Architecture of Leipzig


The history of the architecture of Leipzig extends from the Middle Ages to the 21st century. Numerous typical buildings and valuable cultural monuments from different eras are still preserved or have been rebuilt. Leipzig, Germany, begins its architectural history with several buildings in the Romanesque style. An example of Gothic architecture in Leipzig is the late Gothic hall vault of the Thomaskirche. In the early modern period, the Old Town Hall was expanded in the Renaissance style. The city experienced the peak of urban design and artistic development from around 1870 to 1914 with historicism, Reformarchitektur and Art Nouveau. Numerous trade fair palaces, commercial buildings, representative buildings such as the Imperial Court Building and the new town hall and the arcade galleries known for the city were built. After the First World War, Leipzig became known for its neoclassicism. During the air raids on Leipzig in World War II, large parts of the city center, which was rich in historic buildings, were destroyed. This was followed in the post-war period by neoclassicism and modernism.

Architectural history

Romanesque and Gothic

Leipzig was founded on the site of the later churchyard of St. Matthew as “urbs LIPSK” around 929. The castle urbs LIBZI was first mentioned in 1015 in the chronicle of Bishop Thietmar of Merseburg. The Leipzig art historian Herbert Küas conducted research there between 1950 and 1956. The castle was destroyed in 1217 and the later Leipzig Monastery of the Franciscans was built on this site in 1253. The oldest churches, St. Nicholas and St. Thomas, are of Romanesque origin. The monastery of St. Thomas and the monastery of St. George were built in the 13th century. The later Katharinenstrasse was named after a Romanesque St. Catherine's chapel consecrated around 1233. The later university church Paulinerkirche emerged from the Dominican monastery founded around 1230. Petersstrasse was also named after the Romanesque chapel of St. Petri.
In the 13th century there were four castles, of which only the Pleissenburg remained as a margrave's castle. In 1270 there was a council consisting of twelve councilors. These were subordinate to a margrave mayor from Pleißenburg.
Important Romanesque buildings in Leipzig are or were:
  • The St. Andrew's Chapel in Knautnaundorf is one of the oldest buildings in Saxony; the chapel was built around 1100. The original Romanesque round chapel with a semicircular apse was built based on the model of the round chapel that Wiprecht of Groitzsch had built for his wife at the Groitzsch ancestral castle. At the end of the 15th century, the semicircular apse of the rotunda was demolished. In 1720 a baroque octagon was added to the Romanesque round tower.
  • The church in Leipzig-Thekla was built in the 12th century as a massive building made of quarry stone masonry – consisting of a rectangular nave with a rectangular east choir. There is a rectangular tower in the west.
  • The foundation walls, walls of the nave and choir as well as the portal of the Gnadenkirche at Rittergutstrasse 2 in Wahren date from the 12th century. Likewise the baptismal font and the door leaf.
  • Leipzig's St. Nicholas Church was originally a Romanesque, three-aisled basilica. Remains of the masonry and the westwork with the two corner towers are still preserved from the basilica. From 1784 to 1797 the building was rebuilt in the classicism style based on designs by Johann Carl Friedrich Dauthe.
  • The important Gothic Church St. Thomas was built from 1482 to 1496 on the remains of a previous Romanesque building as a late Gothic hall building. The nave still shows the original Gothic ribbed vault with a presumably reconstructed color scheme from the 15th century. The facade comes from historicism.

