Cathedral workshops (Bauhütten): what UNESCO registered, and what Cologne's does

A workshop, not a building

A Bauhütte is the permanent workshop that keeps a great church standing. UNESCO's description of the practice says the German word Bauhüttenwesen means two things at once: the network of workshops dealing with the construction or restoration of a building, and the workshop itself as a place of work, where several trades collaborate as they did on medieval cathedral sites. In 2020 UNESCO selected the craft techniques and customary practices of the cathedral workshops of Germany, Austria, France, Norway and Switzerland for its Register of Good Safeguarding Practices.[1]

That register is easy to misread from a distance. It does not list monuments. It is one of UNESCO's intangible-heritage mechanisms, and what it recognises here is a way of passing on skills and knowledge. UNESCO's Germany page records the Bauhütten as the only one of the country's ten intangible-heritage elements selected under Article 18, the good-practice provision; the other nine are Representative List inscriptions.[2] For an overview of those ten, see what UNESCO lists for Germany's intangible heritage.

Two UNESCO designations, kept apart

Cologne Cathedral carries two UNESCO connections, and they are different kinds of thing. The cathedral's own history page says the building was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1996.[13] The workshop that maintains it has been on the Register of Good Safeguarding Practices since December 2020, as part of the Bauhüttenwesen, according to the workshop's own site.[3]

UNESCO's element page links the two only loosely. Under "World Heritage site potentially related" it lists seven properties, among them Cologne Cathedral, Aachen Cathedral, the Town of Bamberg, the old town of Regensburg and the Hanseatic City of Lübeck.[1] "Potentially related" is UNESCO's wording, and XTOUR reads it as no more than that: a building's World Heritage status and a workshop's place on the good-practice register are recorded separately.

The 18 workshops behind the application

The application came from the workshops themselves. The Kölner Dombauhütte says it was submitted jointly by 18 workshops from Germany, France, Austria, Switzerland and Norway, and that the Bauhüttenwesen had already been added to the national good-practice lists in Germany and France in 2018.[4] The joint website the workshops set up, bauhuetten.org, names all 18: Aachen, Bamberg, Basel, Dresden, Freiburg, Cologne, Linz, Lübeck, Mainz, Passau, Regensburg, Schwäbisch Gmünd, Soest, Strasbourg, Trondheim, Ulm, Vienna and Xanten.[5]

Two details on that list are easy to miss. The Dresden member is the Zwinger workshop, which bauhuetten.org calls the only secular workshop in the group.[5] The Zwinger itself is covered in the Dresden Royal Palace, Green Vault and Zwinger guide. And the photo credits on UNESCO's element page include the Erfurt cathedral building office, which is not among the 18 applicants bauhuetten.org names.[1][5] A photograph on UNESCO's page is not membership, and XTOUR does not treat it as such.

The same site sets out the route to the listing: Ulm's minster workshop applied for Germany's national inventory in 2015, the German entry was made in March 2018 with Cologne and Freiburg on board, the workshops' professional association backed an international bid in its "Erfurt Declaration" of September 2017, and the nomination was submitted on 6 February 2019.[5]

Each workshop contributed a carved piece in its own typical stone to a single pinnacle, the "Europastein", that accompanied the application, according to the Cologne workshop.[4]

Who runs a Bauhütte

There is no single model. Bauhuetten.org says the workshops can be run by a municipality, a church, the state, an association or a foundation. Cologne's is run by the Metropolitan Chapter of the cathedral, the Metropolitankapitel der Hohen Domkirche Köln.[5]

At the head is the cathedral architect, the Dombaumeister. The Cologne workshop says that in the Middle Ages this was a stonemason by training and that since the twentieth century it has been an architect; Peter Füssenich has held the post since January 2016.[6] The workshops themselves, with around 70 staff, are led by the Hüttenmeister and a deputy, according to the workshop's stone page, which says the post has been separate from the cathedral architect's since the nineteenth century.[7]

The workshops talk to each other across borders. Cologne's workshop dates the modern form of that exchange to a first meeting of cathedral and minster architects and master masons in 1975 and to the founding in 1998 of their association, Dombaumeister e. V., which it says now has more than 150 members from 17 European states.[6]

What Cologne's workshop does

The Kölner Dombauhütte states its task in one line: to keep the cathedral standing as a building. It puts its staff at about 100 people.[3]

Its trade pages show what that means in practice.

