Chile house

Speicherstadt and Kontorhaus district with Chilehaus
UNESCO world heritage
The Chilehaus (view from the northeast)
National territory:	Germany
Type:	Culture
Criteria :	(iv)
Reference No .:	1467
UNESCO region :	Europe and North America
History of enrollment
Enrollment:	2015  ( session 39 )

Fritz Höger's Chilehaus

The Chilehaus is one from 1922 to 1924 built office building in Hamburg Kontorhausviertel . The architecture of Fritz Höger was an example for the Brick Expressionism of the 1920s, that of brick Gothic and Expressionism inspired. With its 36,000 m² gross floor area and up to ten storeys on a floor area of ​​5950 m², the building is one of the first skyscrapers in Hamburg. With its point to the east reminiscent of a ship's bow, it has become an icon of Expressionism in architecture.

On 5 July 2015, the Kontorhausviertel, together with the Hamburg Speicherstadt and the Chilehaus for UNESCO - World Heritage appointed.

Building area

Kontorhausviertel with Chilehaus (red), Sprinkenhof (green), Meßberghof (blue)

Chilehaus with its stacked floors from above

Detail of the stacked floors

Inner courtyard / Fischertwiete

The southern Hamburg old town was spared the great fire of 1842 . Apart from filling in the Reichenstraßenfleet to create a traffic axis between the town hall and the Berlin train station , which opened in 1842 , hardly any structural changes were made. The Gängeviertel was divided into small pieces in medieval structures. The building site of the Chilehaus was built on in 1868 with 69 buildings.

The construction of the warehouse district south of today's customs canal made it necessary to relocate 20,000 residents, some of whom found accommodation in the Gängeviertel. At the end of the 19th century, a few smaller commercial buildings were built, and in 1886 the Dovenhof was also the first office building in Hamburg.

Only as a result of the cholera epidemic of 1892 did the need to rehabilitate and reorganize the area become more pressing. The redevelopment of this area did not actually begin until after another twenty years. The plans were significantly influenced by the Hamburg chief construction director Fritz Schumacher .

A rough plan sketch from 1912 shows in the area between Steinstrasse in the north, Meßberg and Hopfensack in the south, Kattrepel in the west and Johanniswall in the east, the later Kontorhausviertel , with Burchardstrasse a new diagonal axis that intersects the north-south running Mohlenhofstrasse around Burchardplatz has not yet been sketched. Large block developments were planned for the development.

The actual building plot, bordered by Niedernstrasse , Burchardstrasse , Pumpen , Klingberg and Depenau and cut through by the Fischertwiete , was 5,950 m² in size. The Fischertwiete leads to the Messberg, which has served as a vegetable market since the Middle Ages. The wall frame bridge was in the axis of the Fischertwiete.

The city bought the land in 1913, and the competition announced the following year was based on partial residential use. The award-winning design by Distel & Grubitz provided for separate development on the two parts of the property, but individual other designs had proposed a development over the Fischertwiete.

The Klingberg police station, built by Albert Erbe in a baroque style between 1906 and 1908, is located on the Klingberg . She is completely clasped by the Chilehaus.

The building plot was auctioned by the client in October 1921.

The client was the entrepreneur Henry B. Sloman , who had acquired his fortune by trading saltpetre from mines in Chile . In 1912 Sloman was described as one of the richest people in Hamburg with a fortune of 60 million marks. Sloman was largely related to the shipowner family of the same name.

In Hamburg it was customary to name the office buildings. Since the shipping company Rob. M. Sloman had already called their office building on the Baumall built in 1908–1910 Slomanhaus , Henry B. Sloman decided to name his house "Chilehaus" in memory of his 32 years of activity in South America.

architect

Sloman had drafts drawn up by several architects. The drafts of the Gerson brothers have not survived; they realized the neighboring Meßberghof a little later and, together with Fritz Höger, the Sprinkenhof , both in the immediate vicinity of the Chilehaus. Puls & Richter have submitted drafts that also show a building over the Fischertwiete.

Fritz Höger, who had qualified through his buildings on Mönckebergstrasse - Rappolt- and Klöpperhaus - received the contract. The first draft in the city's building files, dated January 19, 1922, shows only partial aspects.

In order to achieve the total area desired by the client, the house had to be nine to ten stories high. In order to soften the massive overall impression of this “high-rise”, Höger chose to design the upper floors as staggered floors . The development was influenced by the newly appointed building maintenance commission.

