Technical Town Hall (Frankfurt am Main)
The Technical Town Hall was the seat of the technical offices of the city administration of Frankfurt am Main from 1974 to 2009 . The administration building was located at Braubachstrasse 15 in the old town , while the rear faced the Alter Markt . It was built from 1972 to 1974 according to plans by the architects Bartsch, Thürwächter and Weber . The location bordered on the cathedral hill , the oldest and probably since Celtic times uninterrupted settlement in Frankfurt, in the immediate vicinity of the imperial cathedral St. Bartholomäus and the Römerberg .
Due to its relative size compared to the surrounding buildings, its architecture and its location in the historic core area of the old town, the Technical Town Hall was one of the controversial structures in Frankfurt's architectural history. In 2005 the city decided to demolish the building. From April to November 2010 the technical town hall was demolished down to the ground floor, the ground floor, the basement and parts of the underground car park followed from May 2011 to January 2012. From 2012 to 2017 the area between the cathedral and the Römer was built on with the new Frankfurt old town . The resurrected chicken market and the street Hinter dem Lämmchen have been accessible again since May 9, 2018 .
location
( chromolithography by Friedrich August Ravenstein )
The building was an urban dominant feature in the heart of Frankfurt's historic old town, between Braubachstrasse, Nürnberger Hof , Altem Markt and Hof Rebstock . The Old Market is not a place but a road and corresponds to the historic "Royal Route" that the festival procession at imperial coronations from Frankfurt Cathedral for Römerberg took.
To the west, the building bordered on the remains of the Nuremberg court, from which a late Gothic gate passage has been preserved ( Madern Gerthener , 1410). Beyond this narrow alley is the Stone House , which was rebuilt after the Second World War . In the south it bordered the Kunsthalle Schirn , built between 1983 and 1986, and the archaeological garden with remains of the Roman settlement on the cathedral hill, which was uncovered in 1972/73, and the early medieval royal palace in Frankfurt , with the access to the Dom / Römer underground station and an underground car park in between. In the southeast, the Technical Town Hall reached up to about 30 meters from the cathedral tower.
The Technical Town Hall covered the former streets Hinter dem Lämmchen , Neugasse and the chicken market bordering on the old market . Its small-scale development was destroyed in the air raids in 1944 and the rubble was cleared by 1950.
In the east, the Technical Town Hall was built directly onto the former main customs office ( Werner Hebebrand , 1927) above the former Rebstock farm , which was converted from 2004 to 2006 by the Limburg diocese into the Haus am Dom educational and conference center . In the north the building was on Braubachstrasse. For the construction of the Technical Town Hall, five buildings on Braubachstrasse that came from the 16th and first half of the 20th century and had survived the Second World War were demolished.
Planning and construction history
The 1963 competition
The planning of the Technical City Hall goes back to the Dom-Römer competition of 1963. The first competition to rebuild Frankfurt's old town did not find the jury's enthusiasm and was not implemented in the center of the old town. From the three winning designs and the contributions discussed in advance, the city planning office developed a master plan for the alignment lines and the individual structural planning in 1951 , which was implemented in the areas on the banks of the Main, around the cathedral and on Berliner Straße , but not in the center of the old town between cathedral and Römer.
After the reconstruction of the rest of the old town was completed, a second competition to design the central old town was announced in 1963. In contrast to 1950, not only Hessian architects were allowed here, so that well-known international architects could contribute with contributions. Like the first competition, the second also took place under the main leadership of the building department head Hans Kampffmeyer .
The competition program prescribed by the city was narrow and left the participants little room for maneuver. An administration building for the technical offices should take up about half of the area to be created. Other functions to be realized were a central city library, an exhibition called Frankfurt und die Welt , which was supposed to present Frankfurt's foreign relations, a youth music school, an art gallery, a cabaret, hotels, restaurants and shops.
Participants in the competition included big names from German and international modernism, including Kampffmeyer's predecessors Ernst May and Walter Gropius , Hans Scharoun , Candilis - Josic - Woods and Arne Jacobsen . The jury included a. the Frankfurt architects Johannes Krahn and Max Meid as well as the Hanoverian city planner Rudolf Hillebrecht and the Viennese architect Franz Schuster , a former employee of May in Frankfurt.
