In the end of March me and my boyfriend went on a weekend vacation with my family.
A city in the east of Germany called Erfurt. It is about a 3-4 hours drive away from Hannover.
Erfurt has a beautiful old part of town, with lots of half-timbered houses and small streets, where cars are not allowed to drive where you can enjoy taking a long walk through the city, while enjoying the beautiful scenery of an intact typical old town of Germany.
Especially if you live in Hannover, where mostly all of the old town was destroyed during world war II, it is an eye-candy to see these houses which obtained such a horrible time.
Believe it or not but the ‘Street’ in the picture above is actualle a bridge with houses on it. During the middle ages there were several bridges like the Krämerbrücke built in Europe – maybe the best known is the Rialto Bridge in Venice.
Most of the houses on the Krämer Bridge are used for little shops which sell unique things like blue pottery. The blue they use to color the pottery or even clothes is well known for this area of Germany – it is called ‘Waid’-Blue.
Another very popular tourist attraction is the Cathedral of Erfurt. For me as an architecture student it was really amazing there, old sacral architecture has just something special.
It has the power to make you feel as small as a bug in just one second. And it makes you realize that hightech is not everything you need to create great, impressing architecture.
Everytime I enter such an impressive old building with so much focus on the details my head is full of questions.. How did they manage that heights and static and still it looks so pretty and massive in one? In my opinion those old master-builder and their helpers where real geniuses and still mostly we don’t know which great minds stand behind buildings like this cathedral or other extraordinary buildings all around the world.
Nowadays we talk about Le Corbusier, Norman Foster, Zaha Hadid, BIG and all the others. Of course they all are great in their special fields of architecture but I think we all can and should learn from those old master-builders from the past. They created architecture that already lasted for centuries and still make people speechless! Architecture that can touch people’s hearts, no matter what their religion or believes are. Architecture that connects people with each other on a higher level, where they share similar feelings without knowing or talking to each other.
