Van Houtem / Lochner cloth factory
The cloth factory van Houtem / Lochner was one of the older and larger textile companies based on Karlsgraben in Aachen . It was founded in 1773 by Heinrich van Houtem, taken over by Johann Friedrich Lochner in 1857 and liquidated in 1907 .
The takeover and expansion of the cloth factory by the Lochner family meant that the infrastructure in the residential area was massively changed and that the later West Park was created to compensate for the necessary development of parts of the English garden on the company's site .
Since 1928, the majority of the remaining buildings have been owned by RWTH Aachen University , which fundamentally restored them after the destruction in World War II and of which only the old baroque gate and the adjacent coach house were listed . Between 1936 and 1955, the remaining areas of the former villa garden were used as the forerunner of the RWTH Botanical Garden .
history
Van Houtem cloth factory
In the 18th century, the Dutch equestrian general Count Berghe von Trips owned the so-called Eysser House on Karlsgraben in Aachen, which was built by Laurenz Mefferdatis and which included a large garden. After his death, the cloth manufacturer Heinrich van Houtem (1737–1789), whose ancestors came from Amsterdam and whose father received citizenship rights from Aachen, took over the house and had it extensively expanded and converted into a city villa. In addition, he had the old plate mill , formerly Segraedt mill , from the 14th century converted into a fulling mill and dye works on the property , which was located in front of the Carlsweiher there and benefited from the Johannisbach flowing through it . Van Houtem belonged to the "New Party" at the time, which had fought for economic progress and independence from the guilds within the framework of the Aachen Mäkelei and for which he became a member of the city council as rentmaster from 1786 .
After Heinrich's death, his son, who later became the commercial judge Ignaz van Houtem (1764–1812), took over his father's spinning factory in 1789, expanded it and in just a few years was one of the most important Aachen manufacturers of that time. In 1802 he also acquired the secularized monastery of the Cölestinerinnen and former white women monastery in Aachen , in which he set up his wool warehouse. In 1804 the factory was personally visited by Napoléon Bonaparte and in 1810 it employed around 290 workers. At that time it was the second largest of its kind in Aachen after the Nellessen cloth factory . After his death, Ignaz's wife, Josefine Schwendel (1759–1839) from Frankfurt am Main, took over the management of the company. She was very socially committed and had been a member of the “Conseil general de la société de la Charité maternelle” since 1811, and in 1815 she headed the association to support the warriors in the field. In 1830, she received permission to set up a 20-hp steam engine to operate the fulling mills and dishwashers, as well as the hoisting and shearing machines. In the following years, a total of around 265 employees, 71 of them under 14 years of age, worked in the company.
After her death, her two sons Georg Heinrich (1786–1850) and Ignaz (1796–1866) failed to maintain the level of production and the factory began to decline. Finally it was sold with the city villa and the property in 1857 to the cloth manufacturer Johann Friedrich Lochner , who gave the company a new upswing.
Lochner cloth factory
Under Lochner, who had previously gained 25 years of experience as a partner in the Burtscheider cloth factory " Johann Erckens Sons & Lochner ", sales increased again. In order not to be entirely dependent on the main plant, he also acquired the nearby Junkersmühle with the associated water rights on the Johannisbach. After his death, his sons Emil , Wilhelm Friedrich (1835–1904) and Rudolf Lochner took over the shares in their parents' textile factory, Emil being the technical manager, Fritz overseeing the sales department and Rudolf being responsible for commercial and administrative matters. The three brothers later adapted the company to the new times through serious changes and it became one of the largest textile factories in Aachen under their aegis.
In 1873 the brothers rebuilt Lochnerstrasse, named after their father, and changed the course of Mauerstrasse as well as the previously built-up area around their parents' Lochner villa. At the same time, a new factory building crowned with towers and battlements, as well as storage and office space, was built next to the old factory building according to plans by the Aachen civil engineer and university professor Otto Intze .
For this new construction measure, the Carlsweiher had to be drained and the Johannisbach laid underground and a large part of the old English garden had to be built. To compensate for this, Emil Lochner acquired the Kirschbenden property in front of Junkerstor in 1882 , where he had a park built with an integrated zoological garden.
