1983 Master of Architecture
Sheila Kennedy

Letters from Abroad

October 14, 1983
Paris

Travel can be both an exciting and a dangerous thing; for some places have the power to shape and change the ways in which we think. I have just returned from an extended and rather extraordinary trip to Germany—a country imbued with a quixotic spirit of contradiction, where contrasts themselves are juxtaposed. My stay in industrial Dortmund, in West and East Berlin, and in quiet Aachen provided an insight into four quite different faces of Germany.

In Dortmund, I had some difficulty finding the Zeche Zollern II, a coal mine built in the second half of the nineteenth century. The city’s tourist information was hardly specialized in industrial architecture, the staatarchives were shut for inexplicable reasons, but fortunately the historical library was able to put me in touch with Herr Spieckermann, the mine’s caretaker, who was a kindly and helpful guide.

The mine, like Ledoux’s Saltworks and Renard’s Grand-Hornu, is organized as an autonomous, miniature city. Here, familiar civic components find their industrial counterparts: precinct walls, gates, common green, housing, a school, and the grandiose director’s office are integrated into the whole. The great machine hall, constructed in 1902 by Bruno Möhring, lies at the end of a long axis. The machine hall is entered (rather atypically) through the short axis of the building. The entry portal was salvaged from the Weimar Pavilion of the 1889 Paris Exposition. The vast hall is dominated by an elevated platform with a marble screen on which the switches and controls for the heavy machinery are located. Overhead hangs a magnificent brass clock; a perfect example of the glorification of the mechanical. The man who flipped the central switch must surely have felt like a god.