Prinz-Emil-Castle

The simple three-axis wing building predominantly features Neoclassical characteristics but cannot deny Rococo elements. The necessary renovation after World War II largely altered the interior. The elevated main house with a pyramid roof presents its two-story, three-window main facade towards the pond to the west, flanked by two lower, equally long side wings, topped by balconies as roofs.

The adjoining wings are of more recent date. The northern transverse building is a narrow, single-story wing crowned with a hip roof, to which an eastern side bar, also with a hip roof, adjoins, slightly offset to the south-southeast opposite the main house, thus forming a U-shaped, three-sided courtyard-like complex opening to the south.

The park, conceived and created from 1772 by the Dieburg gardener Nikolaus Andreas Siebert (formerly called Moser's Garden), originally combined elements of French and English garden art. Around the turn of the 20th century, the garden presented itself as a 19th-century landscape garden with features of a bourgeois garden. Statues, temples, a chapel (once serving as a kitchen), a farmhouse built in Russian style, the Chinese pavilion on the pond island, grottoes, and an artificial Gothic ruin have now disappeared. A water-filled ditch ("Aha"), which originally visually enclosed the park on the west side and allowed an unobstructed and undeveloped view of the Rhine plain at the time, also disappeared at the beginning of the 20th century. After the war, significant interventions occurred due to peripheral developments, the pond was filled in after 1945, only the old trees and gently sloping green areas remained, which are used in winter as popular sledding slopes by Bessungen children.

The park now again features a pond in its center (one of originally two), restored between 1987 and 1989, with a small waterfall. In the middle of the park, east of the pond, the Prinz-Emil-Palais presents itself on a small hill.

The building was destroyed by bombs in 1944. The city of Darmstadt rebuilt it with the help of the American Quakers and the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and handed it over to the Nachbarschaftsheim association, which established socio-cultural district work in the little palace and its annexes. The park now includes children's playgrounds and sports fields, a mini-golf course, and a retirement home. The building is a listed monument.