the art history literature it is only dealt with briefly, as it is called in the "Art Topography Schleswig-Holstein": round barn with thick walls made of tamped clay and a conical thatched roof. It was built in 1831 and its builder, who was the manager of the EW Lentz estate at the time, copied the construction method from the round barns in Mecklenburg. The Bollbrügge round barn has an outer diameter of 22.20 m and an inner diameter of 21.30 m, which results in a wall thickness of approx. 0.90 m. The mud wall is 3.15 m high and stands on a base made of field stone masonry . The total height of the structure is approximately 16.30 m. Two diagonally opposite entrances are closed by double-leaf wooden gates. The round barn can be found in the Gremersdorf coat of arms.

  • Bollbrugge

  • Round barn Bollbrügge

  • facade

  • Passage

  • Roof truss

use

The use of the strange buildings was speculated early on. Johann Ulrich Folkers published a treatise on "Round Houses in Mecklenburg Villages" in the Mecklenburg monthly magazine of 1926. He mentions 18 Mecklenburg villages in which there were round houses. After considering round pile dwellings from the Stone Age and round buildings in antiquity, he excludes historical connections and assumes that the rural round houses are to be viewed as fashionable buildings with subordinate functionality. In the style of late Baroque round buildings, such as the pavilions on the Kamp in Bad Doberan or the round village churches in Mecklenburg-Strelitz , he sees the round houses as the last "offshoot of the great architecture of the Baroque era". Circular buildings up to fantastic spherical building designs (House of the Corridor Guard by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux , Newton Cenotaph by Étienne-Louis Boullée , Maison d'un cosmopolite by A. Vaudoyer ) were a common motif at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries in architecture, especially in revolutionary architecture . This included larger objects ( Narrenturm in Vienna 1783, Hall of Fame by Louis Jean Desprez before 1787; design for a pantheon by Erik Palmstedt 1791; design for a dome building by Johann Conrad Bromeis in 1803; designs for a stock exchange building by Georg Ludwig Friedrich Laves around 1805, Theater design by Giuseppe Pistocchi 1810) also minor architectural tasks ( Johann August Arens , cemetery chapel for St. Peter and St. Johannis in Hamburg 1790; Friedrich Gilly , design for a bathhouse around 1795; Johann Michael Voit , design for a prison 1799; Christian Frederik Hansen , Landhaus Gebauer in Hamburg 1806).

In 1920, the architect told Werner Cords from Parchim of comparable round barns in the Pomeranian Region of Stettin , whose owner, a native of Prüzen in Mecklenburg landowner Ernst Gottfried Georg von Bulow-Cummerow was (1775-1851), the beginning of the 19th century Good Regenwalde and acquired several neighboring properties and expanded them into model businesses. He had round barns built in mud-rammed earth with a steep thatched roof on all of the properties. Cords derived the function from the layout of the Labuhn barn . The floor plan shows a passage and a passage along the outer wall that is kept free from fixtures. Cords suspects a structural connection to the rapeseed cultivation that emerged in the region in the 19th century . Initially, no suitable threshing technique was available, so the rape was "ridden out" on horses. The Pomeranian round barns were built for this purpose. According to Cords, the barns were popularly called "rapeseed barns".

With the development of thrush technology, the complex structures were no longer necessary, which explains the relatively short period of their construction.

Cords concludes that round houses used as cottages or stables are of a secondary nature. The conversion to a stable is documented in Fincken near Röbel / Müritz . Stables with a semicircle or quadrant outline can also be found in Kartzitz on Rügen and in Ivenack . The Ivenacker (half) round stable became famous for the horse breeding run by the Counts of Plessen .

Hohen Luckow and Fincken have been preserved from the round barns in Pomerania and Mecklenburg. Until 1932, the rotunda in Fincken was used as a stable for field horses. It is the last of the former seven round barns in the Müritz district. In the middle of the building, delimited by a half-height wall, there is said to have been a large, round room in which the team leaders slept. Around this room the horses stood with their heads facing the outside wall. In Schleswig-Holstein , the round barn of Bollbrügge (from 1831) has been preserved and is part of the coat of arms of the municipality of Gremersdorf .

Round and polygonal barns in North America

Round barns are also known from North America , especially from the 19th century ; not infrequently they appear in the architecture of the Shaker . The first polygonal barn in North America is the sixteen-sided threshing barn on George Washington's farm in Virginia from 1793. The heyday of round barns in the American Midwest was between 1880 and 1920. The Canadian province of Québec also has several round barns ( grange ronde ) , so in Lac-Brome , Barnston-Ouest and Coaticook .

Round barn in Chile

Another round barn is located in the Museo Colonial Alemán ( Frutillar municipality ; southern Chile).

Web links

Commons : Round barns  - collection of images, videos and audio files

literature

  • Siegfried Hannemann: Round barns in the Regenwalde district. In: The Regenwalde district in Pomerania. Traces of memory. Editor Heimatkreis Regenwalde in cooperation with the sponsor town Melle 2009, pp. 252–253 (there further references).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Everything about the history of the Rundscheune von Bollbrügge can be found in the excellent article by Klaus-Dieter Hahn in the Jahrbuch für Heimatkunde (1981) Volume 25, pages 111–121.
  2. ↑ The round barn in Bollbrügge .
  3. ↑ See Winfried Nerdinger et al. a., Revolutionary architecture, an aspect of European architecture around 1800, exhibition catalog Frankfurt a. M./München 1980, Hirmer Verlag Munich, ISBN 3-7774-5200-9 .
  4. ↑ Round and Polygonal Barns of Indiana , ( PDF ; 4.52 MB), National Register of Historic Places Multiple Property Documentation Form, NRIS Database, National Register of Historic Places.
  5. ↑ North Dakota Round Barns ( PDF ; 1.77 MB), National Register of Historic Places Inventory Nomination Form, NRIS Database, National Register of Historic Places.
  6. ↑ Christoph Langner, Stralsund: Rural circular buildings in Mecklenburg / Western Pomerania, Der Holznagel 5/2005, p. 18, PDF .