In the first rounds, the jury eliminated all works that had obviously not adhered to the competition specifications. This included designs that wanted to accommodate the entire spatial program in a single large building, such as Candilis-Josic-Woods, who quickly expanded the competition area to the south and proposed an amorphous large structure that extends from Braubachstrasse to the banks of the Main, but from its residents Should be changeable at will. The works of Hans Scharoun, Fred Forbát and Ernst May, who (in the case of the latter despite their best knowledge of the area) based their design on an orthogonal grid that was too little influenced by the genius loci and the urban configuration of the old town, even for the taste of the time, came about early sorted out.
The jury selected the young Frankfurt architects Bartsch-Thürwächter-Weber as the winner of the competition. She was so convinced of her contribution that instead of a second prize she awarded three third prizes. One of these was Scharoun, who had designed an " organic urban landscape" reminiscent of his Berlin cultural forum , which he described as an "articulated valley with lively fringes", but which the jury created due to the low, low-rise building on the Römerberg, which was not a proper version of this square , only partially convinced. Another third prize went to the Apel - Beckert - Praeckel community ( ABB , known in Frankfurt above all for the double theater system of the city's theaters completed in the same year ), whose design was oriented strictly at right angles, but was at least divided into several medium-sized structures.
The winning design
The winning design by Bartsch, Thürwächter and Weber was also structured at right angles and divided into four large areas.
On the east side of the Römerberg the exhibition house Frankfurt und die Welt was planned, which was the only one that deviated from the right angle and, similar to Scharoun's design, showed itself in irregular, obtuse-angled shapes. It did not fill the entire width of the previous row of houses, but left large areas open to the north (Alter Markt) and south ( Saalgasse ), so that small squares were created in front of the Stone House and east of the Old Nikolaikirche . The latter at least maintained the proportions of the destroyed old town in its dimensions (it reached roughly from the choir of the church to the former five-finger cookie ), but had never existed in this form or at this point. The planned space at the Steinerne Haus actually existed in the past in a tiny form, but the now proposed space was about half the size of the Römerberg and completely robbed it of its former uniqueness as an open space in the middle of an extremely tightly built-up area.
To the east of the exhibition hall were two large, strictly right-angled structures, a three-winged complex open to the Nikolaikirche with a large inner courtyard, and a very compact, closed component that was supposed to house the youth music school. Both complexes were separated from each other by an alley about the level of the former Lange Schirn street , but connected by two bridges. To the north of the music school was the area to be kept clear for the excavated ruins of the royal palace.
The “administration building for technical offices” was planned between Altem Markt and Braubachstrasse, a complex divided into seven components. Similar to the four main parts of the completed building, buildings of different heights were planned at the corners of the property, from three floors to be used by the hotel in the southwest next to the stone house to eight in the northeast on the corner of Braubachstrasse and Domstrasse. A low, two-storey block with the shops and artist studios required in the competition ran between the two structures on the Alter Markt. To the north, parallel to this, there was another, significantly higher, six-storey building that was roughly the same height as the eaves of the 60-year-old building on Braubachstrasse. A ten-story tower grew from this block in the center of the complex. There was an inner courtyard between this and the low building on the Alter Markt.
In an urban planning competition, it is unusual to define the architecture of the individual buildings in a binding manner, but the structures of the technical offices shown in the model were shown strictly at right angles, albeit asymmetrically.
The design took up the historical coronation path along the Old Market as a defining element, but increased it by widening it many times the width of the previous street, by the ahistorical square in front of the stone house and by the direct line of sight between the Römer and the cathedral tower that never existed before. Until it was destroyed, the market was an approximately eight-meter-wide street that bent slightly to the north at the level of the Lange Schirn and therefore offered no direct line of sight at street level, although the cathedral tower as a trademark of the street protruded visibly over the houses on the southern side of the street.
The winning design was also approved by the “Friends of Frankfurt”, the successor association of the “ Association of Active Friends of the Old Town ” founded by Fried Lübbecke , which in those years united most of the civic commitment to building appropriate for the old town. The association wrote the version from 1963, albeit in view of the revised plans from 1969, “[…] was never a nightmare for the Frankfurt population. It blends in harmoniously with the cityscape at this point and does not endanger the few preserved historical buildings around. ” This view is to be seen in connection with the further development of the planning history that follows.
The revised design from 1969
However, this time, too, the results of the competition were not implemented. Initially, no public funds were available, not least because of the economic crisis of 1966–1968. Then projects of private investors who were interested in the planned hotel also failed.
A further complicating factor was that the space required by the technical offices - especially for the Stadtbahnbauamt - grew steadily and after a few years was twice that required in the 1963 competition. The architects took this into account by making their design more massive and taller.
