3. - Schlösser-Magazin

2. An
14
View across the town, square,
palace and palace garden
looking west.
2. Description
Aerial Perspective
Schwetzingen’s appearance today, however,
is still largely determined by the landscaping
and building work carried out in the
eighteenth-centuries. This is particularly
impressive when viewed from above: an
axis of approx. 50km in length leads from the
Königstuhl hill above Heidelberg in the east
through the whole of the Rhine plain to the
Kalmit hill in the west-southwest (above the
town of Neustadt an der Weinstraße). The
town, the palace and the palace gardens are
aligned along this axis.
A road which originally led uninterrupted
from Heidelberg to Schwetzingen but which
is now only partially usable (extant sections:
Kurfürstenstrasse and Carl-Theodor-Strasse)
lends structure to the town centre and runs
through the Schlossplatz (Palace Square)
directly to the palace. The present pattern
of roads still bears testimony to how this
axis was originally made to run between
two irregular settlements in what is now the
town centre. Rectangular blocks of buildings
along the axis now connect the two original
settlements.
The axis broadens out into an elongated
square, the Schlossplatz, in front of the palace,
which is transected by the Leimbach stream
and the Karlsruher Straße and Schlossstraße
roads running alongside it (B36). At the west
of the square is the cour d’honneur of the
palace; the sides of the square leading into the
town are flanked with an almost unbroken
frontage of buildings.
The palace marks the end of the road
originally running from Heidelberg, but the
axis continues to the west in the form of paths
and lines of sight running through the entire
palace gardens. The palace stands at the
periphery of a large circular garden made up
of beds grouped around paths and avenues.
This great circular parterre is technically the
centre of the gardens, and is framed by two
quarter-circle pavilions and two similarly
shaped pergolas. The great east-west axis is
transected in the centre of the parterre by
an transverse axis which leads to the outer
limits of the gardens in the south and extends
into the town in the form of an avenue to the
north.
The gardens extend to the north and south
asymetrically. To the west, the great circular
parterre is bordered by geometrically arranged
bosquets, and it is surrounded on all sides by
a belt of landscape gardens. Bordering the
palace and the town to the east, the outer edge
of the gardens leads into the open countryside
in the west. The Leimbach stream, whose
course largely determines the boundary
between the palace gardens and the town, is
fed into channels running the whole length
of the boundary; in the west the watercourses
flow into an asymmetrical lake which
interrupts the central axis leading from the
palace. From here the axis continues along
a path leading beyond the gardens to the A6
motorway. The path is bordered by Ketsch
Forest to the south and by farmland to the
north.
Detailed Description of Property
Carl-Theodor-Straße
From the east one enters the property via the
Carl-Theodor-Straße road, which forms part of
the principal east-west axis. The road is lined
by espalier-trained lime trees (re-planted in
2004). Apart from a few nineteenth-century
buildings situated east of the Marstallstraße
junction, Carl-Theodor-Straße is flanked
by buildings originating in the latter half