Construction began on May 14, 1922, and the handover to the client took place in February 1924. The plans were continuously refined and supplemented, even after construction had already started. Early drafts were already included in the first rental prospectus in the summer of 1922.

The characteristic tip has been redesigned again and again.

The building was presented to the general public through the presentation of a wooden model at the first “Überseewoche” in August 1922, organized by the Überseeclub . The Hamburg branch of the Deutscher Werkbund showed work in its own pavilion, including a wooden model of the Chilehaus.

architecture

Due to its proximity to the Zollkanal, and thus also to the Elbe, the subsoil was soft. The property lies on the border between Geest and Marsch and drops two meters to the south and east. This difference in height was absorbed in the basement floors. Up to 16 m long reinforced concrete piles with a total length of 18,000 m were used for the construction. The proximity of the Elbe made special sealing of the cellars necessary, and the boiler room was designed as a movable caisson that could float up during spring tides.

Höger writes about the Bockhorner clinker brick used : “It should also be mentioned that for the fronts of the Chilehaus I chose scrap clinker , of all things, which would normally be considered good enough for pigsties and floor paving. But for me these deformed chunks were just as good for my gigantic building, they were only dear to me through their natural crunchiness, as they were made by the highest embers of fire, only to them I owe a large part of the effect of the gigantic building, they gave the building its liveliness and took the giant's weight away from the earth. ”In view of the short construction time and the number of bricks required, this does not mean that scrap was used; at best, clinker bricks were produced according to such a template. The same clinker bricks were apparently used in the construction of the Oberhafenkantine .

The quiet areas between the windows were bricked up in a Brandenburg bond (two runners, one truss). The pilaster strips , strong vertical strips between the windows, consist of two bricks each, which are bricked at an angle of 45 ° and all seven layers are anchored straight to the wall.

The sculptor Richard Kuöhl played a key role in the ceramic wall decorations on the facade and the stairwells .

In an article that has been postponed, Höger reports on 17 proposals from the Senate for construction, including the development of the public street Fischertwiete . His designs initially met with little approval from the client and the facade commission , as the monumental building had 2,800 identical windows and boredom was feared. To loosen up the roof structure, a new solution was worked with staggered storeys, which the client found to be too new-fangled.

Due to inflation and the subsequent currency changeover, the construction costs could only be estimated at the time of completion in 1924, namely at around 10 million Reichsmarks .

Many small import and export companies settled in the house, each of which only needed a few rooms in order to be able to go about their business.

An Andean condor rises in front of the top of the basement, symbolizing Chile.

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  Board of the Hamburg board program at the Chilehaus in Hamburg's old town

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  Sculptures on top

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  Condor, heraldic animal at the tip of the bow

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  Chilehaus: built-over Fischertwiete. Block A was connected to Block B of the Chilehaus

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  South side with a view of Fischertwiete

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  Kontorhaus Chilehaus in Hamburg's old town, location of the stumbling block for Hannchen Hinsch

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  Fischertwiete

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  Façade details in the Fischertwiete

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  Facade on the pumps

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  Standard facade with pilaster strips

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  Clinker detail on the gateway

reception

Ostspitze Pumps / Burchardstrasse Photo by Carl Dransfeld

Shortly before it was handed over to the client, the Chilehaus was depicted many times around the world. The excellent architectural photography by Höger's “house photographers” Carl and Adolf Dransfeld from Hamburg-Winterhude from March 1924 contributed in particular . In their most spectacular photo, they dramatically staged the eastern tip of the building using a special lens and depicted it from an extreme underside. The Chilehaus thus became the most depicted German architectural motif of the 1920s, which was also used by many artists in their own works. The German tourism industry also used it as a popular figure abroad. Most of the euphoric reports about the office building were based solely on the photos of the Dransfeld brothers. These impressions were far more spectacular than the daily view of the original conveyed. However, the depiction of the Dransfeld brothers alone shaped the view of the Chilehaus for decades, as the former head of Hamburg's monument preservation, Manfred F. Fischer, proves: “It was not the Chilehaus as architecture, but the photo of it that made art history. The invented reality was stronger than the reality. "

Postage stamp from the Sights series (1988)

The Chilehaus became the main work of its architect Fritz Höger. Begun in the middle of the inflationary period , it became an expression of the will to rebuild Hamburg's economy after the First World War .

