What to See in Gütersloh - Top Sights and Attractions

Museum in Gütersloh, Germany. The Stadtmuseum Gütersloh is a museum in Gütersloh, Germany, dealing with the city's history. Under the auspices of Gütersloh's association for local history it accommodates – beside exhibits to Gütersloh's local history – two exhibitions referring to the history of medicine and the industrial history. Every year about five to seven special exhibitions about local topics respectively travelling exhibitions take place in addition to these three permanent exhibitions. The medical-historic collection – the flagship of the museum – was granted a special prize of the European Museum of the Year Award in 1990. A desk of the Nobel Prize winner Robert Koch and an iron lung are some of the most important exhibits.^[1]

Club in Gütersloh, Germany. The Stadtpark und Botanischer Garten Gütersloh is a municipal park with botanical garden located at Parkstraße, Gütersloh, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It is a member of the European Garden Heritage Network and open daily without charge.

The park was created between 1906 and 1909 to designs by garden architect Friedrich Wilhelm Schoedder (1855-1938), with the botanical garden added to its northeastern corner in 1912. A palm house was constructed in 1938 but destroyed in World War II; it has subsequently been restored and now houses a café. A rose garden was created in 1941, followed by a birch grove (1950), mini golf course (1960), orchard (1990), herb garden (1998), and sculpture garden (2000).

Today the park retains its original design, broadly patterned upon an English landscape park, with an elongated axis, wide curving paths, lawns, and numerous trees, as well as a meadow flooded for ice-skating in the winter. The botanical garden is laid out as a display garden, with geometric pools, arcades, and high hornbeam hedges. The orchard contains a number of heritage fruit varieties including Westfälischer Gülderling and Schöner aus Wiedenbrück.^[2]

St. Matthew's Church in the Gütersloh district of Sundern is an octagonal church built in 1986/87. It is the spiritual center for 5,800 parishioners from the districts of Sundern, Kattenstroth and Spexard. With the back wall open to the adjoining side room, the church holds 400 people.

In 1955, a parish hall was built in Sundern, which was used not only as a meeting room but also as a place of worship. At the end of the 1960s, the desire for a church building grew along with the number of parishioners. A church building association was founded under the chairmanship of the publisher Sigbert Mohn. Despite some donations, however, the planned project could not be realized.

It was not until two decades later that the plans were taken up again. At that time, the Sundern/Spexard parish district had 4,000 members. The architect and artist Fritz Karl Wachtmann from Senne designed a "church in tent form" on an octagonal footprint, which connected directly to the existing parish hall and was inaugurated on March 27, 1987.

The construction management was in the hands of the Gütersloh architect Werner Honigmund (* 1933). The construction costs amounted to 750,000 D-Mark, of which the church district of Gütersloh contributed 450,000 D-Mark and the parish 80,000 D-Mark. The congregation was able to raise 220,000 D-Mark in donations.

The equipment includes a grand piano and an organ made by Speith-Orgelbau, Rietberg. The instrument, built in 1987, has 16 stops on two manuals and pedal, mechanical action and registration.

The stained glass windows, also designed by Fritz K. Wachtmann, are worth seeing. In the parish hall, a stained glass window designed by Woldemar Winkler in 1956 and bricked up in 1971 was uncovered in 2012, which takes up the parable of the fourfold field (Matthew 13:3-8).

In 2008, according to the plans of the architect Reinhard Michel, a new community center was built, which was inaugurated on September 7 of that year.