Beehive house
The beehive house is an office and commercial building from the 1950s in Frankfurt am Main and one of the city's early high-rises . It has been a listed building since 2014 and is located on the corner of Zeil and Fahrgasse , exactly where the Konstablerwache was located until 1866 , from which the square of the same name owes its name. The house was built in 1953-54, the architect was Johannes Krahn , owner of the Frankfurter Sparkasse from 1822 , whose logo at the time, a beehive , was the reason for the name.
prehistory
The property (today Zeil 65-69) has been the location of the armory of the Free Imperial City since the late Middle Ages , which was expanded in 1753 by the city architect Lorenz Friedrich Müller to include a baroque guard building, the actual Konstablerwache. This was torn down again in 1822, the Gothic armory had to give way in 1887 to the building boom of Wilhelminian style commercial buildings on the Zeil in 1887. These were largely destroyed in the extermination attacks in March 1944. Immediately after the end of the war, business operations were resumed in single-storey emergency buildings, which now had to give way to the construction site of the Sparkasse high-rise.
During the reconstruction planning, the city decided to move between the south-north axis, which was newly traversed through the eastern city center (today's Kurt-Schumacher -Strasse and Konrad-Adenauer-Strasse ) and the previous main street, Fahrgasse, which was parallel to it (around 100 meters to the west). Grosse Friedberger Strasse to create a large square that should form a “counterpart” to the Hauptwachenplatz at the western end of the Zeil.
Planning and construction
This planning was followed by Krahn's design of the beehive house, the main facade of which does not face the Zeil, but faces east towards the Fahrgasse. However, this only made sense if the opposite building on the very narrow tramline were given up in favor of the new square, which is what happened. Since then, the beehive house has formed the western wall of Konstablerwachen-Platz, the dominant structure of this urban space and the urban and functional articulation point between the shopping street and the new town square.
Krahns draft was in the course of a ausgelobten by the building owner architectural competition selected from 52 submitted works. The Lever House in New York probably served as a model . The construction work went very quickly and only lasted seven months. The house was opened on August 6, 1954.
In 1956, an eight-meter-high, rotatable neon sign in the form of a yellow beehive was installed on the roof of the house, which led to the fact that the "high-rise Passage zum Beehive" was simply called the "Beehive House" by the Frankfurters.
The building
The high-rise building, which faces the Fahrgasse, was 43 meters high and was one of the tallest buildings in post-war Frankfurt. It is a reinforced concrete structure with twelve floors. A three-storey building facing the Zeil belongs to it. The ground floors and first upper floors of both buildings contained a shopping arcade in which, among other things, the new headquarters of the Sparkasse found its domicile. The tenants of the shops included Radio Diehl, Quelle, the Salamander shoe store (today in house 113) and a traditional store for suitcases and leather goods - “Leder Gabler” (today two parallel streets down Töngesgasse ). The upper floors were used for offices, and there were a few apartments on the top floor.
The upper floors of the high-rise wing protrude beyond the southern alignment of the Zeil. Four pillars form an arcade in front of the recessed ground floor , which took up the southern pavement in this area before the Zeil was converted into a pedestrian zone. The nine office floors are surrounded by a continuous horizontal ribbon of windows, while the living floor has individual square windows.
First and second remodeling
In March 1981 the beehive house caught fire due to a short circuit in a shop window and was then completely renovated, whereby the facade was also changed: the filigree steel window frames were replaced by wide aluminum frames and the base floor was clad with aluminum elements.
In December 2004 the DIC real estate group and a real estate fund of Morgan Stanley announced the purchase of the building along with 56 other Sparkasse properties . The Sparkasse has remained in the building as the main tenant.
In September 2007, according to plans by the Frankfurt office KSP Engel und Zimmermann, the renewed renovation of the house began for around 75 million euros. Facade extensions from the time of the first renovation in the 1980s were removed again. This is to emphasize the aesthetics of the 1950s. The component on the Zeil was demolished and replaced by a six-storey new building, the dark facade of which contrasts with the light facade of the high-rise, but thanks to its double storey compared to the previous component, it takes up the eaves height of the neighboring Peek & Cloppenburg department store . On the one hand, this gives the Zeil a more closed urban design at this point, on the other hand (as is the case with the color scheme of the façades) the transversely positioned high-rise building that protrudes above the alignment is emphasized even more than before.
The pictures originally attached to the building also showed a renovation of the facade, but this did not happen and was only cleaned. Only the basement was gutted and renovated and adapted to the new extension.
The house was reopened on April 24, 2009.
In addition to 7,000 square meters of office space, the building now has 3,500 square meters of retail space. In the extension, the Görtz shoe store opened a so-called flagship store as the main tenant on three floors (2,400 square meters) . Next door, Frankfurter Sparkasse operates its largest branch in the city on two floors. There is also a pharmacy on the ground floor.
In 2012, DIC Asset AG sold the house for around 75 million euros to the US-American RFR Holding GmbH of German real estate investors Aby Rosen and Michael Fuchs.
Web links
- Official website
- High-rise passage to the beehive ( memento from October 29, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) in the Frankfurt documentation on the post-war period
Individual evidence
- ↑ Frankfurt city center, Zeil 69, Zeil 67, Zeil 65 Bienkorb, denkxweb.denkmalpflege-hessen.de (accessed on April 11, 2020)
- ↑ a b Article "Why a Frankfurt building is called a beehive" in the senior magazine Frankfurt, issue 4/2008, online version ( Memento from April 13, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ A photo of the Sachsenhausen club ring shows the Frankfurter Sparkasse logo on an advertising glass
- ↑ a b c high-rise passage to the beehive ( memento from October 29, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ DIC press release of December 23, 2004
- ↑ DIC press release of September 13, 2007
- ↑ The beehive house shines again , Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of April 24, 2009
- ↑ 75 million for the beehive house; in: FAZ of October 18, 2012, p. 34
Coordinates: 50 ° 6 ′ 52 ″ N , 8 ° 41 ′ 9 ″ E