Schloss Bellevue
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Schloss Bellevue, President not present(no Flag) |
Schloss Bellevue is a
château in the centre of
Berlin. It is situated on the north edge of the
Tiergarten park, beside the
Spree, near the
Berlin Victory Column, with the address "Spreeweg 1". It has been the principal residence of the
German President since 1994. Its name derives from its beautiful view over the Spree.
Schloss Bellevue was built in 1786 for
Prince Ferdinand of Prussia, the younger brother of King
Frederick II of Prussia, and was designed by
architect Philipp Daniel Boumann as a
summer palace, on the site of a house built in 1743 by
Knobelsdorff. It was the first
Neoclassical building in Germany, and has three main elements: a central building of 19 bays, with a central pediment supported by
Corinthian columns, with wings on either side (the "ladies' wing" and the "Spree wing"). It is surrounded by a park covering 20
hectares.
It served as the official residence of the
Crown Prince of Germany until 1918. The treaty ending the
Franco-Prussian War was signed here on
3 September 1870.
In the mid-1930s, it was used as a museum of ethnography, before being renovated a guest house for the
Third Reich. It was damaged in May 1945, at the end of the
Second World War, and refurbished substantially in the 1950s. From 1957, it was a secondary residence of the President of Germany, a
pied a terre in Berlin in addition to his primary residence at the
Villa Hammerschmidt in
Bonn. It was refurbished again in 1986/7, and
Richard von Weizsäcker moved the primary residence of the President of Germant here in 1994, after the
German reunification. It was reconstructed from 2004 to 2005 to remedy defects in earlier renovations. The President of Germany used
Schloss Charlottenburg for representative purposes during this period. It became his primary residence again in January
2006.
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Berlin Tourism
