Symbolic groundbreaking: A senior center with chapel and community center is being built in Glottertal.
GLOTTERTAL. Without celebration, without speeches: The groundbreaking ceremony for the new senior center took place in Glottertal very unspectacular. The Caritas Association for the district of Breisgau-Hochschwarzwald is responsible for the institution, which is named after the charitable Glottertäler Katharina Rieder. The cost of construction and installation: around 8.5 million euros.
More and more people wish to be able to spend the last phase of life in the familiar environment. Giving up your own apartment, in which you have lived for decades, can therefore be hard. When the familiar environment with family and friends breaks down, older people sometimes fall into resignation. For this reason, the trend is moving from larger homes with a wide catchment area to smaller and local senior centers. Glottertal’s Mayor Karl-Josef Herbstritt summed it up in 2016, when the cooperation with the Caritas Association was announced: “Glottertal would like to stay in their home environment in old age.” This was the starting point for the conceptual and planning process by architect Volker Scheld from the Huller & Scheld office in Freiburg. After almost four years of planning, the ground-breaking ceremony for the Katharina-Rieder-Haus took place on Thursday on the approximately 5,100 square meter site behind the Schurhammerschule. Due to the corona pandemic, a celebration and invited guests were dispensed with. The symbolic groundbreaking took place in a small circle. In addition to Mayor Herbstritt and architect Volker Scheld, Jochen Kandziorra, chairman of the Caritas Association Breisgau-Hochschwarzwald, and two employees of the contracted construction company Weisenburger from Karlsruhe were also present.
The district Caritas Association is the developer and sponsor
With the Caritas association as the owner and sponsor of the facility, a modern, state-of-the-art building and operating concept with 45 fully inpatient nursing places in three residential communities, day care with 20 places, a chapel, seven barrier-free apartments for the elderly, two employee apartments and developed a citizens’ meeting in the center of Glottertal, as Jochen Kandziorra reported. The local historian Bernhard Hoch, known in the Glottertal, helped find the name. He suggested that Katharina Rieder be taken into account. She was born on September 21, 1864 at the Wahlenhof in Ohrensbach as the first child of the Wahlenhof farmers Lorenz and Rosa Rieder. Katharina Rieder entered the order of the Vincentines on June 7, 1887 in Freiburg and was given the name Sister Borromäa, under whom she became known in Glottertal due to her later charitable work in nursing and childcare. Following the proposal, the nursing center will be called “Katharina-Rieder-Haus Caritas Seniorenzentrum Glottertal” after completion. The chapel in the house, on the other hand, is to be consecrated to Saint Barbara and thus build on the historical mining in the valley. The integrated citizens’ meeting is operated by the Generations -gemeinschaft-Glottertal and is intended to form the link between the Caritas Association and parishes, between the senior citizen center and the people in the valley.
The cost of the project is estimated at around 8.5 million euros. The construction period is planned to be 15 months, so that after completion and installation of the building, commissioning is expected in summer 2021.
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