“If the last hope has landed in monument protection, then I don’t want to be the one hoping,” wrote an SZ reader after reading the latest report about new building plans in Herzogpark. In this case, however, his pessimism was deceptive. Four months after the start of the review, the state office added the two houses at Mauerkircherstrasse 17 and 19 to the list of monuments. The owner family apparently wants to sue.
The owners, who have owned the houses since June 2022, divided some of the 22 apartments into shared rooms and asked for prices per square meter of 100 euros, which does not constitute rent extortion for furnished living. In June 2023, they asked the city whether renovations and a five-story new building including a three-story underground car park in the inner courtyard would be permitted. Around 60 residents protested against this in August, whereupon the preliminary inquiry was withdrawn, but a slightly modified new one was submitted in November.
The city has no legal recourse against this densification because there is no development plan in the southern Herzogpark. In such a case, something that can already be found in the area in one way or another must be approved. And in the Mauerkircherstrasse case, the precedent is directly opposite.
But in January the city informed the owners that their application would be postponed for a maximum of 17 months and that the monument status of the two houses would be examined. Unlike 14 other properties in the Karree, they had not been under protection until then. That has changed. As Lea Kramer, spokeswoman for the state office, confirms, they are with the file number D-1-62-000-11139 now recorded in the monument list. The text reads: “Double tenement house, four-story plastered gable roof buildings with axially symmetrical four-axis street facades and raised, elaborately profiled entrance portals with stone walls, by Ignaz Schraudolph, 1936”.
The monument status is justified by the design of the buildings themselves, but also by the urban context. It shows the “development of building and living in Bogenhausen in the early 20th century between late historicism, youth and local style and a – Munich-specific – moderate modernity, as is clearly shown here using the example of numbers 17 and 19”.
The city is now examining what effects monument protection has on the owners’ new construction and renovation plans. “Further information is therefore not possible at the moment,” says the planning department. The owners themselves, who did not respond to SZ’s request, have reportedly already announced an action for a declaratory judgment with the administrative court. This makes it possible to clarify in court whether a building meets the requirements of a monument or not.