Goetz, Carl Florian

Architect, town planner, Nassau building official

Born: 04.07.1763 in Ottweiler

died: 23.06.1829 in Biebrich

Goetz was the son of a bailiff and court chamberlain of the Principality of Nassau-Saarbrücken and completed his training in Saarbrücken, presumably under Friedrich Joachim Stengel, the director of the expansion of Saarbrücken into a late Baroque residence.

In 1789, he moved to Wiesbaden as Nassau building inspector, in 1803 he became building director and in 1807, as the highest Nassau building official, he was appointed a member of the ducal court marshal's office. In 1817, he became state master builder and was responsible for the organization of construction in the centralized ducal Nassau administration until his death in 1829.

Goetz not only possessed administrative skills, but also pursued ambitious design goals as a planner and architect. He was one of the key classicist pioneers of Wiesbaden's development into an up-and-coming spa and residential city in the first decades of the 19th century, even if his work is overshadowed in retrospect by the work of his colleague from 1805 onwards, the Nassau building inspector Christian Zais.

Goetz was the architect of the Mosburg in Biebrich Palace Park (1805-12), the infantry barracks on today's Wiesbaden Platz der Deutschen Einheit ( 1816-19), the new Kochbrunnen spring (1823) and four churches in Nassau's rural communities.

In 1803, immediately after the removal of the fortifications in the south and east of Wiesbaden, he presented a first draft for the expansion of the city with a new street south of the old city, today's Friedrichstraße, which was deepened in 1805 in a sketch plan, and he combined this urban planning with specifications for the architecture to be realized. In 1805, he not only defined the new building plots at Mainzer Tor and Friedrichstraße in a revised sketch plan, but also the prescribed house types in a model development of the street frontage. Of the houses built according to these specifications, Friedrichstraße 5 still exists today (with a simplified entrance, without the open staircase planned by Goetz). The sketch plan from 1805 is also the first to show a new promenade street running east of the town in a northerly direction, which later became Wilhelmstraße.

His "Layout of the city of Wiesbaden and its immediate surroundings" of 1806, which followed up on this idea and suggested that the maze of alleyways in the old town be delimited by two streets meeting at right angles, became the starting point for Zais's planning of the historic pentagon.