House of the Œuvre de Notre-Dame

The Œuvre Notre-Dame, a unique institution on place du Château

The Œuvre Notre-Dame was founded to supervise the construction of Strasbourg Cathedral and also to collect and manage the funds required for building and maintaining it. First mentioned in documents in 1246, it also contained the administrative offices and workshops of the cathedral stonemasons.

Although the main part of the Cathedral was finished in 1459, the foundation was far from outliving its usefulness and such was its renown, that its stonemasons lodge was elected Supreme Lodge of the Germanic Holy Roman Empire from 1459 to 1707. The Œuvre Notre-Dame still plays an active role today, working alongside the State, the owner of the Cathedral.

The foundation occupied 2 buildings looking on to place du Château. The first of these was built in 1347 and now forms the eastern wing of the current complex and can be recognised through its crow-stepped gable. Between 1578 and 1585, the Œuvre’s architect, Hans Thomann Uhlberger, added a spiral staircase and a second wing. A statue of a warrior stands atop the gable, with its volutes.

The original interiors have, fortunately, been kept, notably the stonemasons' lodge on the ground floor and, upstairs, the Œuvre Notre-Dame administrators’ office, and the receiver’s office next to the strongroom.

The museum of the Œuvre Notre-Dame, its mediaeval and Renaissance collections and its Gothic garden

Although the museum of the Œuvre Notre-Dame was founded in 1931, it has been the storage centre for the Cathedral’s statues, an important part of its collection, since the French Revolution, as well as for an exceptional set of architectural drawings of the Cathedral dating back to the 13th century. The museum is also a showcase for Alsatian civilisation from the Renaissance to the 18th century.

The adjoining Gothic garden was created in 1937 and drew its inspiration from the treatise on plants by Dominican friar Albertus Magnus, an evocation of the mediaeval Paradisgärtlein.