Art & Culture

Modern Architecture in Saxony

Not only baroque – Saxony is also home for modern style . Industrial buildings, contemporary avant-garde or , for 100 years architecture on an international level . An excursion.

Shimmering light: The production hall of the Maschinenfabrik Auma Coswig near Dresden was put in stainless steel shindles and translucent material by Wurm + Wurm architects in 2008. Now the avant-garde building of the company, which has existed for over 100 years, shines for travelers along the railway line Dresden – Berlin.

A pretty ufo landed on the lawn: It is the customer center of Porsche Leipzig, a diamond made of concrete, steel and glass, designed by the architectural firm Gerkan, Marg and Partners. Here it is where since 2002 Porsche Cayenne, the Macan and Panamera are build.

World-class architecture: The central building of the 2005-built BMW plant in Leipzig was designed by the London architect Zaha Hadid. Outside it comes with a facade that suggests aerodynamics, inside the bodies of the produced cars “fly” above the heads of the employees in their offices.

A new religious building, in the middle of the city: The new building of Trinity Church in Leipzig was a rare opportunity for local architects Schulz and Schulz. They disguised the triangular scale church with warm, red volcanic rock, inside creating the impressive interior to clear, reduced prayer rooms.

Chemnitz-based architect Max W. Feistel wanted to rationalise the sense of building in the mid-20s of the 20th century. His own house, the Villa Feistel, should have been an example of industrial design in 1928 . The steel-skeleton plates were bolted inside and outside.

With Erich Mendelsohn one of the most famous architects of the 20s is responsible for the design of the department store Schocken in Chemnitz. Today, the meticulously restored house is the seat of the National Museum of Archaeology – but the Schocken Signet is there again.

Like a mosque the former tobacco factory Yenidze enthroned over the eastern Friedrichstadt in Dresden. The entrepreneur Hugo Zietz produced cigarettes of the brand Salem in the 1909 finished building. Today you’ll a restaurant and a puppet theater in the dome.

The new Dresden synagogue stands in the same place where the old synagogue by Gottfried Semper was destroyed in the pogroms of 1938. The Saarbrücken based architects Wandel, Hoefer Lorch + Hirsch built the construction of abstract cubes. The coloring of the concrete is reminiscent of the Wailing Wall.

At this Dresden building you easily recognize the signature of the architect Daniel Libeskind from afar: Where once the Saxon army encamped their weapons, a rapid wedge mounting separates the facade since the renovation in 2011. Inside you’ll find the Military History Museum.

This article was published in 2016 as a contribution to the “Monopol Sachsen – art and culture”.

Themes of the article

Art & Culture

Modern Architecture in Saxony

Related topics

100 years of Bauhaus

Porsche Leipzig