The breakthrough in the construction came with the decision not to run the old part of the subway through Berliner Strasse , but under the Römerberg. This offered the opportunity to jointly build the Römer underground station , immediately south of the site of the administration building, as well as the two-storey underground car park planned above it .
Because of the tight schedule for the construction of the subway, the construction of the Technical City Hall had to start. In 1969 the city council decided to implement the revised design by Bartsch, Thürwächter and Weber. The building mass, which was greatly enlarged compared to 1963, was now realized in a rectangular base that stretched around an inner courtyard and from which three broad towers of different heights rose. According to the will of the city, these towers were not allowed to be higher than the transept of the cathedral, which is why the architects had to revise their plans, which provided for even higher towers, but still had to prove the spatial plan. The right-angled structures of the first draft were given a lighter appearance by chamfering the corners, balcony-like balustrades and the latticework-like latticework on the facades. In contrast to the curtain-wall facades of the historicizing replicas, the latticework made of metal tubes did not simulate a load-bearing function, but was recognizable to the naked eye as a decorative element.
Citizen protests against the building
A huge protest against the building manifested itself in the form of over 20,000 collected signatures. Even within the planning administration there were doubts, so even the head of the planning office at the time, Hans-Reiner Müller-Raemisch, could only describe the design as "somewhat bearable". The citizens' initiative "Friends of Frankfurt" considered the planned building site to be fundamentally unsuitable in view of the greatly increased spatial allocation and had an alternative design for a technical town hall on Börneplatz , which is less sensitive from an urban point of view , drawn up. Curiously, the employees who were housed in the Technical Town Hall later actually moved to Börneplatz as part of the demolition planning, namely to the former customer center of Stadtwerke Frankfurt, which was built at the beginning of the 1990s, also accompanied by citizen protests, to merge the administration of the Stadtwerke Stadtwerke . Before the Technisches Rathaus moved in , it housed the Stadtwerke Holding , the administration of VGF and parts of Mainova AG .
The protests of the population in the 1960s were extremely violent and were not only directed against the planned building of the authorities, but are to be seen in the context of the extremely heated atmosphere of the house- to- house war in Frankfurt . As with the disputes in the Westend, the anger of the citizens was directed against the arrogance of power in the social democratically run magistrate in general, and against the person of the then building department head Hans Kampffmeyer in particular. The latter, not only as a representative of the city government, but also directly as the future user of the building, became the enemy of parts of the population, as it was the building and planning administrations he led who were supposed to move into the planned new building.
Demolition of historical buildings to clear the construction site
Before construction began, a total of six buildings on Braubachstrasse - today's house numbers 21 to 31 - were demolished from 1970 to establish the new building. House no. 21 was a three-story half-timbered house from the 16th century, the upper floors of which had been destroyed in the war. A post-war concrete structure was built on the historic ground floor. The three houses no.27, 29 and 31 were built between 1911 and 1913 after the Braubachstrasse breakthrough, house no.23 not until 1940.
The house at Braubachstrasse 25 also contained the intact baroque rear wing of the Haus zum Esslinger , the home of Johann Wolfgang Goethe's aunt Melber . Remains of the buildings that were considered worth preserving were stored in the Historical Museum, but can no longer be assigned to the corresponding buildings due to a lack of indexing.
Architect Thürwächter said in an interview in 2005: “I was young and didn't think about it. One of the architects, Hermann Senf , was actually still alive at the time, but it wasn't really a problem for me to demolish a colleague's house. I found the buildings completely irrelevant. "
The construction
The subway construction began in January 1970 on Domplatz with a tunnel section to Börneplatz built using the mining method ( shield drive ). In contrast, the underground station was built from April 1970 in an open excavation pit, which destroyed the oldest Frankfurt settlement soil for archaeological research. In December 1971, the shell work was completed. The design for the subway station came from Bartsch / Thürwächter / Weber in cooperation with the Meid & Romeick office .
After the construction work was completed in 1974, the ceiling of the underground car park formed the new level of the space. The concrete pillars of the underground car park were raised about one meter above ground level so that the planned large building could later be placed on this pillar grid. For almost ten years, until the reconstruction of the Römerberg-Ostzeile and the construction of the Schirn Kunsthalle , what was then known as the Höckerzone occupied the historical urban space between the Kaiserdom and Römerberg. The foundations of the Carolingian royal palace in Frankfurt were preserved in the neighboring archaeological garden and made accessible to the public.
