Markthalle Stuttgart

About this place

The city's covered market opened on the thirtieth of January 1914, after the architect Martin Elsaesser won the competition of 1910, replacing an older hall of 1864 that the city's trade had outgrown. It cost one million eight hundred and fifty thousand gold marks. From outside it is an Art Nouveau building of arcades, towers and oriel windows; inside it is something else entirely, a hall with no central columns, roofed in glass carried on reinforced concrete girders, one of the earliest confident uses of concrete in a German public building. The hall was damaged in the war, its glass roof was back by 1946, the fabric was rebuilt in 1953, it was listed as a protected monument in the early 1970s, and it was renovated again in the 1990s and once more in 2004. Today it holds somewhere between thirty and forty stalls: fish, cheeses, spices, Turkish, Italian and Greek produce, coffee and flowers, with an upper floor of cafes looking straight down onto the market floor. Walking in costs nothing, and the doors are open Monday to Friday from half past seven in the morning until half past six in the evening and on Saturday from seven until five, while it closes all day Sunday. Prices here are delicatessen prices rather than street market prices, so know that before you shop. The finest moment is around ten on a Saturday morning when every stall is fully laid out, and the upper gallery is the right place to stand to look at the roof.