Casa Oppenheimer facts for kids
Quick facts for kids |
|
|
Casa Oppenheimer
|
|
.jpg)
Casa Oppenheimer in 2014
|
|
 Location in Puerto Rico
|
|
| Location | Calle Salud No. 47 (NW corner with Calle Aurora), Ponce, Puerto Rico |
|---|---|
| Area | < 1 acre |
| Built | 1913 |
| Architect | Alfredo B. Wiechers Pieretti |
| Architectural style | Art Nouveau |
| NRHP reference No. | 87001824 |
| Added to NRHP | 29 October 1987 |
Casa Oppenheimer (which means Oppenheimer House in English) is a special old house in Ponce, Puerto Rico. It was designed in 1913 by a well-known Puerto Rican architect named Alfredo B. Wiechers. This house stands out because it has beautiful front gardens, even though it's in a small city space.
The house is located at 47 Salud Street, right in the historic part of Ponce. It's at the corner of Salud and Aurora streets. People also call it Casa del Abogado, which means "House of the Attorney". In April 2019, a women's health center called MedCentro turned the house into Casa Mujer.
Contents
What's the Story Behind Casa Oppenheimer?
The Oppenheimer House is one of the most unique homes in Ponce. It was built in 1913 for Doña Isabel Oppenheimer-de Santiago. The architect, Alfredo Wiechers, was very important in Puerto Rico in the early 1900s.
Just two years before, in 1911, he had designed another famous house called Casa Serralles. Today, that house is home to the Museum of Puerto Rican Music. Mr. Wiechers studied architecture in Barcelona, Spain, and then came back to Ponce. He built many buildings there in a style called Spanish-Art Nouveau.
Wiechers designed many grand homes for the wealthy families of Ponce. The Oppenheimer House is one of these amazing buildings. Its design mixes modern ideas with the simpler building styles used by local people in the hot southern part of Puerto Rico.
How Does the House Use Space?
A cool feature of this property is its front entrance gate. It's built with a special angled shape called a chamfer. This angle matches the way the city streets meet at the corner of Salud and Aurora streets.
This design was actually required by city rules. These rules made sure that buildings on city corners had angled edges. This clever design, along with a similar angled shape on the front of the house itself, created a lot of garden space in the front. This was very unusual for a city lot, especially one so close to Ponce's main town square.
Why Is Casa Oppenheimer Important?
The Oppenheimer House is considered "one of the best examples in Ponce" of how Puerto Rico adapted the Barcelona School of architecture. It's a key part of the many grand houses built in the late 1800s and early 1900s. These houses together give the center of Ponce its special look and feel.
What Does Casa Oppenheimer Look Like?
.jpg)
The house is a one-storey building made of brick and stone. It sits on the northwest corner of Salud and Aurora streets in Ponce's Historic Zone. The house is built at an angle to the street corner. Its main front faces the corner.
At both ends of this front, the house turns, first becoming straight with the side street, then parallel to it. A 4-foot tall plastered stone wall surrounds the property. On top of this wall is an 18-inch high wrought iron railing. The small, angled front gate is also made of wrought iron.
The front of the house curves inward. It has a raised porch, Ionic columns, and a recessed area called a loggia. Above these, there's a decorative cornice with a wall that looks like a castle's battlements. The raised loggia porch has concrete balustrades (railings) along its entire length. You can reach this porch from the front gardens by a wide stone stairway. The loggia has five arched openings that form the central part of the curved front.
