The Television Tower Stuttgart

Visit: march the 12th,2025

I had already been up on the top of Stuttgart's tv tower some 21-22 years ago but by pure accident I found myself again in Stuttgart where I had to kill two hours.I decided to revisit Germany's tentative whs again.

The TV tower in Stuttgart was the first of its kind in the world and triggered a kind of worldwide chain reaction in the tower construction.

Today there are countless tv towers all over our planet.The Stuttgart pioneer is considered an architectural and aesthetic masterpiece by many experts with its timeless design.It was opened in feb.1956 after 20 months of construction.The total height from the ground to the top of the antenna is 216 meters.As a groundbreaking structure, the TV tower served as a model and prototype for TV towers around the world. Even the world's tallest TV tower, the Tokyo Skytree, is considered an offshoot of the Stuttgart original, and experts consider the Stuttgart TV tower to be the most beautiful and safest in the world. Due to its innovative public use ( a cafe inside a tv tower for example) , it has been imitated architecturally and stylistically in many places around the world. A key consideration in the selection process was surely that the site could fill a thematic gap in the World Heritage List. This applies to the Stuttgart TV tower as a technical monument of the post-war period and a blueprint for its kind.

The view from …

An ugly television tower as a world heritage site? Or an innovative work of engineering representing the second half of the 20th century? Basically, a bit of both and I'm torn between these two views. But there is no middle course, a clear decision - thumbs up or thumbs down - is required. So here a summary of my pros and cons.

When TV started to become a mass medium in the early 1950s, high masts were needed to transmit the signals of sound and image. As Stuttgart lies in a valley, a nearby hill, the Hohe Bopser, was chosen as the location for the transmitter. The original plan was to build a lattice tower, which had previously been used for such purposes. But the engineer Fritz Leonhardt proposed an innovative alternative: a slender monolithic tube made of reinforced concrete. It was the first tall tower in the world with this type of construction. And the tower should be open to the public with a restaurant and a viewing platform. Although controversial at first, the tower soon became the city's landmark. But that doesn't mean much, Stuttgart doesn't have much to offer that would be suitable as a landmark.
The construction and the concept of the tower has been copied and varied many times, mostly in Germany. Almost every major German city has such a concrete TV tower. And also the Guishan TV tower in Wuhan, the CN Tower in Toronto and the towers in Vienna and Johannesburg were …