Georg Salomon Hermann Moller

Born: January 22, 1784 in Diepholz
died: March 13, 1852 in Darmstadt

Alongside Karl Friedrich Schinkel and Leo von Klenze, Georg Moller is considered an important German architect during the Classicism and Romanticism periods. His inventiveness as a creator of generous spatial compositions is particularly noteworthy.

Moller came from an old family of pastors and scholars with Scandinavian roots. His father, Levin Adolf Moller (1757 - 1825), was a lawyer in Celle, then an advocate and municipal judge in Diepholz; his mother, Elisabeth Sophie von Castelmur (1761 - 1795), came from a Swiss noble family.

After graduating from grammar school, Moller began his professional training in Hanover in 1800 in the building office of Christian Ludwig Witting, who was appointed court architect in 1801. Here he caught the eye of the architect Friedrich Weinbrenner (1766 - 1826), who was temporarily staying in Hanover and whom he followed to Karlsruhe in 1802 as a scholarship holder of the Hanoverian government.

During several years of study at the private college set up by Weinbrenner, he acquired in-depth theoretical knowledge in the field of neoclassical architecture as well as practical experience working on Weinbrenner's projects, such as the planning and expansion of the city of Karlsruhe. In 1807, he set off on a study trip to Italy, particularly Rome, where he socialized with an illustrious circle of painters, sculptors and architects. He was primarily interested in studying the construction of early Christian basilicas. At the end of 1809, he returned to Karlsruhe via Paris.

In February 1810, Moller was employed as a court architect in Darmstadt and was appointed building councillor by Grand Duke Ludwig I of Hesse in the same year. He settled in Darmstadt and in 1811 married Amalie Hessemer (1780 - 1839), the widow of Ludwig Merck, a member of the famous Darmstadt family, and after her death his grandniece Helene Hille (1810 - 1873).

In 1812, he was appointed Chief Building Officer, in 1831, under Grand Duke Ludwig II, Court Building Director and finally Chief Building Director in 1844. This placed him at the top of the building industry in the Grand Duchy of Hesse. He received inspiration for his architectural work on trips to Paris, Berlin, England and Munich.

Darmstadt's rise to a royal residence necessitated an expansion of the city and the construction of representative public buildings and private residences on a large scale. Moller's main works in Darmstadt include the planning and layout of the new town, the so-called "Mollerstadt", the former Masonic Lodge (1817/1818), the former court theater (1818 - 1820) and the Ludwigskirche (1820 - 1827), the first Catholic sacred building in Darmstadt after the Reformation. A work that still characterizes the cityscape today is the Ludwig Monument on Luisenplatz (1841 - 1844).

Outside Darmstadt, he designed the east dome of the cathedral in Mainz (1828) and today's state theater (1829 - 1833) and the city palace in Wiesbaden, the seat of the Hessian state parliament. The neo-classical building was built between 1837 and 1842 as the residence of the Dukes of Nassau. In 1837, Duke Wilhelm von Nassau commissioned Moller to draw up plans for a new building on the market square. He came up with a sophisticated corner solution that defined the building and the square. The master builder Richard Goerz from Wiesbaden was put in charge of the construction. The foundation stone was laid in 1837, but Duke Wilhelm did not live to see its completion. His son, Duke Adolf von Nassau, moved into the completed building at the end of 1842. Moller also worked for the Landgraves of Hesse-Homburg and for Klemens Wenzel Lothar Prince von Metternich, whose Johannisberg Palace in the Rheingau he modernized.

In addition to his work as an architect, Moller was also active as a monument conservator and engineer. In keeping with the spirit of his time, Romanticism, he researched the buildings of the Middle Ages and, alongside Sulpiz Boisserée, with whom he had been friends since 1811, was instrumental in the recovery of the Gothic architectural outline of the main façade of Cologne Cathedral, one half of which was discovered in Darmstadt in 1814 and the other in Paris in 1815. The result of Moller's study of medieval buildings is the series of "Denkmaehler der deutschen Baukunst", which he published in individual volumes from 1815 to 1849 and which he finally compiled in three volumes. In the introduction to the first volume (1821), he reproduced in a footnote the first comprehensive ordinance in Germany issued by Grand Duke Ludwig I in 1818 for the protection and care of "Denkmäler der Baukunst" (monuments of architecture). Moller's interest in engineering and the use of new building materials is demonstrated by his "Beiträge zu der Lehre von den Construktionen" (1833-1843).

Moller received numerous honors in the course of his life. He was a member of the Academies of Arts in Berlin (since 1818), Copenhagen (since 1839) and Vienna, as well as a member of the Royal Institute of British Architects (since 1834). In 1820, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Heidelberg and was made an honorary citizen of Mainz in 1831.