• Stone. The cathedral contains about 50 kinds of stone, and since the 1990s the workshop has sought replacements that match the originals in look and geology, today buying trachyte from Montemerlo in Italy, sandstone from Božanov in the Czech Republic and from Obernkirchen, and limestone from Caen. Stonemasons are its largest group.[7]
• Glass. The workshop's glass page says glaziers were not one of a Bauhütte's traditional trades, and that Cologne set up its own glass workshop in 1953; it is still reconstructing windows destroyed in the Second World War from designs kept in its archive.[8]
• Scaffolding. The workshop employs its own scaffolders, five at the time its scaffolding page was written, three of them trained carpenters.[9]

One detail on the stone page is worth looking for on the building. From the post-war years until about 1980, carvers were allowed figurative ornament where there had been foliage, so the cathedral carries portraits of workshop staff, footballers, the statesmen Kennedy, Macmillan, de Gaulle and Khrushchev, and the goat of the 1. FC Köln football club.[7] The page does not say where on the building each one is.

Why the scaffolding never comes down

The scaffolding is the workshop at work. Peter Füssenich, quoted on the workshop's home page, recalls the old Cologne saying that the world will end when the cathedral is finished, and says the cathedral is never seen without scaffolding, which is as it should be: a scaffold-free cathedral would mean a building left to decay.[3] His predecessor Barbara Schock-Werner put it more bluntly, in a line the scaffolding page quotes: a Cologne Cathedral without scaffolding is not a wish but a nightmare.[9]

The hanging scaffolds on the towers have a history of their own. The current-works page traces them to a storm, "Yra", on 24 November 1984, when stone fell from both towers; the cause was iron reinforcement from the 1870s rusting inside the stone, and the masons are replacing it with stainless steel. It says the hanging scaffold on the north-west corner of the north tower hung until 2021 and that the north-east corner and then the south tower come next.[10]

The workshop's own pages do not agree on dates here. The scaffolding page still says that north-west scaffold would probably come down in summer 2020, while the current-works page says it hung until 2021 and lists its removal in October 2021.[10][9] XTOUR follows the current-works page and does not know when the next scaffold goes up.

A refounded workshop

Cologne's workshop is not continuous from the Middle Ages. Bauhuetten.org dates the first one to the start of the Gothic cathedral on 15 August 1248 and its refounding to 1823/24, after building had stopped around 1520.[5] The cathedral's history page gives the refounding as a process that began in 1822 under Friedrich Adolf Ahlert and was largely complete by spring 1824.[13] XTOUR's reading is that the two count the start differently; both put the new workshop in place before the completion campaign of 1842 to 1880. The history page says that by the time the towers were being finished, from the mid-1860s, the workshop employed more than 500 people.[13]

The two Cologne sites also differ on a small point of the building's history. The cathedral's history page says that on 20 May 1906 an angel's wing fell from above the main portal; the workshop's show-depot page places the same fall above the Three Kings Portal.[11][13] XTOUR does not know which is right.

Seeing the workshop's work as a visitor

The workshop's show-depot page says two of its depot rooms east of the cathedral choir, on Trankgasse and Am Domhof, are laid out as small exhibitions that can be viewed from outside through shop windows.[11] Its tours page says guided tours reach places otherwise closed to visitors, such as the steel roof structure and a historic bell-ringing machine in the south tower, and sends readers to the official tour site, domfuehrungen-koeln.de.[12]

XTOUR does not publish tour times, prices or access conditions. For tickets to the cathedral interior, the tower and the Treasury, see the Cologne Cathedral ticket guide; for the city, the Cologne destination page.