Tagblatt Tower

About this place

An eighteen-storey office tower sixty-one metres high, built between 1924 and 1928 for the newspaper Stuttgarter Neues Tagblatt to a design by Ernst Otto Osswald in the New Objectivity style. It was the tallest building in southern Germany when it opened, and the first German high-rise built in exposed concrete: no stone facing, no render, the structural material itself simply left visible to the eye. That decision was the heart of the argument. Germany had been debating since 1920 whether high-rises should be built at all, and the tower was a deliberate answer. Osswald called it a purpose building, one whose rooms are merely economical, healthy and pleasant to use, and nothing more. It survived the war and is a listed monument, and the grid of its facade still looks startlingly plain in a city of sandstone. In practice there is no viewing platform and no museum about the building, because it is a working office tower. What you can enter is the ground level, the cultural centre known as Under the Tower, home to the tri-Buehne theatre company, the young people's theatre JES and a puppet stage. So visiting really means looking at it from Eberhardstrasse and Marienstrasse, and going inside only if you hold a ticket for an evening show. A quarter of an hour from the outside is enough.