Speyer water tower
The Speyer water tower , built on the elevated terrace , the highest of the three terrain levels over which the city of Speyer extends, still serves to supply the city with drinking water and is a cultural monument and a landmark of the Speyer-West district .
The tower was built in 1883 on the initiative of the engineer and entrepreneur Adolf Friedrich Lindemann (1846–1931), who lived in England and who, on the basis of a stock corporation, created the first modern drinking water network with 20 km of pipes and 105 hydrants in Speyer from 1882 to 1883. The water tower should provide the necessary water pressure in this system. Lindemann wanted to win over a large number of communities in the Vorderpfalz for a large hygienic drinking water system, but only found acceptance with his ideas in Speyer, where there had been several cholera epidemics in the 1870s .
The water for the system was found in 1882 after several test bores in the forest area "Jägerrast" in the Speyer forest . After quality problems from 1885, a new pumping station was built at the table well near Berghausen , which still supplies the water today.
The tower originally stood in the open, but is now surrounded by the Speyer-West district, directly from the street and the “Am Wasserturm” settlement.
Since German banks could not be won over for financing, Lindemann had won an English company under Ch. Marschall as financier. Since Lindemann cooperated with England, his company was placed under state supervision in 1914 (beginning of World War I ) and liquidated in 1917. The water supply and the tower went to the city of Speyer, which it continues to operate today through its Stadtwerke Speyer.
The building: technology and architecture
The water tower bears witness to the beginning of large-scale hygienic drinking water supply systems and is an early example of a tower with a loft tank similar to the systems that were built in Pirmasens and on Martinshöhe .
According to the judgment of the art historian Clemens Jöckle , the achievement in erecting the tower is to have built a distinctive urban structure in restrained but powerful forms in addition to the technical construction. The function of the structure as a concealing covering of the technology is expressed in the three-part structure. The base, stand and container can be seen in the exterior.
The basis is a twelve-sided base floor, the lintel of which bears the year 1883.
The three-story stand is divided into 12 fields with narrow window slots using flat wall templates. The lintels of the 12 windows of the basement floor, the 36 windows of the post and the 12 false windows of the container floor were made of yellow sandstone, which contrasts with the red of the clinker brick in which the tower is built as a whole.
The container storey protrudes on stepped consoles over which a profiled sandstone cornice runs around the tower. Above that, wall templates again divide the floor into 12 fields.
For the tower roof, the elements of the hipped roof , tambour and lantern were originally compressed in such a way that a kind of offset hipped roof was created.
swell
- Clemens Jöckle : District capital Speyer. Buildings from the Bavarian past. Publisher: Historical Association, Speyer District Group, ISSN 0175-6583 ; P. 68: 34. The water tower monument
literature
- Ludwig Stösser: When Speyer's water tower was still praised as a technical wonder of modern times , In Speyerer Tagespost 1974, also in Speyerer Vierteljahreshefte 1974, p. 2 ff.
- Reinhard Slotta: Technical Monuments, Volume 2, pp. 450–452
Web links
Coordinates: 49 ° 19 ′ 11.2 " N , 8 ° 25 ′ 21.3" E