📍🇩🇪 Why Munich's Town Hall is no Vienna or Brussels

Quite fascinating to compare Munich's municipal building with its known models from Brussels and Vienna. The architect Georg Hauberrisser (1841-1922 CE) clearly re-used the Flemish-style gabled roofs (pignons, in French :), the installation of a clock tower and a well-lit functional horizontality (this is an administrative building after all ... ).

But take a step back at Marienplatz to see the whole frame and you will witness the old Germany in its medieval (Ottonian) monumentality: massive sculptures of old lords, inelegant width of the main tower, prominent balconies... also that little Italian / Byzantine touch with twisted columns that one does not find in Brussels and even less so in Vienna - where any oriental motif has been systematically rejected.

Munich... all the confidence of a European crossroad that tells its story in its own terms, absorbing contributions from north and south when it deems it right, on the side.

____ Sources ____

>> Henri Focillon, "The Art of the West in the Middle Ages", 1938