Überseering 35

View from the southwest in 2015.

Entrance area with green areas

The Überseering 35 office building is a building complex that was completed in 1974 in the Hamburg office city of City Nord . The initiator of the construction and long-term user was the mineral oil company Deutsche Shell AG .

Construction and architecture

In 1968, Deutsche Shell AG decided to combine the head office in Hamburg, which is spread over more than ten locations, and the data center from Frankfurt at one location. Since the property on the Inner Alster that was in use up to that time was not sufficient for these plans, the group swapped it for a much larger property in City Nord, for which it only had to pay an additional 16 million DM . He thus had a plot of land which, according to his plans, should be sufficient for the next 25 years. For the construction and operation of the building, an unusual procedure for Germany at the time, a company that was independent of the group was founded and an exclusive tenancy agreement was agreed with it for 30 years.

In 1970 there was an architectural competition , the result of which was expressly intended to be very strongly oriented towards open -plan offices. The winning design by the architects Gerkan, Marg and Partners consisted of four trapezoidal office wings that were supposed to give the building a floor plan like a wind turbine . In mid-1970, however, Shell carried out an employee survey, based on the results, revised the definition of open-plan offices and now mainly demanded single and two-person offices. The previous draft was thus obsolete. Until 1972, the architects presented a complete re-planning, in which four two flush conventional undeveloped office wings at right angles from a central core out. Construction itself began with the laying of the foundation stone on March 8, 1972 and was ready for the first Shell employees to move into on September 10, 1974. During construction, the significantly rising steel prices endangered the realization of the original facade design. In the end, however, the building authorities and the architects jointly managed to defend the facade design against the cheaper changes requested by Shell.

The building is divided into an extensive base area and the cross-shaped high-rise. The brightly clad base with its three floors above ground and two basement levels houses the underground car park, building services, special functional areas and open-plan offices. The darkly clad high-rise contains the classic offices on 13 floors. Its glazing and the facades with their eye-catching galleries are kept in dark brown, as is typical of the time, and are intended to signal the building's international standard. The floor plan ultimately led to 15 percent open-plan offices and 85 percent individual offices. This created a flexibly usable house that could also be adapted to future changes. The connection between street level and the higher pedestrian level is achieved almost effortlessly via the basement and the rising area for the outdoor parking spaces. The entrance hall as well as the conference, training and representation rooms are also located on this pedestrian level. The lower part of the building receives daylight through spacious, green courtyards. A large plastic of the Shell logo in front of the entrance still reminds of the former user.

The high-rise has its greatest extension of 120 m in north-south direction and reaches a height of 55 m above street level.

use

Deutsche Shell used the building until the end of the 1990s. Hamburg-Mannheimer Versicherung then bought it and used it for its own purposes at times. In the early 2000s, she renovated the building and adapted it to new requirements. After that, it turned out to be a property with good rentable space.

At the beginning of 2017, the University of Hamburg rented a large part of the building space in order to accommodate parts of the humanities institutes until 2022 during the renovation of the Philosophenturm .

Photographs and map

Coordinates: 53 ° 36 ′ 17 ″  N , 10 ° 1 ′ 6 ″  E

Überseering 35​

Hamburg

• 

  Details of the complex facade design

• 

  The view from the west with the Überseering in the foreground shows the division into the light plinth and the dark office area

• 

  Shell logo plastic

Individual evidence

1. ↑ For the description of the facade design, comparisons with the Seagram Building are often made .
2. ↑ Representation of the building by the owner ERGO Versicherung. Retrieved June 11, 2018.
3. ↑ Article in the Eimsbüttler Nachrichten of January 13, 2017. Retrieved on June 11, 2018.
4. ↑ Article in the Hamburger Abendblatt from January 13, 2017. Accessed June 11, 2018.

literature

• Sylvia Soggia: City-Nord - Europe's modern model city . Dölling and Galitz Verlag, Hamburg 2009, ISBN 978-3-937904-83-2 , p. 144-149 .
• Ralf Lange : Architecture in Hamburg . Junius Verlag , Hamburg 2008, ISBN 978-3-88506-586-9 , p. 190 .

Web links

Commons : Überseering 35  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Representation of the building by the owner.
• History of the building on the website of the University of Hamburg.