Poelzig-Bau

The Poelzig site opposite the Industrial Museum has been brought back to life. The striking, elongated building with a yellow clinker brick façade on Zwickauer Straße was once home to the carpet factory owned by the industrialist Kohorn. Extensive renovation work was completed in spring 2013. The former boiler house has now also been renovated, as has the red clinker-brick building in the third row. This now houses spacious owner-occupied flats.

Who exactly was this Poelzig, after whom the site is named? Hans Poelzig was born in Berlin in 1869. As an architect, he left his creative mark on his home city and on major cities such as Frankfurt am Main, Hanover and Stuttgart, but also on the Saxon industrial city of Chemnitz. Professor Hans Poelzig was extremely versatile. He also worked as a painter, set designer, film set designer and university lecturer. In his main field, architecture, he pioneered the move towards Expressionism and New Objectivity. This was later to become known as the Bauhaus style. As early as the beginning of 1922, Poelzig produced an initial design on behalf of the Chemnitz-based textile factory Sigmund Goeritz, with further designs to follow. These studies alone give a sense of the building’s imposing presence. Poelzig experimented with the proportions, making the upper storeys taller and more imposing than the lower ones. The impression of heaviness is further emphasised by the rough-textured quarry-stone façade.

The family-run company Goeritz has been based in Chemnitz since 1882 and is known as a manufacturer of hosiery and fabric gloves. Knitwear production was added later. Since 1909, the company has been based on Zwickauer Straße and Ulmenstraße. It survived the First World War with some difficulty. Afterwards, however, a period of steady growth began. More jobs were created. The company was converted into a public limited company. It is now one of the largest knitwear manufacturers in Germany.

The city rejected Poelzig’s initial design for a seven-storey factory complex. This was partly due to strong objections from the Alfred- und Hermann-Escher-AG, located opposite and now home to the Industrial Museum. The legal dispute was referred to the Ministry of Construction in Dresden. In 1925, a scaled-down version with one storey fewer and a recessed fifth storey was approved. Construction began but ground to a halt after two years, following the completion of the first section, due to a lack of funds. Consequently, only a four-storey section of the original building was completed – a structure that Poelzig had originally envisaged as “a fusion of the form of a permanent building with the typology of a factory building”.

Between 1929 and 1933, Sigmund Goeritz AG became the leading manufacturer of ladies’ underwear in Germany. When the National Socialists came to power, the persecution of the Jewish-owned Goeritz company began. In 1938, the company was forcibly sold. Under the name Venus Werke AG, production continued despite material shortages and other restrictions. During the nights of bombing in March 1945, several buildings on the Poelzig site were severely damaged.

The new beginning brought with it a change in the production line. Having been converted into state-owned enterprises, the Venuswerke initially produced training and swimwear, followed later by the companies Spuret and Trikotex, which operated as part of VEB Strickwaren Oberlungwitz. Even before reunification, buildings at the rear of the site stood empty. By 1991, it was all over, and signs of decay were evident everywhere to a greater or lesser extent. Initial attempts at repurposing or new development failed, as did forced auctions. Then, in 2007, the site was acquired by Chemnitz-based Poelzig Projekt GmbH and the regeneration project got underway. It will be interesting to see how it develops. But one thing is certain: on this historic site, an impressive symbiosis between old and new has been set in motion.