3. - Schlösser-Magazin

3. Kew
108
3. Justification for Inscription
Mosque was a rather small-scale folly
within a cluster of buildings designed to offer
a stroll through foreign architecture. It was
strictly a mood piece, and its model function
for Schwetzingen was purely architectural. It
was also rather short-lived – the Kew Mosque
had been pulled down by 1783.
The Surviving Minaret of Lednice
A somewhat mosque-like building based on
Turkish models was constructed from 1797 for
the Moravian summer residence of Lednice
(Eisgrub) of the Princes of Liechtenstein. The
building from plans by Joseph Hardmuth was
variously called “Turkish Tower”, “Minaret”
or even “Mosque” and is still standing today.
The 68m tower serves as a point de vue in
the palace’s main axis and was used as a
lookout tower. It rests on a square, colonnaded
basement surmounted by a storey containing
eight “Oriental” rooms. In the centre,
surrounded by twelve smaller spires, rises the
massive minaret with three exterior balconies.
Originally four square pavilions flanked the
structure, and both the interior rooms and the
exterior walls were decorated with ornaments
and Qur’an quotes in Arabic characters. The
building, usually referred to as the minaret,
does not adhere to the type of “Oriental
mosque” current in Europe at the time, or
the Kew model either. As regards its building
type it is therefore barely comparable to the
Schwetzingen Mosque, constituting instead
a very idiosyncratic interpretation of an
“Oriental” building. Due to its use as a lookout
tower it is different from its Schwetzingen
counterpart not only in form but in function,
too.
Lost Garden Mosques
Simultaneous with the Schwetzingen building
a mosque was constructed from 1778 at
Hohenheim near Stuttgart, commissioned
by Duke Carl Eugen of Württemberg. It
was a small elongated structure with an
octagonal central pavilion and two square
terminal pavilions connected by covered,
trellised walks. At either end rose a minaret
crowned with a flagpole. It was a folly used
for pheasant breeding, with pheasant runs
attached at the back, 88 and was dismantled
in 1796. Judging from surviving depictions
the Hohenheim Mosque was very similar in
type to the model at Kew. With the fact that
it was a garden folly doubling as a pheasant
house, it represented the very opposite of
the intentions that led to the building of the
Schwetzingen Mosque – even though to the
contemporaneous mind the idea of keeping
exotic birds in a decorative building “in the
Oriental taste” would have seemed quite
natural.
Another garden mosque that has not survived
was constructed 1795/96 at the Floride, four
kilometres from Hohenheim. Here three
domed pavilions crowned with crescent
moons were connected by artificial Roman
ruins. 89 This exotic structure was also used as
a pheasant house. The plurality of Antique
and Oriental styles and, again, the use the
building was put to do not allow a direct
comparison with the Schwetzingen Mosque.
After 1770 the Baroque gardens of the
Weißenstein Park at Wilhelmshöhe Palace
were divided up into a number of areas and
converted into a landscape garden under
Landgrave Friedrich II of Hessen-Kassel. Of
the ambitious plans, partly inspired by Kew
Gardens, only a mosque from designs by
Heinrich Müntz was realised (c.1785) in the
pre-Romantic, sentimental garden. It consisted
of a central octagonal building with a drum
and dome and square, domed extensions with
small round windows; there was no minaret
at first. However, a view of the mosque
by Johann Heinrich Tischbein the elder of
1786/87 depicts a later version, with two
minarets added. The mosque was pulled down
some time before 1813 as it no longer appears
88 Andrea Berger-Fix, Klaus Merten: Die Gärten der Herzöge von
Württemberg im 18. Jahrhundert. Exhibition catalogue. Worms
1981, p. 78.
89 Ibid. S. 93.