Town hall

Franz Zell built the town hall in St. Gilgen on Lake Wolfgang in Austria’s Salzkammergut in 1914/15. The building stands in the middle of Mozartplatz.

Zell’s design adapts to the rural building tradition in the Salzkammergut, the region that became the epitome of the "summer retreat" as early as 1850. A historical photograph from Zell’s estate shows the Doppler inn in Marktschellenberg in the Berchtesgaden district. The architect may well have been inspired by this building. As the town hall in St. Gilgen is comparable in its basic form with its bulky structure, two full storeys, an attic and the half-hipped roof.

Zell, however, upgrades the town hall building with a wooden bay window situated in the central axis and supported by the entrance’s two columns. For Zell, the bay window is an architectural quotation that becomes a symbol of bourgeois building in historicism. Here, the bay window also becomes a structuring element of the façade, giving it an emphatically symmetrical look. The decorative paintings around the windows and the shutters give the building the desired "picturesque" effect.

Michaela Thomas