One of Friedrich Weinbrenner's numerous large-scale buildings in Karlsruhe, which had a major impact on the city, was the 'Museum', inaugurated in December 1814 and which was destroyed by a major fire in 1918. However, the building planned by Weinbrenner from 1813 onwards was not so much an exhibition building or magazine, but was the meeting venue of the "Museumsgesellschaft" (or "Museum", from 1808 onwards), an association founded in 1784 as a reading society, whose members came almost exclusively from the circles of the Karlsruhe upper classes of the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy. The rooms with their high-quality furnishings, above all the central hall, provided space for exclusive concerts, balls and social evenings and formed a centre of social and cultural life in the city throughout the 19th century.
The set of plans for the project, presumably drawn up by Weinbrenner in 1813, probably comprised a total of eight sheets, which are today distributed among different archives. In addition to the view presented here, there is another sheet with a section in the Haupts Collection. With the exception of a plan with the view of the "Facade against Lange Strasse" in the Karlsruhe City Archives, the larger part of the plan set with three ground plans and two further sections is now kept in the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania. All the sheets are uniform in their drawing technique and have Weinbrenner's characteristic signature abbreviation "Wb". They are numbered consecutively in Roman numerals and have a scale in "feet". With the exception of the two Hanover sheets, all the other sheets also bear Weinbrenner's office stamp, which indicates that the plan set was probably separated during Weinbrenner's lifetime or shortly after his death.
Although Haupt knew the authorship of the two drawings and also noted it accordingly in the index, the assignment to the project of the House of the Museum Society was not recorded by him. Haupt must, however, have been familiar with the building from his time as a student in Karlsruhe and his time at the Grand Ducal Palace Construction Office in Baden between 1876 and 1878. In the research on Weinbrenner, which was already pronounced during Haupt's lifetime, Haupt's holdings of original drawings as well as drawings by his students, however, remained unknown.
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