In 1994, the head of the city council, Karlheinz Bührmann, put the construction costs for the Technical Town Hall at DM 93 million. It is unclear whether this also includes the costs for the underground car park and underground station.
architecture
The Technical Town Hall consisted of four structures of different heights arranged around a common inner courtyard. The south-western structure, like the connecting bars between the four sub-buildings, had four floors. The ground floor was partially elevated so that the inner courtyard remained accessible to the public despite the continuous connecting bars. The third floor was set back in places.
The south-east building had seven floors, the north-west nine and the north-east thirteen, whereby the top floor was also designed as a stacked floor and counting was difficult because the terrain level on the south side of the building was one floor higher than on the north side.
Despite the enormous height development in this urban environment, the building was dominated by horizontals, i. H. through the continuous ribbon windows and the exposed aggregate concrete parapets hanging in front of them. The vertical frame constructions in front of the facades looked graceful.
A recurring motif in the floor plan and elevation was the 45 ° angle that is often observed in buildings from the 1970s, unlike the rectangular cubes of the 1960s. The square plans of the main building and the numerous protrusions and recesses of the external facades were chamfered at the corners . In the elevation, there were 45 ° angles in the “arcades” of the south and west façades, the supports of which were sometimes not vertical, but inclined, and in the roof shapes: to “integrate” into the urban environment of the old town, there were between the top floor and the flat roof are sloping dark surfaces that should be reminiscent of traditional slate roofs.
In some writings, the architectural style is attributed to Brutalism , although it remains unclear whether this refers to the technical term established in architectural history, which denotes the conscious use and staging of exposed concrete (French: béton brut ) or, as a word creation, " brutal " building that ignores urban or historical contexts. These two conceptual interpretations are not mutually exclusive.
use
In addition to the technical offices, there were shops on the north side (Braubachstrasse) and on the south side as well in a continuous passage that overcame the height difference with a staircase. In addition to the various catering facilities (Chinese restaurant, Italian restaurant, ice cream parlor) there were also the Frankfurt rooms of the drinks dealer Alexander Loulakis .
Demolition and follow-up construction
In 1994 the city sold the Technical City Hall to Deutsche Immobilien Leasing (DIL), a subsidiary of Deutsche Bank, as part of a lease back sale process for DM 148 million . The rent was set at around 11 million DM annually for the first 12 years. After the 12 years had expired, a buy-back clause was agreed for 135 million DM. Alternatively, one could have rented from the 13th to the 20th year, but at a far less favorable interest rate of around 15 million DM.
At the end of 2004, due to the approaching expiry of the contract, considerations began as to how to proceed with the technical town hall in the future. A concept decided by the city council initially provided for the options of preservation or demolition and subsequent small-scale rebuilding; in spring 2005, the option of conversion was finally abandoned. Under the premise of tearing down the now around 30-year-old Technical Town Hall, an urban planning competition for the new building was announced. This should be based much more strongly than before on the historical conditions of the construction site than the existing building.
However, a winning design by the Frankfurt office KSP Engel und Zimmermann , chosen in September 2005 , only met a few of these requirements: in addition to large new buildings, it envisaged relocating the course of the old market to the south, which was even respected by the Technical City Hall. In 2007, the city council decided on a modified master plan for the redevelopment of the Dom-Römer area. Among other things, it was stipulated that the former old town houses " Haus zur Goldenen Waage " and " Neues Rotes Haus " as well as the entire street behind the Lämmchen with the houses " Junge Esslinger ", "Alter Esslinger", " Goldenes Lämmchen " and "Klein Nürnberg" As true to the original as possible [to be reconstructed] and the reconstruction of the " Großer Rebstock " house [to be aimed for] .
As a prerequisite for the demolition, the city repurchased the Technical Town Hall with the expiry of the rent-back contract on April 1, 2007 for 72 million euros. The demolition costs were estimated at 19 million euros in 2008, or 8.2 million if the foundations of the Technical City Hall can continue to be used for the new building.
After the last administrative departments had moved out at the end of 2009, the building's floor-to-floor demolition began in January 2010. In April 2010, demolition officially began (with the first digger bite ) . Because of the narrow buildings all around, it was not possible to use a wrecking ball , and blasting it was impossible anyway. Therefore, the individual floors were removed with small excavators. Building materials containing harmful substances such as B. Asbestos and glass wool were disposed of. In November 2010 the building was demolished down to the ground floor; Cranes built in March 2010 were dismantled again. The two-storey underground car park was then prepared for demolition, with all the building services being removed. From May 2011 to January 2012 the remains of the building were demolished.
literature
- Hans-Reiner Müller-Raemisch: Frankfurt am Main. Urban development and planning history since 1945 . Campus, Frankfurt / New York 1998, ISBN 3-593-35918-9 .
