The stepped gable
Five stages with paired Romanesque arches.
A.Savin โ CC BY-SA 3.0 ยท Josรฉ Luiz โ CC BY-SA 4.0 ยท Michael Wittwer โ CC BY-SA 4.0 ยท Rembert Satow โ CC BY-SA 3.0
Among the most powerful patrician merchant families of medieval Cologne โ the class of great traders who effectively governed the city before the craft guilds seized power from them in a struggle in 1396. The Overstolz also led the city's conflicts against its archbishop, and this surviving house is the clearest physical trace of that class.
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The Overstolzenhaus is the oldest surviving stone dwelling in Cologne, built around 1230 for the Overstolz family โ among the wealthiest merchant families in the city and the most politically powerful in the Middle Ages. Its facade is the value: a stepped gable of five stages with paired arches and Romanesque windows, among the purest surviving examples of late Romanesque domestic architecture in northern Europe. At a time when most houses were timber, building a stone house on this scale was an explicit declaration of the family's wealth and standing. The interior cannot be visited โ the building today houses Cologne's Academy of Media Arts, meaning it is a working university building. The whole value lies in the facade, seen from the street in a few minutes. It is a stop on a walking route through the old town near the Rhine rather than a destination in itself, which is why I did not build it on the first pass.
Five stages with paired Romanesque arches.
Stone in an age of timber houses.
Rheingasse 8, 50676 Cologne