Speaker
Description
Around 1800 the establishment of the first cottons mills in Saxony marked the start of the industrial revolution in Germany. In the beginning there was no precise vision what kind of building would be necessary or suitable to house the machinery for the industrial production of spinning cotton. The entrepreneurs and architects involved in the development therefore followed the example of the British cotton industry and adopted the building type of the Arkwrigth Mill, but changed some of its details depending on local architectural experiences and the special weather conditions of the region. Most of the new built and water powered textile mills in Saxony followed these type of construction until the 1860s. With the growth of industry, the development of new industries like engineering, chemical, optical, electrical or automobile industry since the 1870s as well the introduction of new construction materials like cast iron, concrete or steel and the propagation of steam and electrical power led to new types of industrial buildings suitable for different kinds of production. Their layout followed not only the needs of production but also the development of the predominant styles of architecture in the following decades in Germany, such as historism, art nouveau, land art or modernism. After the Second World War in the communist German Democratic Republic (GDR) economical needs led to the ongoing use of such old industrial buildings until most of them became obsolete after the German reunification with the wide deindustrialisation of Eastern Germany in the 1990s. Again for economic reasons new types of industrial buildings were developed in the GDR with the introduction of light steel and prefabricated concrete constructions. Since the German reunification the common western and global style of industrial architecture dominated the erection of new industrial buildings and structures in Saxony.
The paper will give an overview about this development and will discuss the stress field between the architectural form and the industrial function in the development of industrial buildings in Germany by the example of the industrial history of Saxony.
References
Bernd Sikora: Industriearchitektur in Sachsen im europäischen Kontext. Halle 2020 (INDUSTRIEarchäologie – Studien zur Erforschung, Dokumentation und Bewahrung von Quellen zur Industriekultur, Vol. 21)
| Keywords | History, Industrial Buildings, Saxony, Germany, Technology, Architecture |
|---|