Höger gained reputation and received several follow-up orders, including in the immediate vicinity, the Sprinkenhof . As a result, he often and happily comments on the construction and the surrounding conditions. Fischer explains in his introduction: Hardly any other artist has fallen as victim to his own legends and myths as Fritz Höger. Nobody has contributed so much to obscuring the traces by loud-mouthed spreading fairy tales, through bramabar-like talkativeness and ingratiating self-praise. ... So the abundance of sources has the opposite effect of knowledge if it is used uncritically.

In 1999 the building, which has been a listed building since 1983, was placed on the nomination list ( tentative list ) for UNESCO World Heritage . From 1991 to 1993 the Chilehaus was extensively renovated.

owner

The Chilehaus was owned by the Sloman family until the mid-1980s. In 1990 the Swedish private investor T. Karlsten bought the building. Today it is owned by the real estate fund of Union Investment Real Estate GmbH (formerly DIFA Deutsche Immobilien Fonds AG ). A Manufactum department store has been located on the ground floor since October 2001 . and a branch of the C. Bechstein piano house .

See also

• List of office buildings in Hamburg

literature

• Piergiacomo Bucciarelli: Fritz Höger. Hanseatic builder 1877–1949. Vice Versa Verlag, Berlin 1992, ISBN 3-9803212-0-7 .
• Harald Busch , Ricardo Frederico Sloman: The Chilehaus in Hamburg. Its client and its architect. Festschrift on the occasion of the 50th anniversary 1924–1974. Edited by Friedrich Wilhelm Sloman a. Hans Jürgen Sloman on behalf of the GbR "Chilehaus-Verwaltung". Christians, Hamburg 1974, ISBN 3-7672-0297-2 .
• The Chilehaus (Fritz Höger) . In: Wasmuth's monthly magazine for architecture . Volume 8 (1924), Issue 9/10, pp. 288–295, urn : nbn: de: kobv: 109-opus-9205 (with 15 illustrations)
• Manfred F. Fischer: The Chilehaus in Hamburg. Architecture and vision. With 28 plates by Klaus Frahm, Gebr. Mann Verlag, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-7861-2299-7 .
• Ingrid Hansen: Hamburg's architectural and cultural monuments. Downtown and the edge of the harbor. Edited by the cultural authority, Hamburg Monument Protection Office, Christians, Hamburg 1992, ISBN 3-7672-1078-9 .
• Alfred Kamphausen: The builder Fritz Höger. (Studies on Schleswig-Holstein Art History, Volume 12.) Verlag K. Wachholtz, Neumünster 1972.
• Dietrich Neumann: The skyscrapers are coming! German skyscrapers of the twenties. Debates, projects, buildings. Vieweg, Braunschweig / Wiesbaden 1995, ISBN 3-528-08815-X .
• Herman Soergel : The new Hamburg Chilehaus . In: Decorative art, illustrated magazine for applied arts, Volume 33 = year 28, 1924/25, pp. 56–70 ( digitized version ).
• Rainer Stommer: Skyscraper . The beginning in Germany. Jonas, Marburg 1990, ISBN 3-922561-95-0 .
• Claudia Turtenwald (Ed.): Fritz Höger (1877-1949). Modern monuments. - Catalog for the exhibition “Fritz Höger - Architect of the Chilehaus. Modern Monuments. ”At the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg from September 28 to November 16, 2003. - Dölling and Galitz Verlag, Hamburg 2003, ISBN 3-935549-56-3 .

Web links

Commons : Chilehaus  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Entry on the UNESCO World Heritage Center website ( English and French ).
• Chile house. In: arch INFORM .
• www.chilehaus.de Official website
• Chilehaus webcams View into the atrium, view of the Speicherstadt

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Hamburg's Speicherstadt is a World Heritage Site . shz.de, July 5, 2015
2. ^ MF Fischer: The Chilehaus in Hamburg. Architecture and vision. , Pp. 21f., Cites a yearbook for millionaires
3. ^ Pablo de la Riestra: Hamburg Architecture of a Cosmopolitan City , Michael Imhof Verlag, 2008, pp. 98–99
4. ^ MF Fischer: The Chilehaus in Hamburg. Architecture and vision. , P. 48, illustration
5. ^ MF Fischer: The Chilehaus in Hamburg. Architecture and vision. , P. 81
6. ^ MF Fischer: The Chilehaus in Hamburg. Architecture and vision. , Introduction
7. ↑ Manufactum in Hamburg , accessed on March 30, 2015.
8. ↑ C. Bechstein Centrum Hamburg , accessed on April 25, 2018

Coordinates: 53 ° 32 ′ 53 ″  N , 10 ° 0 ′ 6 ″  E