Kempten Town Hall

Kempten in Germany was once two cities under one name, and their feud ran for centuries. The town hall went up in 1474 as a plain stone house of about eight hundred square metres. It answered to the free imperial city, never to the monastery and its prince-abbots. The council declared for Luther at the Diet of Speyer in 1529 and carried the crowned imperial eagle in the city's arms.

The façade stacks its centuries in plain sight. Gothic elements arrived in the mid sixteenth century, and a Renaissance remodel followed sixty years later. From 1874, Historicism and Neo-Renaissance added their layer to the stone. On the western cross-side by Kronenstraße, a staircase projection of 1568 carries a small rectangular bell tower. On the east rises a tower with a delicate onion dome. Above its stairway, two eagles hold the double eagle of the German Confederation, flanked by the arms of four patrician families. Out front, the market fountain has stood on the square since 1576, and a café beside it invites you to rest. Walk toward St.-Mang-Platz and you pass the former hotel palace everyone calls the Londoner Hof. Its great portal is the work of the Munich architect Emanuel Seidl.

The city council meets inside these walls, and the rooms hold furnishings with their own stories. A Biedermeier interior waits in the wedding room. The meeting room next door keeps Gothic fittings from the weavers' guild house. And in the Schrannenhalle, the reception hall, the official side of city life begins. In the large council chamber on the second floor hangs a wooden ceiling of 1460. It came from that same guild house, which makes it older than the town hall beneath it.