- Bernd Kalusche, Wolf-Christian Setzepfand : Architecture Guide Frankfurt am Main . Reimer, Berlin 1992, ISBN 3-496-01100-9 , p. 71.
- Wolf-Christian Setzepfandt: Architecture Guide Frankfurt am Main . 3. Edition. Dietrich Reimer Verlag, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-496-01236-6 .
- Jens Krakies, Frank Nagel: Stadtbahn Frankfurt am Main: A Documentation . Ed .: City of Frankfurt am Main. 2nd Edition. Frankfurt am Main 1989, ISBN 3-923907-03-6 .
Web links
- Citizens of Frankfurt, fight back! Association "Friends of Frankfurt" (text of a leaflet distributed by the association in 1970 against the construction of the Technical City Hall)
- Claudia Michels: Technical Town Hall gave the old town the rest . In: Frankfurter Rundschau , September 10, 2005 (on the destruction of the remaining relics of the old town by the construction of the Technical City Hall)
- Frankfurt am Main: Destruction and reconstruction of the cityscape Germany V. (with special "appreciation" from the Technical Town Hall)
- Hannes Hintermeier: Frankfurt's Technical City Hall - the taxpayer cannot like that . In: FAZ , June 1, 2007, page 40 (interview with Anselm Thürwächter , the architect of the Technical City Hall, on the subject of demolition)
- The future of Frankfurt's old town . FAZ.NET -Spezial (collection of press articles on the planned demolition of the Technical Town Hall and the new building)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Rainer Schulze: The construction fences are falling in Frankfurt's new old town today. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , May 9, 2018, p. 33.
- ↑ Müller-Raemisch ( see Lit. ), pp. 56–64.
- ↑ a b c Müller-Raemisch ( see lit. ), p. 342.
- ↑ a b Müller-Raemisch ( see lit. ), ill. On p. 344.
- ↑ a b c d e f Müller-Raemisch ( see lit. ), ill. On p. 343.
- ↑ Flyer of the "Friends of Frankfurt" ( see web links ).
- ↑ a b Müller-Raemisch ( see lit. ), p. 345.
- ↑ a b c Müller-Raemisch ( see lit. ), p. 344.
- ↑ Müller-Raemisch ( see Lit. ), p. 343.
- ↑ a b Hannes Hintermeier : Frankfurt's Technical City Hall - the taxpayer cannot please ( see web links ).
- ↑ Article by Stadtbild Deutschland e. V. ( see web links ).
- ↑ a b Michels ( see web links ).
- ↑ Philipp Sturm, Peter Cachola Schmal (ed.): The always new old town. Building between cathedral and Römer since 1900. (= catalog for the exhibition The Always New Old Town in the German Architecture Museum), Jovis-Verlag, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-86859-501-7
- ↑ Krakies, Nagel ( see lit. ), p. 122.
- ↑ Deposit, p. 104.
- ↑ a b Minutes of the 19th plenary session of the city council on Thursday, December 15, 1994 (2:03 p.m. to 11:40 p.m.). In: PARLIS - Parliamentary Information System of the City Council of Frankfurt am Main. Retrieved August 7, 2011 .
- ↑ cf. for example the new building of the historical museum, completed in 1972, very close by.
- ↑ fr-online.de ( Memento from January 7, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
- ^ New old town - KSP win competition for the center of Frankfurt. In: BauNetz.de. September 19, 2005, accessed August 7, 2011 .
- ↑ Verbatim minutes of the 15th plenary session of the city council on Thursday, September 6, 2007 (4:02 p.m. to 10:30 p.m.). In: PARLIS - Parliamentary Information System of the City Council of Frankfurt am Main. Retrieved August 7, 2011 .
- ^ Lecture by the magistrate to the city council M 112 2007 from June 20, 2007. In: PARLIS - Parliament information system of the city council Frankfurt am Main. Retrieved August 7, 2011 .
- ^ Claudia Michels: Altstadt im Wande ( Memento from June 3, 2016 in the Internet Archive ). The end of a role model: Frankfurter Rundschau from January 4, 2010.
- ↑ News from April 22, 2010 with photo
- ↑ FAZ.net March 17, 2010: Technical Town Hall in Frankfurt - naked except for the concrete .
- ↑ 2nd edition DomRömer Zeitung (February 2011) ( Memento from October 2, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
Coordinates: 50 ° 6 ′ 39 ″ N , 8 ° 41 ′ 2 ″ E