Vitos Chapel in Giessen

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Chapel from the east

The Vitos Chapel Gießen is the clinic church of the former sanatorium and nursing home in Gießen , today the Vitos Clinic for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy Gießen , a subsidiary of Vitos GmbH . The hall church built in 1912 with a massive tower in the northeast is a Hessian cultural monument . It is used alternately for Protestant and Catholic church services as well as for cultural events and concerts.

history

Annex building with arched roof and sacristy in the south

In 1911 the Gießen State Sanatorium and Nursing Home was built on the site of the Gießen city forest on Licher Straße . It was founded as an agricultural colony in order to achieve a certain degree of self-sufficiency through the cultivation of crops. Due to the many green areas and the rich tree population, the area today resembles a park. The differently designed buildings in the "pavilion style" were initially assigned to different diseases.

The State Building Authority built the clinic church in 1912. The then Gießen Catholic priest and dean Johannes Bayer and the ordinariate rejected the plans for a simultaneous church . In the first few years, the areas for Protestant and Catholic services were structurally completely separated from each other. The apse was walled up and only accessible through the sacristy. The small rectangular choir accommodated 14 knees and seats and a further eight seats in the catholics' worship service assembly room, while the nave was used for Protestant services. The partition wall was painted on the side of the nave with a large round arch that simulated an apse. The Catholic part was consecrated on May 5, 1912 and the first service was held one day later. About 30 Catholics attended services every Sunday in the first half of the 1920s. Catholic officials, employees and the sick asked the ordinariate in 1921 to remedy the cramped conditions. Negotiations were long and unsuccessful about an extension of the choir or the removal of the partition wall. It was not until 1930 that the wall was removed and the current interior was created. Since then the chapel has served as a simultaneous church. From July 1, 1941, the responsible NS administration stopped paying the remuneration of the Protestant and Catholic clergy and the organist service.

When the State Welfare Association of Hesse took over the clinic in the early 1950s, it was renamed the Psychiatric Hospital . After merging with the Marburg Clinic under the name Center for Social Psychiatry Mittlere Lahn in 2002, the clinic has been called Vitos Gießen-Marburg since 2009 .

architecture

The massive bell tower

The houses, which are apparently randomly distributed over the 20  hectare site, partly take up elements of Art Nouveau . There is no symmetrical arrangement of the buildings. Rather, they are based on the topographical conditions. In the center of the site on a diagonal path, the chapel stands on the middle of the gender axis that used to separate the men's from the women's shelters. The white plastered hall church made of brick over an unplastered base is built from roughly hewn lung stone and basalt. Architecturally, the style is based on churches in Upper Hesse.

The church is dominated in the northeast by the solidly walled tower on a square floor plan, which houses the bells and the clockwork. The main entrance in the vestibule is designed as a rectangular portal with walls made of red sandstone. The vestibule rests on four Tuscan columns made of red sandstone, which support a slate hipped roof that encloses the tower on three sides. The upper part of the tower shaft jumps back slightly over a sandstone cornice. Large rectangular sound holes on the three free sides have lamellas and the clock faces of the tower clock. The slated helmet structure consists of a curved roof that conveys to an octagonal end with a Welscher hood . It is crowned by a wrought iron tower cross with a gilded weathercock.

The ship is exposed by large rectangular windows with two-web Sandsteingewände and shoot structure and by a steep pitched roof completed, which is manned each side with three small triangular dormers. The retracted and lower rectangular choir with arched roof is supplied with light on the southeast side through a small oval window and on the northwest side through a rectangular window. A sacristy on a rectangular floor plan with a hipped roof is attached to the south corner .

Furnishing

View of the altar area
View of the organ gallery

The interior is simply furnished. The nave is completed by a flat beam ceiling. The cross beams are supported by a longitudinal girder. The wooden organ gallery is built in a niche in the tower hall and offers space for four benches. Pilasters with rhombuses structure the parapet, the coffered panels of which have six fields. Inside the tower hall, three wooden doors with lead-glass diamonds lead to the staircase, into a small adjoining room and to the nave.

The polygonal, wooden pulpit has a wide pulpit staircase and a sound cover, which is crowned by a ball and cross. The wooden church stalls leave a central aisle free. Twelve lamps are attached to a large, wheel-shaped brass chandelier, and nine brass lamps that were gas lamps before electrification were attached to the walls of the ship.

The rectangular choir opens towards the ship in its entire width. The altar area is raised by two steps. The wooden block altar with coffered fields is set up there. In the south corner there is a wood-carved Madonna with the child. On the choir wall, the crucified is depicted as a pictogram as a gray painted metal work from the 2000s. A door with an arched arch allows the passage to the sacristy. A wooden confessional with an openwork diamond lattice is installed here in a separate small room.

organ

A contract for a new organ was signed with Förster & Nicolaus Orgelbau on December 16, 1910. The Lich company built the organ with six registers on one manual and pedal in 1912 . Three-quarter pillars divide three arch fields in a rectangular housing with a flat prospect , the cornices of which are profiled. In 1955 the building company made a change to the disposition . It replaced a register, added a mixture and set up a transmission for the Octave 4 ′. Since then the instrument has seven registers with the following disposition:

I Manual C – f 3
Principal 8th'
Dumped 8th'
Octave 4 ′
flute 4 ′
recorder 2 ′
Mixture III
Pedal C – d 1
Sub bass 16 ′
Choral bass (from I) 4 ′
  • Coupling : I / P, super octave coupling

literature

  • State Office for the Preservation of Monuments Hesse (ed.), Karlheinz Lang (edit.): Cultural monuments in Hesse. University town of Giessen. (= Monument topography Federal Republic of Germany ). Verlagsgesellschaft Vieweg & Sohn, Braunschweig / Wiesbaden 1993, ISBN 3-528-06246-0 , pp. 401-403.
  • Peter Weyrauch : The churches of the old district of Giessen. Mittelhessische Druck- und Verlagsgesellschaft, Gießen 1979, p. 66 f.

Web links

Commons : Heil- und Pflegeeanstalt Gießen  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ State Office for the Preservation of Monuments Hesse (ed.), Lang (edit.): Cultural monuments in Hesse. 1993, p. 403.
  2. ↑ Church services in and around Gießen , accessed on April 17, 2020.
  3. ↑ Music at Vitos , accessed on April 17, 2020.
  4. ^ Weyrauch: The churches of the old district Gießen. 1979, p. 66.
  5. ^ Vitos Gießen-Marburg: History. Retrieved August 23, 2014.
  6. ↑ State Office for the Preservation of Monuments in Hesse (ed.): The whole of the former sanatorium and nursing home In: DenkXweb, online edition of cultural monuments in Hesse , accessed on 23 August 2014.
  7. ^ Franz Bösken, Hermann Fischer: Sources and research on the organ history of the Middle Rhine. Volume 3: Former province of Upper Hesse (=  contributions to the Middle Rhine music history 29.1 . Part 1: A – L. ). Schott, Mainz 1988, ISBN 3-7957-1330-7 , p. 368 .

Coordinates: 50 ° 34 ′ 37.5 "  N , 8 ° 42 ′ 5.7"  E