Baukulturführer 118 Rosenthal am Rothbühl, Selb

Lines in the Landscape
The last fifty years have seen dramatic changes to the overall setting. The Rosenthal porcelain factory at the Rothbühl no longer stands alone. Yet the connection to the landscape of the group of buildings located parallel to the road and railway leading uphill in a northerly direction is unmistakable. There is a lightness to the lines drawn by the giant facility – as if executed with a fine pencil following the contours of the Fichtelgebirge. All of the buildings in the ensemble have been kept low, the only high point being the building with its interior silos where the clay is prepared, as if corresponding to the hills in the distance. One reencounters these decidedly clear lines in the construction drawings, which Walter Gropius and The Architects Collaborative Inc. (TAC) created for Philip Rosenthal in Selb in 1964. From the first pen stroke to completion, the ambitious project “has exemplified lightness, elegance and clarity”. These were the words used way back then by the Süddeutsche Zeitung when it acclaimed the model which Gropius personally presented to the invited newspaper and trade representatives in the Rosenthal Studio-Haus in Munich in December 1964.