Dampfmaschinenhaus

When in the middle of the 19th century three architects, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Friedrich Ludwig Persius and Johann Heinrich Strack, set out to create a castle-style summer residence for the prince and later Emperor Wilhelm I and his wife Augusta with Babelsberg Castle, it became a future one Park design especially important to build an irrigation system. Peter Joseph Lenné, who had already started laying trails and planting on the sandy Babelsberg heights in the spring of 1833, called for unsuitable maintenance in vain. Persius, the architect of the king, used ambition and imagination to give the urgently required and now approved utility buildings a pleasing shape that is carefully integrated into the Potsdam garden landscape. Since hardly anyone is interested in an outstanding combination of modern technology and architectural beauty nowadays, because for a few new workplaces are only padded and promoted, the exemplary reference to the Persius waterworks created in 1843 and 1844 no harm, because in addition to its specific purpose, namely to provide parks with water, the building also fulfills the character of a work of art.

The building, designed in the Moorish style with the high, crenellated tower, in which Persius had finally hidden nothing more than the chimney, corresponds in its echoes to medieval castles with the neo-Gothic castle on top of Babelsberg. From there it flowed to two lakes , served the growth of the trees and, above all, fed the largest of the fountains, the Geyser , a few meters from the shore the castle in the Havel». After the demolition of the old Bürgershof across in Klein Glienicke in 1971, something similar was feared on the Babelsberg side.

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