    Leipzig Trade Fair and Renaissance

Around 1500 Leipzig had 7,000 to 8,000 inhabitants, but was not as important as Erfurt, which had 13,000 inhabitants at the same time. Through imperial trade fair privileges, the Leipzig Trade Fair was elevated to the status of an Imperial Fair in 1497 and 1507. The provisions of the Leipzig trade fair privilege were particularly at the expense of other regional trading centers such as Erfurt, Halle and Magdeburg, because the privilege of 1507 stated that no trade fair, no fair, no business or sale could be held within a radius of Leipzig – first of all to visit the Leipzig trade fair and previously all goods were available in Leipzig. This meant that trade fairs in Erfurt, Halle and Magdeburg were prohibited. Leipzig thus developed into a nationally important trading center in central Germany. In Leipzig grew an important merchant bourgeoisie.
For trade, buildings such as the town hall, the armory, the public weigh house, the stables and the granary were built in the Renaissance style, which flourished in Saxony as the Saxon Renaissance. Hieronymus Lotter gave the Old Town Hall its current facade in 1556/1557. The “Leipzig Erker” has had its own tradition in Leipzig since the 16th century. The first stone oriel window was built in 1523 at the Haus zur goldenen Schlange. This type of “oriel window became increasingly widespread”. The art historian Wolfgang Haubenreißer notes that Hieronymus Lotter's Renaissance oriel windows in particular influenced the other homeowners. Lotter's works are the single-story box oriel windows from 1556 at the Old Town Hall, the Pappenheim oriel window in the courtyard of the Pleissenburg and the two-story corner bay window on Lotter's home from 1550 at Katharinenstrasse 26.
Important buildings of the Renaissance in Leipzig are or were:
  • Alte Nikolaischule, built in 1597. The painted wooden ceiling in the entrance area of the house, the Leipzig coat of arms above the door and the door frame made of Rochlitz porphyry tuff are from the Renaissance and the 16th century.
  • Moritzbastei, a two-wing building with a pentagonal floor plan, built by Hieronymus Lotter from 1551 to 1554.
  • Public weigh house, built by Hieronymus Lotter in 1555. The scales were inside the house. Leipzig received the right for weighing goods in 1507 and weighed and cleared all goods in the public weigh house.
  • Old Town Hall, built by Hieronymus Lotter in 1556.

