Egg cold store

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The egg cold store at the Osthafen in Berlin

The egg cold store (also egg storage ) is a former cold store and today an office building at Berlin's Osthafen on Stralauer Allee in the Friedrichshain district . The building, built according to plans by Oskar Pusch and opened in 1929, served as a cold store for perishable goods and has been the headquarters of Universal Music's German headquarters since July 2002 after a renovation .

history

It was not until 1913 that the east port was opened as a major port project after 16 years of planning and construction. In the same year, the grain and goods storage facility was opened in the northern part of the site, which is now the eastern harbor storage facility . Directly to the north-west of the port  , a cold store was to be built - in the immediate vicinity of the Oberbaum Bridge - but it was only built in 1928 and 1929 according to plans by the architect Oskar Pusch by the Hamburg company Kühlhaustransit-AG as a reinforced concrete frame construction. The nine-storey, cubic building was characterized by a closed, expressionistic , striking light yellow brick facade with a gray-colored diamond pattern. The inside of the building had a thick, insulating layer of cork on the walls and ceilings and a complex system of ventilation and cooling circuits with which cooling temperatures between 0 ° C and –10 ° C could be achieved.

In Berlin vernacular the cold store was called egg storage because up to 75 million eggs could be cooled here. In addition, it was also used for the temporary storage of a large number of perishable goods that came from home and abroad and were mostly transshipped by ship across the Spree and by rail here. This included wine, butter, canned food, frozen meat, game, poultry and millions of eggs to supply the Berlin population and for further industrial processing.

In 1923 the Westhafen was handed over to the newly founded BEHALA and, with more than twice the capacity, replaced the Osthafen as the largest goods transshipment point in Berlin.

Due to the rapid growth of the city, an extension of the egg cold store to the north was necessary and was completed in 1940.

The cold store in 1951

In April 1945 the East Harbor was occupied by the Red Army and the dismantled superstructures were taken away as booty to supply the Soviet units. Parts of the east port and the granary were used for the transshipment of dismantled goods in the following years, but the egg cold store was used again in 1945 to supply the population with food. From 1947 the Osthafen was completely returned to German administration, but was already separated from the entire Berlin port administration in 1948 in the course of the Berlin split.

Cold store and Oberbaumbrücke in October 1989

With the construction of the Wall in 1961, the Osthafen was now directly on the border with all the resulting restrictions for daily operations. Nevertheless, the now only port in East Berlin and the cold store could not be dispensed with and so it was given an additional thick insulation cladding in the 1970s in order to better adapt the external insulation of the building to the purpose of fine freezing and deep freezing. Before the insulation was improved, frost and ice could be observed all over the house on wet and cool spring and autumn days, a clear indication that the original insulation was not designed for freezing.

The house, originally designed for light cooling (5 ° C to a maximum of –10 ° C), has been operated as a deep-freeze store since the mid-1960s as a result of the changed living and consumption habits of consumers. The (two?) Existing Linde refrigeration compressors could only insufficiently provide the required cooling capacity, so they were replaced by four V8-200 refrigeration compressors from the manufacturer MAFA Halle in the early 1970s. This was accompanied by the conversion of the high-voltage switchgear and the transformer station. The V8 compressors were driven by 6 kV slip ring motors with 200 kW each and put into operation via starting resistors. As part of this conversion, the recooling plant was probably converted to three small cooling towers (evaporation condensers), which were installed on the machine house roof directly next to the Oberbaum Bridge.

At the beginning of 1980 the cold store was upgraded, in addition to renovation of the interior insulation, the cold room floors and ceilings and the replacement of the old cold room doors, the room cooling was converted to a closed brine circuit. As part of this upgrade, the entire LV network was renewed using the ISA 2000 industrial switchgear.

The light cooling areas in the basement rooms of the cold store were only used as technical material storage or were empty, the additional development as a deep freeze area was not possible because this cold store, due to its conceptual basic design as a light cold store, did not have any measures to protect against freezing.

The refrigeration system itself was an ammonia refrigeration system; the normal refrigerant charge was 26 t of ammonia.

After the fall of the Wall, the western port capacity was largely sufficient to supply Berlin and the eastern port was no longer needed. In East Berlin times, West Berlin ice cream and fine frozen products were stored in this cold store for many years, but with the realistic costs after German reunification, there was obviously no longer any interest in this service. As an overall view, the house was technically at the level of the late 1960s, so it was hardly possible to run it economically, and the basic concept as a multi-storey cold store posed a significant problem, as the horizontal and vertical conveying routes resulted in additional logistical problems.

In 1991 the cold store was shut down, the granary followed successively. In 1992, the Berlin port and storage company BEHALA decided to give the two storage buildings a new use. From 1995 there were plans to combine the egg cold store and the granary to form a building complex and use it as a business design center . However, they did not materialize.

Current usage

Southwest side of the egg cold store with closed clinker brick facade

From 2000 the cold store was converted into an office and commercial building by the Berlin architect Reinhard Müller; work on the cold store was completed in 2002. Here, the originally closed facade was liberated by the subsequently applied insulation and open over a large area on three sides and with a curtain provided glass facade. Only the front facing northwest towards the Oberbaumbrücke still has a closed clinker brick facade. Originally it was planned to provide the glass panes with a rasterized diamond pattern in order to achieve a closed facade appearance in terms of monument protection. Because of problems with the lighting of the interior areas, this was ultimately not done. In 2002 the music group Universal Music moved its German headquarters from Hamburg to Berlin and moved into the renovated cold store in July. Before that, in November 2001, was the work of art 13.4.1981 (see: Police grid ) by the artist Olaf Metzel , which had been installed since 1987 on Joachimsthaler Platz at the corner of Kurfürstendamm opposite Café Kranzler as part of the Berlin Sculpture Boulevard and was then stored in the depot for a few years. was rebuilt next to the egg cold store.

literature

  • Friedrich Krause: The east port of Berlin , Berlin 1913.
  • M. Hirsch: The Berlin Osthafenkühlhaus der Kühltransit-AG In: Journal for the entire refrigeration industry , 1930. P. 21 ff.
  • Herbert Schwenk: Lexicon of Berlin Urban Development , Haude & Spener, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-7759-0472-7 .

Web links

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

Individual evidence

  1. Werner van Bebber: 750th anniversary of Berlin - system fight in front of the Kranzler. In: Der Tagesspiegel , June 30, 2007

Coordinates: 52 ° 30 ′ 7 ″  N , 13 ° 26 ′ 49 ″  E