Kembs-Niffer lock

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Lock with control tower
The administration building

The lock Kembs-Niffer ( French Écluse de Kembs-Niffer ) is located in Upper Alsace , at the eastern end of the Rhine-Rhône Canal at its transition into the Rhine canal . The owner is the state waterway administration Voies navigables de France . The lock has been under monument protection as Monument historique since 2005 .

history

At the end of the 1950s, the Rhine-Rhône Canal had two connections to the Rhine east of Mulhouse : the actual eastern section of the canal, which reached the Rhine to the northeast in the Strasbourg area, and a southern section, the Hüningen Canal . This initially led in a south-easterly direction until it came within a few hundred meters of the river in the area of ​​the municipality of Niffer . From there, it ran parallel to the river up the Rhine in order to establish the connection in the direction of Basel via a lock to the Rhine near the eponymous municipality of Hüningen .

This was changed as part of the further development of the Rhine canal from the mid-1950s. The northern section of the Hüningen Canal has been redesignated as part of the Rhine-Rhône Canal. To the south of Niffer there was a puncture with a lock. Since this came to lie on the territory of the municipality of Kembs , it was given the double name Kembs-Niffer. The southern part of the Hüningen Canal was closed to shipping, as was the old northeast part of the Rhine-Rhône Canal, which is no longer required. Today, both are only used for tourism and recreational purposes. The outbuildings were designed by the French-Swiss architect Le Corbusier . He designed two objects: an observation and control tower as well as an administration and customs building. On the tower shaft there are two staggered, cube-like , closed rooms. On top of this sits the control room, designed in the plan of an isosceles triangle, accessible via an external staircase. The roof of the service building is designed in the form of a hyperbolic paraboloid shell , the outer walls of all buildings are made of exposed concrete . The first talks between Le Corbusier and the client took place in the spring of 1960, and in April 1961 the lock was officially inaugurated in the presence of the then French Economics and Finance Minister Wilfrid Baumgartner . At this point only the control tower of the two buildings was completed. The construction work was completed in the following year 1962.

The lock house of the lock located 500 m further north opened in 1995

After several attempts had been made to expand the Rhine-Rhône Canal for larger ships, it was achieved in the 1990s that at least the section between Mulhouse and the Rhine was prepared for European-class ships . The lock was too small for this type of ship. It was only designed for the Freycinet-class barges called Péniche, Flamländer or Spits and was therefore replaced by a newly built lock around 500 meters to the north. Since this was on the territory of the municipality of Niffer, it was named Schleuse Niffer ( French Écluse de Niffer ), it went into operation in 1995.

Dimensions of the lock chamber

Length 85 m

Width 12 m

Drop height 5.5 m

literature

Web links

Commons : Schleuse Kembs-Niffer  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Information on the history of Niffer ( Memento of the original from April 13, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on a private website, accessed April 12, 2014 (French) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.hopla.net

Coordinates: 47 ° 42 ′ 15 ″  N , 7 ° 30 ′ 15 ″  E