Kugelhaus Dresden

On the north side of Dresden Hauptbahnhof on Wiener Platz there’s an unexceptional low rise modern office block in which is embedded a tribute to one the city’s great lost landmark buildings - the Kugelhaus.  Designed as a spherical building by Munich architect, Peter Birkenholz for the 1930 International Health Exhibition in Dresden’s Grossen Garten park.  Inspired by the unbuilt visions of Claude-Nicolas Ledoux it was quickly adopted as an emblem of the city and hosted a series of exhibitions of technology and engineering.  By the mid-1930s as the novelty faded, it fell out of favour.  Maintenance was expensive and the recently ascendant Nazis took exception to it.  When an operator could not be found it was demolished in 1938. It was Dresden’s misfortune that it fell under the control of an especially brutal Gauleiter, Martin Mutschmann.  The preservation of traditional Saxon arts and crafts was Mutschmann’s obsession when he wasn’t occupied with matters of torture and execution, suggesting he was even less receptive to Modernism than the average Nazi.  It remains the case that spherical buildings always come with problems and often have a short life. Had it been spared by the Nazi culture warriors, it would have been very unlikely to have survived the Allied firestorms of February 1945.  There’s an additional tribute to the Kugelhaus in the form of a spherical cinema in the lobby of the Volkswagen Transparent Factory which now stands on the same spot.