Ars: časopis Ústavu Dejín Umenia Slovenskej Akadémie Vied (39.2006)

Fig. 4- H. F. Waesemann: Villa Eichborn in Breslau, garden view. „Zeitschrift für Bauwesen“, Vol. 7, 1857.

Hesse, East and West Prussia, Brandenburg, Pomera-
nia, Mecklenburg and Silesia. The majority of archi-
tects active in the 19th Century in Wroclaw, the capi-
tal of Silesia, earned their éducation at the Berlin
Building Academy, therefore the ideas propagated
there found their reflection in the local architecture.
The houses that were emerging in Wroclaw were
based both on the ‘Pompeian havens’, and the prin-
ciples formulated by Cari Boetticher.
The most excellent example of the first trend was
the villa belonging to a banking family of Moritz-
Eichborn, which was erected in theyears 1854— 1855
due to the reconstruction work of a former, small
garden pavilion. The villa was surrounded by a grand
garden complex and located in the Southern outskirts
of the city, in the area which had been occupied until
1807 by strong fortifications that were dismantled
after the Prussian-French war [Fig. 1}. The property
was purchased by Johann Wolfgang Moritz-Eichborn
in 1819, at a sale of the post-fortified areas organized
by the city authorities.19 This area, which lay on the
exterior of former moats, witnessed the development
of the Suburbs of Swidnica — a new, richer part of the
city, initially only with villas sunk in vast gardens.
The first residence of the Eichborn family, probably
a summer residence, was erected in the beginning of
the 1820s — it was located in the far end of the lot,
from the Tauenzien Street, which was demarcated
shortly after the démolition of the city fortifications.

19 KIESERITZKY, E.: Das Gelände der ehemaligen Festung
Breslau 1813 — 1870. In: Mitteilungen aus dem Stadtarchiv und
der Stadtbibliotek zu Breslau. Breslau 1903, p. 56 and n.

In 1854 Ludwig Theodore, a son of the founder of
the residence, contracted reconstruction works of the
villa and the design of a new garden arrangement to
two artists - the architect Hermann Friedrich Waese-
mann (1813 — 1879) and the gardener Peter Joseph
Lenne (1789 - 1866).
Waesemann graduated from the Berlin Building
Academy in 1835 and six years later he started de-
sign work with one of the most ingenious successors
of Schinkel, Frédéric August Stüler.20 The architect
assisted Stüler in designing, among others, the New
Museum in Berlin. At the beginning of the 1850s
Waesemann renewed his relationship with the Build-
ing Academy - he started lecturing on colorful déco-
rations in architecture. In 1853, however, the archi-
tect came to Wroclaw, where he took a position in
the local building administration. Undoubtedly, the
Eichborn villa was Waesemann’s greatest masterpiece
built in Wroclaw. His design of the complex used
the already existing buildings — he expanded former
residence towards the front and joined it into one
whole with the enlarged utility buildings. In the new
horizontal layout of buildings, the culmination was
the structure of the villa, whose design followed the
classic rules of symmetry and axiality. Modelied after
the Roman ‘villa urbana’, the most représentative in-
teriors of the Eichborn residence were located on the
axis of the building — the first in the séries of rooms
was a columned porticus leading to a spatial hall and
20 THIEME, U. — BECKER, F.: Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden
Künstler. Leipzig 1942, Vol. 34, p. 21.

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