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Architecture

Today’s complex of buildings “Haus der Wissenschaft Braunschweig” was built from 1935 to 1937. The design by the architect at that time Emil Herzog comprised three main buildings: The lecture building, the Naturhistorische Museum and the gym building. The three wings enclosed an atrium that opened to the north, before the construction of the north wing in the mid-sixties gave the building complex its present shape.
On first sight, the building reminds the viewer of the North German brick expressionism, even though this architectural style was ten years past its prime at the time of construction. Some parts of the building still show a strong symbolic reference to the Nazi ideology.
The building complex is shaped by a high, tower-like central block, which hosts the entrance hall, lecture halls, seminar rooms and office spaces as well as the assembly hall.
The wide-stretching roofs, especially those of the Naturhistorische Museum and the so-called “Hall of Honour” within the tower, are a reference to the North German ecclesiastical architecture of the Brick Gothic era.
Above the Hall of Honour (arch hall), placed upon the tower, was once a hemispherical louver, which was used as a public observatory, but was destroyed in the war.
With the vertical columns of the central block, the whole complex is designed to make the greatest possible impression, even from a distance. However, the skyward effect caused by the vertical elements is counteracted by the building’s monumentality. By the way: behind the massive and conservative brick front, there is a quite modern structure of armoured concrete.

When designing the interior, Herzog kept to the classical, monumental representational buildings of his time. Within the whole building complex, symbols of Nazi ideology could be found: scones designed as torch holders, runes symbolizing battle and death, railings and heating element coverings decorated with wrought-iron “crosses” resembling swastikas.