Teufelssee waterworks

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Listed waterworks from the northeast

The Teufelssee waterworks , also known as the Grunewald waterworks or Charlottenburg waterworks , is the oldest preserved waterworks in Berlin . The facility at Teufelssee was built in 1872 and shut down in 1969 due to technical and hygienic defects.

history

Beginnings 1870–1873

Waterworks from the southeast

On May 1, 1866, the limited partnership on Actien Charlottenburger Baugesellschaft Westend was founded in order to build the Westend villa colony . The architect Martin Gropius took over the construction planning and execution together with Hanshent and F. Schmetzer. In 1870 the company found that the water supply could not be ensured by the Westend waterworks , which had started at the same time , so that a large number of the houses could not be sold. In addition to the actual water treatment plant, the company had a water tower built according to plans by the Potsdam master builder Petzholtz at the intersection of Eschen- and Platanenallee, which was designed by Heinrich Quistorp in the form of a hall of fame with a viewing floor and art exhibitions.

The work in Westend was completed, the plant supplied 4,500  m³ of water per day from 1873, but initially had too few customers and was technically not yet fully developed. It filed for bankruptcy.

The creditors, the architect Gropius and one of the company's main shareholders, Quistorp, then founded the Charlottenburger Wasserwerke GmbH and acquired a 28,000 m² building site on the Teufelsee in order to build a new, larger and more modern waterworks. One of the main reasons for the location was the nearby water lift at Teufelssee, which also became one of the plant's first main customers. Against the initial resistance of the city administration of Charlottenburg , the construction of the new waterworks began in 1872. A cabinet order of July 11, 1870 allowed the company to operate this plant for a period of 60 years.

Ultimately, the waterworks was essentially built in two construction stages. In the first stage, a two-storey half - timbered house with a clad facade was constructed, the style of which was based on buildings by Karl Friedrich Schinkel . In the second stage, the actual main building, consisting of the machine and boiler house, the round collecting well and the separate, distinctive chimney was built. A steam engine from the traditional Wöhlert machine factory was added in 1873. In the same year was a result of private speculation Heinrich Quistorp into bankruptcy .

Further development 1874–1922

Share over 1000  Marks in the Charlottenburg Waterworks on December 10, 1891

On August 21, 1878, Charlottenburger Wasserwerke AG was founded and the Westend plant was taken over. In order to connect Neu-Westend to the existing sewer system , an 84 meter high water tower was built on the Spandauer Berg on Akazienallee in 1881/1882 according to the plans of the Dresden building officer Bernhard Salbach and in 1909 with an additional 60 meter high water tower, built according to designs by the city building officer Heinrich Seeling and the architect Max Niedehoff on the Steglitzer Fichtenberg, added. Both towers were required to maintain the water pressure in the pipes; they are now known as the Charlottenburg Water Towers . With these extensions and technical innovations, the water company succeeded in reliably supplying most of the buildings in the city of Charlottenburg with water from 1881.

In 1885 a backing pump house, the well and machine master house and an increase in capacity were added. The company has now also received approval to connect the Steglitz community to the water supply network. Between 1891 and 1892 the plant was supplemented with a de-icing system based on the Piefke system. In 1892 the daily output of the Charlottenburg waterworks was now 10,000 m³.

In 1888, the Beelitzhof waterworks on the Wannsee, newly built by the Charlottenburg concern, went into operation twice as large. The Rieseler building, the sand filter and washing system and a pure water tank were built there. In 1894 two more steam pumps were purchased from the Borsig company . In 1900, the Charlottenburg waterworks supplied 28 communities, some of which were quite far from the plant's location. The legal dispute with the city of Charlottenburg was only settled in 1906 and the waterworks now became municipal property.

In 1911 four more wells were drilled on the site at Teufelssee, and another five in 1919. At the same time, the boiler house and machine house received more powerful units. The plant had thus reached its upper limit of 12,000 m³ of water per day. In 1911, the Charlottenburg II pumping station on Spandauer Damm was built and put into operation for safe transport .

During the First World War , the company management had a shed set up on the site for a locomotive as a drive reserve because the city's energy network was too unsafe for the pump drive due to fluctuations in electricity.