After the death of Emil Lochner in 1900 and the retirement of Fritz Lochner due to old age, Rudolf Lochner continued to run the company as a sole shareholder and converted it into a GmbH a little later . It gradually became clear, however, that neither his sons nor his nephews showed any interest in joining the family business. Since there were no buyers willing to continue the company, Robert Lochner was forced to liquidate the cloth factory in 1907, from which the Delius cloth factory , which was only a few hundred meters away and which was newly built in the same year, benefited, which Emil also benefited from Lochner's son-in-law Eugen Peltzer (1871–1955) hired as a new partner.
The Lochnerfabrik building was initially taken over by the brothers Carl Hugo (1867–1957) and Eduard Friedrich Hugo Heusch , who ran the Hugo Heusch & Cie. Needle factory there until 1928 . , formerly Butenberg & Heusch , and then acquired by the Technical University.
Likewise, the Lochnerpark with the zoological garden had to be closed as early as 1905, but could be continued as municipal property with a new orientation as Westpark from 1920.
RWTH Aachen
After the takeover by the university, the buildings were fundamentally rebuilt for their purposes and the newly founded Institute for Mineral Engineering moved into the premises. In addition, a botanical garden was laid out in the remaining parts of the former villa garden in 1936 by the head of the botanical institute, Alphons Theodor Czaja (1894-1984), which was used as a teaching garden for students of pharmacy until it was moved to Melatener Strasse in 1953 as well as for budding food technicians.
Later other departments of the university moved into the building, including in the main building on Lochnerstraße the Faculty of Georesources and Material Technology, the Department of Geosciences and Geography and the Chair of Engineering Geology and Hydrogeology.
In 2017, plans became known to relocate the Institute of Mineral Engineering to the new RWTH Campus Melaten and to hand over the old factory building to a new urban planning use.
building
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After the former factory buildings were mostly badly damaged in World War II, they were rebuilt by the university, partially changed and realigned for the institute's needs. Although the old chimney from the time of van Houtem and parts of the east facade of his city villa built by Mefferdatis on Mauerstraße and the entrance portal with the coach house on Karlsgraben, which was subsequently added in 1890, only the portal and the coach house were placed under monument protection. The changes to the other parts of the building, most recently in 1961 by the architect Hans Haas, meant that they did not meet the criteria for inclusion in monument protection. Nevertheless, the historical structure of the old factory can be easily understood from the style and shapes.
The arched portal, built around 1773, is attributed to Jakob Couven or Joseph Moretti . It is framed by two double pilasters with Ionic capitals on high plinths . In the curved entablature above is the coat of arms in the middle, on which the Lochner family's coat of arms with sword and crowns has been located since 1857. On the back side, due to the extension of the coach house, instead of the pilaster, the gate only has a half-column on the free side and is crowned by a triangular tympanum with a semicircular window in the gable.
The two-storey, three-axle plastered former coach house connects directly to the gate at the rear. It consists of one room each on the ground floor and one on the first floor, which are connected by a spiral staircase. After this small building complex had been vacant for many decades and threatened to deteriorate, the “Neuman & Esser Foundation” initiated a restoration of the buildings in 2006, which the Klaus Peters family, descendants of the Lochner family, had brought into being.
literature
- Thomas Lochner: The story of the Aachen cloth manufacturer Johann Friedrich Lochner and his family . Schnell-Verlag, Warendorf 2013
- Bodo von Knoppen: Alt Aachener Gärten , Georgi, Aachen 1987, pp. 65-68
- Reinhard Dauber and Ingeborg Schild : Buildings of the Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen , in: Rheinische Kunststätten , issue 400, Neuss 1994, p. 16
Web links
- Moritz Wild's entry on Karlstor and Kutscherhaus in the " KuLaDig " database of the Rhineland Regional Association
- Karina Angelova / Lorezo Morez: The van Houtem cloth factory in Aachen , In: Rheinische Industriekultur
Individual evidence
- ↑ Cloth factory van Houtem on albert-gieseler.de
- ↑ Eckard Heck: The citizens of the city buy a zoo , on movieaachen.de from October 20, 2018
- ^ Institute for Mineral Engineering of the RWTH Aachen , on the homepage of the RWTH Aachen
- ↑ New building for rock metallurgy at RWTH Aachen , press release from RWTH Aachen on July 17, 2017
- ↑ Monument Karlsgraben 55, Lochnertor and Kutscherhaus , monument report on the website of the city of Aachen.
Coordinates: 50 ° 46 ′ 26.5 " N , 6 ° 4 ′ 31.7" E