    Leipzig bourgeois town houses and oriel windows of the Baroque era

After the Thirty Years' War, Leipzig achieved a leading role in Central Europe as a trade fair city and, thanks to its own trade connections in all directions, it developed into one of the most important trading centers in Europe. The Baroque period began with the construction of the Leipzig Stock Exchange Building and took on an independent, bourgeois form in this city. Leipzig's Katharinenstrasse, Leipzig's market square and Leipzig's Petersstrasse developed into places with bourgeois, four-story magnificent buildings with multi-story, ornately decorated box oriel windows. Since Leipzig was a leader in printing and bookselling, Leipzig also became a trading center for progressive ideas. Outside the city walls, unhindered by guild barriers, numerous manufactory productions emerged, which marked the beginning of Leipzig's industrial development. Trade fairs and manufactories were run by large entrepreneurs who were also bankers who had immigrated to Leipzig from southern and western Germany. The profit earned was immediately invested in baroque buildings.
The “Baroque Leipzig Oriel Window” was influenced by the two-story corner oriel window on Hieronymus Lotter's house from 1550 at Katharinenstrasse 26. The two-story corner oriel window of the Romanus House at Katharinenstrasse 23 corresponded to the oriel window of Hieronymus Lotter's home. An “important link between the Leipzig oriel windows of the Renaissance and those of the Baroque” was the oriel window of the house at Hainstrasse 3, called Weber's Hof. The oriel window from 1662 is two-story and shows decorations from the early Baroque: festoons, putti, cornucopias. Paul Wiedemann's oriel window on the Fürstenhaus, made of Rochlitz porphyry tuff, was influenced by the Torgau Hartenfels Castle from 1533 to 1536. “A Leipzig special form from the end of the 17th century” are the box oriel windows at Hainstraße 8 and in the courtyard of the Stentzlers Hof exhibition center at Petersstrasse 39 to 41. These oriel windows are “lavishly decorated with vegetal ornamentation”. The box oriel window at Hainstrasse 8 was described as follows: “The stucco work, floral tendrils and a lion's head holding flower garlands still bear witness to the extraordinary quality of the craftsmanship of the time.”Weinkauf/Schneider, p. 32.
Important Baroque buildings in Leipzig are or were:
  • Webers Hof, Hainstrasse 3. Christian Richter designed the house in 1662 in the Baroque style. The two-story oriel window is particularly elaborate: “This… box oriel window… is the oldest oriel window preserved in Leipzig, if not the first oriel window ever built.”
  • Old trading exchange. “At that point in time, you probably wouldn't have noticed that Leipzig's first building was built here in a completely new architectural style, which differed greatly from the previously usual geometrically strict forms based on ancient models. Only when the bright façade, decorated with decorative flower and fruit garlands, was completed, did the new baroque splendor emerge. The building by Johann Georg Starcke was the first baroque building in Leipzig."
  • The Großbosische Garten : This French formal garden was created based on designs by Leonhard Christoph Sturm. Sturm was another Baroque artist who was called to Leipzig and sponsored by Georg Bose.
  • Hainstrasse 15, built by Wolfgang Bachmann from 1693 to 1695. The half-timbered house is two window axes wide. An unadorned, wooden, two-story box oriel window extends across the entire width of the facade. Nikolaus Pevsner describes this as an intentional innovation to set itself apart from the ornate oriel windows of the neighboring houses through “simplicity, sobriety and lack of decoration”.
  • Romanus House at Katharinenstrasse 23, built from 1701 to 1704 by Johann Gregor Fuchs.
  • Knauthain Castle and Apel's Garden. These were designed according to designs by David Schatz, who lived in the house at Neumarkt 13 in Leipzig, which he himself had built according to his design. Cornelius Gurlitt describes David Schatz's architectural style as follows: "From these buildings one can see a progression from simple Dutch forms to Baroque, the latter expressed more in added ornament, not in an inner liberation."
  • Torhaus Dölitz, Helenenstrasse 24. The model was the architectural style of Cornelius Floris : the “earliest evidence of the transition from the Renaissance to the Baroque, which was based on Nordic models ”.
  • Königshaus at Markt 17, built from 1705 to 1706 by Johann Gregor Fuchs.
  • Fregehaus at Katharinenstrasse 11, rebuilt by Johann Gregor Fuchs from 1706 to 1708 using still visible Renaissance components from around 1535. The builder was Gottfried Otto.
  • Bosehaus at Thomaskirchhof 16, built by Nikolaus Rempe from 1711 to 1712. The builder was Georg Heinrich Bose.
  • Schillerhaus at Menckestrasse 42 in Gohlis, built in 1717 in the Baroque style.
  • The house Zum Arabischen Coffe Baum at Kleine Fleischergasse 4, built by Adam Jacob from 1717 to 1719.
  • Hainstrasse 13, built by George Werner from 1744 to 1746. The three-story box oriel window is made of stone and stucco. The side surfaces are slightly concave.
  • House of the Golden Snake, built by George Werner from 1747 to 1750.
  • House Zum Grönländer at Petersstrasse 24/Sporergäßchen, built by George Werner from 1749 to 1750.
  • Aeckerlein's Hof. Peter Hohmann had the building built in the Baroque style by Johann Gregor Fuchs and Christian Schmidt from 1708 to 1714.
  • Griechenhaus at Katharinenstrasse 4, built in 1640.
  • Hohmanns Hof at Petersstrasse 15. Peter Hohmann had the building built by George Werner in the Baroque style between 1728 and 1731.
  • Jöcher's House: Merchant Johann Christoph Jöcher had the building built in 1707 by Johann Gregor Fuchs in the Baroque style. The portal with the female figures on the balcony was created by Christian Döring in 1736.
  • Koch's Hof: The banker Michael Koch had the building built between 1735 and 1739 based on designs by George Werner.
  • Hainstrasse 8: The oldest surviving town house in Leipzig at Hainstrasse 8 dates from around 1550 to 1560. It was the construction period of the Renaissance, when solid construction replaced half-timbered construction. Half-timbered buildings themselves were banned in Leipzig in 1559. The builder was Antonius Lotter, brother of the municipal builder Hieronymus Lotter. At the beginning of the 18th century, the building received an elaborately designed, baroque box oriel window. Russian students who were trained in Leipzig in the 1760s on the orders of Tsarina Catherine the Great also lived here, according to Alexander Nikolayevich Radishchev.
More pictures can be found here.