Meeting Place
Since 1856 the House of Lords met at a Baroque city palace on Leipziger Straße No. 3, near Leipziger Platz, formerly owned by the merchant Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky (1710–1775) and seat of the Royal Porcelain Factory from 1763. It had been acquired by Abraham Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1776–1835), father of Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn, in 1825. In summer 1826, young Felix Mendelssohn wrote his A Midsummer Night's Dream ouverture, which premiered at his father's house.
After the Prussian state had purchased the building in 1856, it also served for the meetings of the Reichstag of the North German Federation from 1867 to 1870. Upon German unification in 1871, the neighbouring building on Leipziger Straße No. 4 was rebuilt as the seat of the Reichstag of the German Empire, before it moved into the new Reichstag building in 1894. Both the Leipziger Str. No. 3 and 4 buildings were demolished in 1898 to make space for a new building for the House of Lords.
The Neo-Renaissance Herrenhaus building, designed by the architect Friedrich Schulze, was completed in 1904. Schulze had had also built the adjacent Abgeordnetenhaus on Prinz-Albrecht-Straße from 1892 to 1898. Both structures were connected by a common functional wing in the rear, which allowed deputies to move freely between both chambers. Since 1993, the Abgeordnetenhaus building is the seat of the Berlin state parliament.
Seat of the Prussian state council from 1921 to 1933, the former Herrenhaus building from 1933 served for Hermann Göring's Preußenhaus foundation. The former debating chamber saw the inauguration of the People's Court (Volksgerichtshof) in 1934 and with the erection of neighbouring Ministry of Aviation the next year it was refurbished as the prestigious Haus der Flieger lobby of Göring's headquarters.
Heavily damaged by Allied bombing and the Battle of Berlin, the building was restored after the war and from 1946 served for the East German Academy of Sciences. Since 2000, it is again the site of the parliamentary sessions of the Federal Council (Bundesrat) of Germany.
Read more about this topic: Prussian House Of Lords
Famous quotes related to meeting place:
“They are universal places, like churches, hallowed meeting places of all mankind.”
—Iris Murdoch (b. 1919)