History

Strasbourg passed to the German Empire in 1871 under the Treaty of Frankfurt, becoming the capital of the new Reichsland of Alsace-Lorraine. The medieval city on its island in the Ill could not hold the administration, garrison and population the empire intended, so engineers and architects drew up an entirely new quarter to the north and east. The plan was deliberately monumental: long straight avenues, formal squares, and a hierarchy of public buildings meant to assert German cultural authority on the Rhine frontier.

The set-piece is the Place de la République, laid out as the Kaiserplatz. Around it rose the Palais du Rhin, the imperial palace begun in 1884 to designs by Hermann Eggert (1844–1920) and finished in 1889, a square neo-Renaissance pile loosely echoing the Palazzo Pitti in Florence. Facing it stand the National and University Library, the former Alsace-Lorraine parliament that is now the Théâtre national, and further administrative palaces, all classified today as monuments historiques. The university quarter, with its grand Palais Universitaire, observatory and museums, extended the same ambition into learning.

As the century turned, taste shifted from historicist revival to Jugendstil. Architects working in the Neustadt and across the city gave apartment blocks sinuous ironwork, floral stucco, bow windows and ceramic decoration — the German cousin of the Art Nouveau then flowering in nearby Nancy and in Brussels and Paris. When France recovered Alsace in 1918 the quarter survived intact, and in 2017 UNESCO acknowledged it as an exceptional, well-preserved expression of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European urbanism.