Umspannstation_Cotta

Transformer Station Cotta

The art:

The artist engaged with 2 themes when he was designing the station: on one hand the myth of the guesthouse of Cotta and on the other hand the Dresden illustrator Richard Bernhardt.

The motives:

Since 1904 the formerly village square is called Altcotta. Because of the construction of the Cotta town hall replacing the village lake and the therefore resulting changes in the surroundings there are only a few parts of the old village center remaining. One of the oldest buildings is the 1862 opened „Dorfgasthof“ (village guesthouse) that was called later on „Zum Frosch“ (to the frog) with regards to the old village nickname. In 1962 a movie theatre took place in it. After 1990 the guesthouse was used as a casino for a short time and then was not in use until its demolition in 2002. At the same place a modern urban district center was build that looks like the historical building (Photo). Since the beginning of 2008 the Cotta party pub „Jedermanns“ and since April 2009 the Coffee-Bar and disco „Raimund's“ were in this house. In 1998 the pub „Frosch à la card“ opened in the Leutewitzer Straße no. 5 that also keeps up the tradition of „Frosch-Cotte“.

http://www.dresdner-stadtteile.de/West/Cotta/cotta.html

Max Richard Bernhardt was born on the 18. of July 1900 in Oberpesterwitz and lived in Löbtau in the Lange Straße no. 30 until he died on the 13. January of 1977. During his drawing career he was making more than 23,000 pencildrawings while he was walking through Dresden and the surroundings, Bohemia and Thuringia, that were part of approx. 300 self-bonded sketchbooks. After his death most of those books were thrown into a used paper collection and were partly discovered in the 80s and therefore could be rescued. Due to the continuously numbering of the sketches the year of origin could be determined exactly. The detailed drawings and the dates on it still can give hints to monuments that are not existing anymore nowadays what makes the sketches a very important contemporary document. The motives are buildings, village- and town views, but also natural disasters like a flood of the river Elbe although the artist valued details like unique stones, fancyworks and archways.

The Cache itself and the translation into English is licensed to the Creative Commons licence "Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported" (visit link)