Kramgasse - Buildings

Buildings

Apart from a few cellars, only fragments of the current buildings on the Kramgasse date from before 1500. Many of the private town-houses retain elements from the Late Gothic period. There are very few preserved 17th century façades. Between 1705 and 1745, the façades and parts of the interior of 72 of the street's 85 buildings were rebuilt in the Baroque style, many of them by the noted architect Albrecht Stürler or his students.

Three fountains decorate the street. At the eastern crossroads, the Kreuzgassbrunnen was the model for all other obelisk fountains of Bern; it was built 1778–79 by Christian Reist and Johann Conrad Wiser. In the center, the Simsonbrunnen was built in 1527 and decorated with a figure by Hans Gieng of Samson taming the lion in 1543. The Zähringerbrunnen at the western end of the street is Bern's first figure-topped fountain, an interesting combination of historical tradition and heraldic personification. It was built by Hans Hiltprand in 1535, depicting an armoured bear – Bern's heraldic beast – bearing the arms of the house of Zähringen.

House no. 2, at the eastern end of the street, houses Bern's oldest apothecary's since 1527; the 1824 hardwood interior of the drugstore is unique as the earliest witness of the Gothic Revival in Bern. The cellar of house no. 4 dates from the 13th century, Bern's oldest building period. House no. 7 is completely preserved in its state of 1559 and the city's most impressive ensemble of secular Late Gothic architecture; its rich interior is preserved in the Historical Museum. No. 19 was built together with no. 21 in 1735–40 and is representative of the Bernese Régence style; it was used as a family town house until the 1970s. No. 29, the Zunfthaus zu Kaufleuten ("Merchants' Guildhouse") is the most significant Late Baroque Bernese town house, built 1718–20 by Niklaus Schiltknecht and equipped with a guild hall with impressive Baroque boiseries and furniture. No. 17–21 are the headquarters of the police department of the canton of Bern, in the course of whose establishment here in the 1950s the historical interior was largely destroyed. No. 41 features one of the few Humanist house mottoes that survived the 18th century building boom; it reads: "What's most beautiful is highest justice, what's best is to be healthy, but what's most joyful is to attain what one desires."

The Zunfthaus zu Metzgern ("Butchers' Guildhouse"), no. 45, is a 1769 construction by Rudolf Augst, a student of Niklaus Sprüngli. No. 61 features the first use of the colossal order in a private building in Bern; its back-house, Münstergasse no. 56, is one of the few purely pre-Baroque town houses. No. 54 is recognised as one of the finest works of Bernese town house architecture and as the best work of Albrecht Stürler. No. 81, in turn, has been characterised as a low-key masterpiece by Niklaus Sprüngli because of its tensely elegant, barely adorned façade.