Stuttgart broadcasting center

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Funkhaus Stuttgart
The radio house seen from the lower palace garden

The Stuttgarter Funkhaus was built from 1972 to 1976 by the architect Rolf Gutbrod for the then Süddeutscher Rundfunk and was considered to be the most modern broadcasting house in Europe when it went into operation. It stands in the area of ​​the former Stuttgart city ​​hall in the Berg district . Until 1998 it was the headquarters of the Süddeutscher Rundfunk and its programs. Since 1998 it has been the seat of the director of SDR's successor, Südwestrundfunk . It is also the seat of the SWR state broadcaster for Baden-Württemberg as well as one of the three (officially equal) headquarters of the two-country establishment (next to Baden-Baden and Mainz).

use

The radio house now houses the studios of the radio programs SWR1 Baden-Württemberg and SWR4 Baden-Württemberg , their editorial offices and numerous specialist editorial offices of the SWR. Until 1998, SDR 3 and the Südfunk 2 cultural program were also produced here , most recently in cooperation with Baden-Baden .

There are no television studios in the radio house at Neckarstrasse 230, which was completed in 1976; For years these were located in the directly adjacent television complex at Villa Berg and only moved into the new building in 2011 , which was attached directly to the broadcasting house.

The building has 18 floors, 8 of which are underground (or on a slope). There is also a VHF transmitter on the radio house ( filling transmitter with lower power).

Analog radio (FM)

In the case of directed radiation, the main radiation directions are given in degrees in the antenna diagram.

Frequency  
(MHz)
logo program RDS-PS RDS-PI Regionalization ERP
(kW)
Antenna pattern
round (ND) / 
directional (D)
Polarization
horizontal (H) / 
vertical (V)
91.5
SWRinfo - Logo.svg
SWRinfo SWRinfo_ D3A6 - 0.3 ND H
93.1
SWR2 Logo.svg
SWR2 __SWR2__ D3A2 Baden-Württemberg 0.2 ND H
99.6
SWR1 Baden-Württemberg SWR1_BW_ D301 - 0.5 ND H

Building history

To this day, the building stands in a field of tension between tradition and modernity, between technical innovation and the zeitgeist of the 1960s and 1970s, and it has repeatedly been adapted to contemporary requirements and user needs. The construction of the radio house on Neckarstrasse ended a series of makeshift and temporary buildings, from Danziger Freiheit (now Charlottenplatz ) to buildings in the area of Villa Berg , from which broadcasts were broadcast for five decades.

The post-war history of radio for North Württemberg and North Baden begins for Radio Stuttgart at Neckarstraße 145, about 750 meters from today's Funkhaus, in an office building of the former Reichspost , which was not big enough and poorly suited for studio technology. A “ medium-sized broadcasting hall ” was built into the restored building shell of Villa Berg - this was the first step towards the new location. In the park of Villa Berg , the radio studio and later the "TV studio" was first built, both hidden on a slope, not to impair the impression of Villa Mountain.

In the 1960s, Rolf Gutbrod had to plan a building that would meet the requirements of broadcasting in the long term, at a time when radio was playing the main role of the public broadcaster and television was only just beginning to develop. The requirement for the radio house was also to express the self-image of the Süddeutscher Rundfunk "broadcasting as a public good". The urban planning requirements had to be taken into account, especially to integrate the new building into the adjacent park area "Villa Berg".

By squaring the circle , many strengths and weaknesses of the broadcasting company emerged.

The strengths: From the outside, the cultural monument shows a different perspective at each location because the three components are shifting towards each other. The complex is divided into three areas: communication, editing and administration as well as production. In contrast to the seemingly cool facade, there are also unique, sometimes playful structural details. For example the mosaic garden terraces or the so-called “Eye of God”, a triangular glass window that lets daylight into the lowest levels of the broadcasting house. The special features include the symbolism of Gutbrod's sign language, the use of color as an information carrier, the variety of materials in the interior and the lack of symmetry axes and right angles. The television studios in the park of Villa Berg were connected by an underground tunnel. The weaknesses of the building: the light-poor studios, dark offices on the lower floors, the large-scale use of copper, especially on the lower level, or the unusable open staircase along the terrace level.

In 2000, the Stuttgart radio house was added to the list of cultural monuments by the Baden-Württemberg State Monuments Office . The three-part building complex with its blue-silver facade cladding is still considered a unique structure in the broadcasting landscape.

New building

In May 2008, SWR began building an extension to the broadcasting house on the adjacent property on Kuhnstrasse to the northeast. The commissioning took place in July 2011 and for the first time all Stuttgart editorial offices, television, radio and internet are produced at a single location. The new building has a usable area of ​​22,000 m² and connects four studios that can be operated by three control rooms. The first broadcasts started in mid-May 2012. The official opening of the new building took place on June 28, 2012.

Web links

Commons : Funkhaus Stuttgart  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. visit the funkhaus at schwaebische-albvereinsjugend.de
  2. ^ Radio Stuttgart - a station of the American military government, so the station's first name (until July 1949). The presentation follows the contribution by Edgar Lersch: From Danziger Freiheit to the Park of Villa Berg in the monograph: A house for broadcasting (places and buildings in Stuttgart - from 1924 to today) from 2003
  3. ^ Topping- out ceremony in July 1956, January 1959 commissioning of the radio play complex .
  4. Most of the television studios were built on a slope , i.e. underground. Inauguration April 10, 1965. According to Edgar Lersch: From Danziger Freiheit to the Park of Villa Berg, p. 45. These studios remained in operation until the new building in 2011 - see below - and were connected to Neckarstraße 230 by a tunnel, the was also used for guided tours by groups of visitors.
  5. Fantastic on the way. In: Mebucom.de, accessed on November 15, 2013.
  6. SWR new building inaugurated in Stuttgart. Chronicle of the ARD, accessed on September 5, 2016.

Coordinates: 48 ° 47 '36 "  N , 9 ° 12' 14"  E