Nuremberg City Hall

Brief information

Nuremberg City Hall grew out of a rather modest beginning: until the 14th century, the city council met not in its own building, but in a weaver's house. Later, the city bought land from Heilsbronn Monastery and acquired neighboring houses, which were turned into administrative buildings. That is why the city hall is important not only as a place of municipal government, but also as a trace of how medieval Nuremberg gradually shaped its authority in stone.

The oldest part of the complex is the Great Hall, built between 1322 and 1340. Later, new wings were added to it: the late Gothic council building, the four-wing Wolf's Building with the appearance of an Italian palace, and, after the destruction of 1944-1945, the New City Hall of the 1950s. In this one complex, what comes together is not styles for the sake of styles, but different ways of showing civic power in different eras.

What to notice first

It is worth comparing the three visible logics of the building. The late Gothic northern facade of the council building belongs to the reconstruction of the early 16th century; its painted decoration appeared in 1521, when the city hall was already functioning as the city's representative space. The Great Hall is important not for its size in itself, but because its walls and ceilings were painted according to sketches by Albrecht Durer: the source text emphasizes that this was the largest such mural work in Europe before Michelangelo's work in the Sistine Chapel.

Wolf's Building reads differently: it is a complex of four wings, conceived as a building with the architecture of an Italian palace, from the time when Nuremberg was a wealthy free city. A separate detail from this stage is the 1617 statues of saints by Leonhard Kern. The New City Hall, by contrast, speaks the language of postwar reconstruction: Schneckendorf's building of 1954-1956 is described as a typical 1950s project with a grid-like facade. Comparing the facades helps one see not a single "old city hall," but a complex that was assembled anew each time after changes and destruction.