in progress...

THE CITY HALL OF COLOGNE (KÖLN)

Though the current city hall of Cologne dates from the fourteenth century — with many  subsequent additions and renovations and repairs —   the building has its origins in the eleventh century, making it the oldest city hall in Germany. But the history of the site of the city hall reaches much farther back into the past. A Roman pratorium (a general or governor’s headquarters), dating from before the fifth century, occupied the site until destroyed by an earthquake in the eighth century.

In spite of its age — or because of it — the Cologne city hall is a radically different structure from the one first erected almost 1,000 years ago. The presernt town hall dates from the fourteenth century, augmented by a tower added in the fifteenth, a loggia from the sixteenth, and an atrium from the twentieth.

And after the destruction by allied bombing in Word War II, the entire building had to be reconstructed from this state:

more to come...