Salutogenese – Das Jahrbuch der KIT-Fakultät für Architektur 2021

habitat designed as a healthy place had to be supplied with
fresh air and sun. Out of this conviction, the planning of the
city, its houses, parks, baths and fountains, came increasingly
to the fore as medical measures. The medicalization of
architecture and urban planning helped to prevent diseases
well before modern hygiene was born in the early nineteenth
century in the great industrialized cities threatened by cholera,
typhus and tuberculosis.
A popular legend that emerged at the end of the eighteenth
century describes the founding of Karlsruhe, attributing
it to a dream had by Margrave Karl Wilhelm von Baden-
Durlach (1679–1738), who, exhausted after hunting, lay
down to rest in the forest. There he dreamt of a fan-shaped
city plan with radial streets, like a circle of sunrays. A
healthy environment was selected as the location for a new
country house intended to facilitate recovery from government
work. It was probably not until 1718 that the decision
was made to transform this representative hunting chateau
into a new capital for Baden. In 1718 the design for a fanshaped
city layout was ready. The unusual idea of merging
the ceremonial cour d’honneur and the Lustgarten
(pleasure garden) also came into being during this early
phase. This actual center of the city was conceived as a closed
urban space, and probably also as a protected microclimate.
It was only two years later (1720) that the decision was
made to complete the circle and thus to connect the city with
the forest. The pleasure garden became the link between
town and forest. The twenty-four lanes cut into the forest
corresponded to their original purpose as a Jagdstern and
symbolically emphasized territorial control. At the same
time, this ensured the connection of the city with the landscape,
since Karlsruhe remained an open, that is unfortified,
town.
B Johann Carl Hemeling, Greenhouse
for the Lustgarten [Pleasure
Garden] in Karlsruhe (1724)
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Diskurs