The daily capacity of all Charlottenburg waterworks in 1918 was almost 35,000 m³ of water. As a result of the incorporation of existing suburbs and -Cities of Greater Berlin in 1920 were Berlin Municipal Waterworks AG , a newly founded single economic body of all waterworks, now the owner of the Charlottenburg plant, which changed its name to January 15, Charlottenburg water and industrial Werke AG changed . With several of its own plants (including the Teufelssee and Jungfernheide plants, the Johannisthal waterworks, built 1899–1901, the Beelitzhof I and II plants and the Lichterfelde waterworks, which had already been shut down in 1908 - the successor was the Tiefwerder waterworks between 1913 and 1920) they supplied the western and southern parts of Berlin with water.

At that time there were 5562 house connections in the former city of Charlottenburg, the pipe network length was 199 kilometers.

In the years 1923–1980

The plant was one of the eight production sites that were not subject to any changes after being taken over by the City of Berlin due to their good condition. On January 1, 1937, the Berliner Städtische Wasserwerke AG was converted into the Berliner Städtische Wasserwerke as a proprietary operation with the help of the law on the conversion of corporations from 1934 without liquidation . After the Second World War , on August 30, 1945, the Berliner Städtische Wasserwerke and the Charlottenburger Wasser- und Industriewerke AG merged to form the Berliner Wasserwerke .

In 1963, Berliner Wasserbetriebe had the Teufelssee plant overhauled, 17 wells remained in operation and supplied 8,000 m³ of water per day. The operation of the waterworks was stopped in 1969 due to technical and hygienic deficiencies. Between 1974 and 1975 the Berliner Wasserwerke applied for the demolition and scrapping of the boiler. Concepts of use as an adventure and leisure park at Teufelssee had to be abandoned in 1980 for reasons of nature conservation . In 1981 the main building and the residential building, and finally the remaining technical equipment, were placed under monument protection.

The structures of the waterworks

Only the buildings on the motherland in Charlottenburg are shown here.

The civil servants' residence built first consists of a lively structured main facade, a protruding entrance area and coupled, rounded, closed triple windows. This and other administrative buildings were built as half-timbered buildings , filled with red, white grouted bricks and had a hard roof . The main building for water extraction, i.e. the boiler house and the machine house, on the other hand, consisted of an iron framework construction, as larger loads had to be absorbed. A 90 meter high chimney with a round top and a square base led the exhaust gases high into the sky.

Architecturally, experts classify the building as an arch style with a brick look .

technical description

Groundwater from one of the Barnim glacial valleys was pumped from a deep well through a filter . It got into a masonry collecting well and from there into the machine house by means of two backing pumps, which were around seven meters high and were driven by steam engines . Here the groundwater flowed through several air tanks , which ensured that the gases in the water were extracted. Over the course of several years further wells were drilled. Then the purified water, now of drinking water quality, was pressed into the pipes to the end users. Agitator filters, developed by engineers from the Charlottenburg factory, and a pure water tank with 520 m³ were in use.

use

Since 1985, the building ensemble has served the Ökowerk Berlin nature conservation center as an exhibition and event location for all aspects of nature, the environment and ecology. In the machine hall , the oldest still preserved steam pumps for water technology in Berlin can be viewed.

literature

  • Berlin and its buildings . Part X, Volume A (2), Urban Engineering . Michael Imhof Verlag, ISBN 3-86568-012-7 , Petersberg, 2006, ISBN 3-86568-012-7 . P. 53–111 and 338: Systems and structures for the water supply by Hilmar Bärthel .
  • By filter, pump and aerator. Visit to the Charlottenburg waterworks . In: Vossische Zeitung , July 26, 1925, first supplement.
  • Shahrooz Mohajeri: 100 Years of Berlin Water Supply and Sewage Disposal 1840–1940 . Franz Steiner, Stuttgart, 2005 ISBN 3-515-08541-6
  • Wilhelm Gundlach: History of the city of Charlottenburg . 2 volumes. Springer-Verlag, 1905, archive.org
  • Willy Bark: Chronicle of Alt-Westend . Berlin 1937, p. 31 ff.
  • Technical sights in Germany . Volume 5: Berlin . Munich 1980
  • Kurt Eckert: Repairing, renovating, restoring. Exemplary monument preservation in Berlin . Berlin 1998

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i Bärthel, pp. 60–62.
  2. ↑ Shahrooz Mohajeri: 100 years of Berlin water supply , here: return to groundwater ; Explanation of the Piefkeschen system on books.google.de, accessed on August 19, 2018.
  3. ↑ a b c Bärthel: Buildings of the water supply , ... p. 338.
  4. ^ Vossische Zeitung , 1925

Coordinates: 52 ° 29 ′ 32 ″  N , 13 ° 14 ′ 9 ″  E