Villa Ulrich

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View from the Genzmer Bridge from the southwest

The Villa Ulrich , also known as the “To the Seven Waves”, in Halle (Saale) , Ratswerder 7, is the former home of the architect Wilhelm Ulrich , which he had built in 1924/25 according to his own designs and which, in its expressionistic form, is an important style represents the 1920s. In the register of monuments of the city of Halle , the house is listed as a villa under registration number 094 04957.

location

The villa is hidden in a natural area under the protection of tall trees on the Ratswerder, north of the confluence of the Mühlgraben with the Saale . The former inland island between the now overbuilt Gerberaale and the Mühlgraben, southwest of Halle's old town, is the southern part of the historic Strohhof peninsula, which is still threatened by floods, and remained almost undeveloped until the beginning of the 20th century.

Building history and architecture

The client and architect Wilhelm Ulrich moved to Halle in 1921 to join the architecture office of his uncle Gustav Wolff , which he took over in 1929. In March 1924 he submitted the building application for his own house. It was to be built on the previously purchased plot of land on the headland between the Gerberaale and Stromsaale. A good year later, in April 1925, the final inspection took place. The property was originally considerably larger than it is today; it extended far to the north, which can still be seen on old plans. Ulrich's conception of architecture is directly indicated by a relief on the northeastern entrance side with the inscription “To the seven combs - 1924”.

Following the pattern of a honeycomb, six similar rooms are arranged around a hexagonal core, forming a spacious floor plan. The ground floor took on the function of a cellar due to the high groundwater level. A staircase leads to the floor above, where five adjacent honeycombs can be entered from the central honeycomb, the anteroom, which accommodate a pantry, laundry room, heating, kitchen and dining room. The actual living areas are on the first floor. The second floor is located above the roof approach and accommodated smaller, presumably subordinate rooms. A food elevator leads through all floors.

The strongly moving floor plan structure is based on surfaces that are at angles of 120 ° to one another and open alternately inwards and outwards. The polygonal broken surfaces dominate the exterior design . The steep tent roof, which looks like a triangular pyramid, gives the building a unified monumental shape.

In 1927 Ulrich added a garage to the left of the villa and a garden hall to the right, as a symmetrical counterpart.

For the architect, this first building, which was independently constructed according to his own design, was a prototype of building with a hexagonal floor plan. In his own words, the honeycomb principle realized here seemed "clear as crystal and rhythmic like music" and thus corresponded to the credo of his expressionist architecture program. At the same time, it made an important contribution to the experimental architecture of the Weimar period .

The house was sold in 1995 and extensively restored in the same year, so that the exterior view largely corresponds to the state of the 1920s. The color scheme was also essentially restored. The newly laid pavement in the form of an irregular hexagon refers to the floor plan of the house.

literature

  • Buildings by architect BDA Dipl.-Ing. Wilhelm Ulrich in Halle ADS In: Deutsche Bauzeitung, Issue 63–64, Berlin 1930. Digitized
  • Karin Franz: Villa Ulrich. In: Dieter Dolgner (Ed.): Historic villas in the city of Halle / Saale. Friends of the architectural and art monuments Saxony-Anhalt eV, Halle (Saale) 1998, ISBN 3-931919-04-8 , pp. 119–126.
  • Holger Brülls, Thomas Dietzsch: Architectural Guide Halle on the Saale. Dietrich Reimer Verlag, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-496-01202-1 , p. 166.
  • Sabine Klug: The end of the right angle. Wilhelm Ulrich and the hexagonal building concepts in 20th century architecture (= studies on art history , volume 175), Olms Verlag, Hildesheim 2008, ISBN 978-3-487-13696-7 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ State Office for the Preservation of Monuments in Saxony-Anhalt (ed.): List of monuments in Saxony-Anhalt / City of Halle. Fly Head Publishing, Halle 1996, ISBN 3-910147-62-3 , p. 380.
  2. ↑ Karin Franz, p. 121/122 (see literature)
  3. ↑ Brülls / Dietzsch, p. 166 (see literature)

Coordinates: 51 ° 28 ′ 41.5 ″  N , 11 ° 57 ′ 40.4 ″  E