Post office in Hanover

Post office in Hanover, 2021

The Postscheckamt Hannover is an office building complex in Hannover in the Mitte district . It was built in the early 1970s for the postal check office in Hanover, which had been in existence since 1909 . The complex on a plot of around 19,000 m² was built under the direction of the Hanover Post Office in cooperation with the Hentrich, Petschnigg and Partner office . Following the sale of the area by Postbank in 2018, the demolition and construction of a new quarter with residential, office and commercial buildings is planned from 2022.

description

The building complex of the Postscheckamt, built between 1972 and 1973, is located south of Celler Strasse, east of the park of the former St. Nikolai cemetery and west of the railroad tracks of Hanover Central Station .

The building complex has two high-rise elements with up to 10 floors and further two- to three-story intermediate wings as well as an approximately six-story wing. The individual buildings form staggered cubes of different heights that are pushed into one another . The balconies running around almost all floors create a structure, creating strong horizontal contrasts. Most of them are even available in a modified form on the ground floor. The facade is clad with exposed aggregate concrete and gives a brutalist impression. The mirrored glass panes are framed with golden brown anodized metal frames. There are several elements of art in the building on the property , such as a spherical sculpture on the street side and an abstract metal sculpture in the fountain in the inner courtyard.

Stem with customer entrance
Facade facing Celler Strasse with green boxes
Depressed area
Spherical sculpture, Big Hanoverian Woman (1973) by Friederich Werthmann on Celler Strasse

story

With the establishment of postal checks on January 1, 1909, 13 postal check offices started operations, including the Hannover postal check office with 70 employees in the main post office building on Ernst-August-Platz . It was responsible for the districts of the Oberpostdirektion Hannover, the Oberpostdirektion Braunschweig , the Oberpostdirektion Minden and the Oberpostdirektion Oldenburg . From 1925 the post office was located in a building on Raschplatz , which was demolished in 1982. Between 1926 and 1935, the postal check office introduced machine booking. Due to the skyrocketing postal check service, external payment offices were set up in Braunschweig in 1951 and in Bielefeld in 1954 . In 1967 the postal check office had around 1,800 employees and ran over 250,000 accounts .

After the Second World War , the Hanoverian city planner Rudolf Hillebrecht agreed with Deutsche Post in 1949 that they would build a new post office on Aegidientorplatz . When an architectural competition was advertised in 1957 , the number of postal checks had increased so much that a fourteen-story high-rise building should have been built on this property. Because of the expected concentration of traffic on the outskirts of the city center, Hillebrecht persuaded the post office to build the post office at another location north of the train station.

New construction and demolition plans

High-rise complexes on Celler Strasse, 2015

The vacant buildings, 2021

After the post office was rebuilt in 1972 and 1973 and opened in 1974, the seat on Raschplatz was given up. In 1984 the postal check office in Hanover was renamed the Postgiroamt Hanover . In the mid-1990s, the postal check procedure was discontinued as part of the postal reform , with which the building finally lost its original function.

Some parts of the building complex were already empty in 2018. Since Postbank apparently wanted to give up the property, the city of Hanover drew up a new development plan that made apartments, offices, shops and social facilities possible. In 2018, Postbank sold the property of the former post office to a consortium consisting of a Hanover-based group of companies and a real estate company. The consortium intends to demolish the existing buildings and build new buildings under the name “Stadtquartier Goseriede” for around 200 million euros in accordance with the development plan, including around 300 apartments. The planned buildings include a 64 meter high and a 40 meter high skyscraper. Because of its inner-city location, the area is considered a "fillet". According to the city of Hanover, it is one of the most important development areas of the 2020s and one of the last large reserves of space in the city center. Until the new construction plans came up in 2018, the location and the development status of the district were assessed less favorably because the local street line is located next to the building complex .

The building was cleared in 2021 after the approximately 500 employees of Postbank and its subsidiaries had left it. The relocation to the former administration center of Bausparkasse BHW in Hameln , where Postbank is based, led to protests by Postbank employees. The subsequent use of the area with around 27,000 m² of residential and commercial space each was called into question by the COVID-19 pandemic that began in 2020 . The incipient trend towards home office led to planning uncertainty in the demand for office space. In 2021, the Lower Saxony Chamber of Architects initiated a discussion on the transformation of inner cities. In connection with this, a student project was presented on how the former post office check office could be built to preserve its substance. The background to this is the question of whether conversion is more ecological than demolition with a new building because of the gray energy used for construction .

Revolving door of the customer entrance
Window areas and balconies
All-round balconies
Structure on the ground floor analogous to the surrounding balconies on the upper floors
Nested balconies