Emporio skyscraper

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Unilever House 2006, view from Uhlenhorst over the Alster
Facade of the Emporio House 2012

The Emporio high-rise , formerly Unilever-Haus , is an office building in the Neustadt district of Hamburg at Dammtorwall 15. It was designed by the architects Helmut Hentrich , Hubert Petschnigg , Fritz Eller , Erich Moser and Robert Walter and was the German headquarters for the Unilever group until 1964 built. After the company moved to a new building, also known as the Unilever House , in HafenCity in 2009, the building , which has been a listed building since the turn of the millennium, was converted. It has been rented to various parties under the name Emporio since spring 2012.

architecture

The building was designed by the architects Helmut Hentrich and Hubert Petschnigg. The Unilever house originally consisted of 21 floors and was 90 meters high. The building has a triangular core made of reinforced concrete as a fixed and access point for elevators. On the three edges of this central triangle, three disks lay tangentially and intersected with one another. This is what makes the building so special, a rotationally symmetrical geometrical figure that has no name of its own. The area attached to the core is a steel frame construction with a curtain wall , a lightweight facade. Its interior design was largely designed by Eduard Bargheer , who was also responsible for the inlay wall of the central conference room. What was remarkable about the Unilever House was the originally complete lack of auxiliary buildings to allow the building to work through its presence alone. A cafeteria for 400 people, an underground car park with 280 parking spaces, air conditioning, seven elevators and a file paternoster were available.

After the renovation, the building is 98 meters high, divided into 24 floors and has 40,021 square meters of floor space. In addition, during the renovation, the facade was successively replaced by a double facade , taking modern energy standards into account. Over 2700 facade elements with a weight of 700 kilograms were replaced for this. On the originally specially created green areas around the building, a new development with a hotel of the Scandinavian chain Scandic with a usable area of ​​23,800 square meters was created. The architecture firm Markovic Ronai Voss (MRLV) was responsible for the supervision of this new building .

Sustainability concept

With the conversion, energy and resource-conscious technical building equipment should improve the ecological balance of the high-rise. The aim was to reduce CO 2 emissions from around 2,750 tons per year to around 1,700 tons. The annual primary energy requirement per square meter of 158 kWh should correspond to CO 2 emissions of 40 kg / (m²a). The office building is pre-certified for the silver seal of approval from the German Sustainable Building Council and has received the American building seal Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) in platinum.

history

Pre-planning

Planning for the construction of the administrative headquarters for what was then the Margarine Union began as early as the 1950s. The terrain between Caffamacherreihe , Dammtorwall, Dragonerstall and Valentinskamp and with the roads Fürstenplatz and Ulricusstraße in the New Town was one of the last remaining Gängeviertel Hamburg. Due to the narrow and partly dilapidated buildings, including many half-timbered buildings from the 17th to 19th centuries, it was declared a redevelopment area.

In 1958, 12,000 square meters of the area were sold for three million DM (in today's purchasing power 7.1 million €) to the Margarine Union for the construction of a representative office building, which was supposed to enhance the district. The city took on the higher costs of demolishing the buildings and relocating 120 businesses and 2,000 residents (including 600 households in social housing), some of whom were reluctant to leave their district. In 1958 tests were carried out with a tethered balloon to determine the height of the building and its impact on the cityscape. In the same year, an architectural competition was announced. In 1961 another 2,500 square meters were sold to Caffamacherreihe and Valentinskamp to Margarine-Union for 1.26 million DM, as the area was too small to create the necessary parking spaces and open green spaces. By 1965, the city had relocated another 75 families and 27 businesses.

Construction and use

The company Wayss & Freytag and Walter Bau carried out the construction . Nine months passed between the laying of the foundation stone in October 1961 and the topping-out ceremony in July 1962. In 1964 the Margarine-Union moved into the building with 2100 employees who were previously located in 15 locations in the city.

The shape and height of the structure were disputed. The central supply tower, which protruded more than 15 meters above the last floor as a black "stump", was felt to be too prominent. Due to public protests, the building was therefore increased by two storeys as early as 1964, so that only 7.90 meters of the supply tower protruded, which was also clad with light artificial stone slabs.

In 1989 DIFA AG, later Union Investment Real Estate GmbH , acquired the building for the UniImmo Deutschland open-ended real estate fund . In 2000 the building was listed as an example of the modernization of Hamburg in the post-war period.

modification

Since the building did not meet the space requirements of Unilever or the modern requirements of an office building, the company with 1,100 employees moved in 2009 to a new building on Strandkai in HafenCity.

Hochtief Construction was commissioned as general contractor with the conversion to the Emporio high-rise , which began in July 2009 and was completed in early 2012. The contract volume reported by the client at the start of construction was EUR 138 million. Hochtief gutted the building, tore down the technical structures, created a new elevator shaft and replaced the underground car park with three basement floors. In autumn 2010, the building was raised by another two floors to 23 storeys and a height of 98 meters.

A special feature during the renovation phase was the 106-meter-high crane, one of the highest free-standing construction cranes in Europe, required to erect the steel structure and assemble the new facade.

gallery

  • Laeiszhalle and Emporio high-rise, 2014

  • Unilever House from the perspective of Planten un Blomen , 2005

  • View from Valentine's Camp, 2006

  • Base, 2006

  • The gutted Unilever house under renovation, 2010

literature

  • Otto Jungnickel: Unilever House, Hamburg . Callwey, Munich 1966.
  • Extensive tree sonographic treatment in: Roman Hillmann: The first post-war modernity. Aesthetics and perception of West German architecture 1945-63 . Petersberg 2011, p. 203-264 .

Web links

Commons : Emporio (Hamburg)  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hamburg, "Emporio", Germany. (No longer available online.) Union Investment Real Estate GmbH, archived from the original on July 8, 2013 ; Retrieved April 20, 2013 .
  2. ↑ EMPORIO quarter in downtown Hamburg officially opened. (No longer available online.) Union Investment Real Estate GmbH, June 1, 2012, archived from the original on October 5, 2013 ; Retrieved April 20, 2013 .
  3. ^ EAL - Magazine: Real Estate - Investment - Finance. Happy Read Publishing Ltd., October 2009, accessed April 20, 2013 .
  4. ↑ Dagmar Hotze: EMPORIO Hamburg -LEED-Platinum for listed refurbishment. greenIMMO - online magazine for sustainable real estate, November 1, 2012, accessed on April 20, 2013 .
  5. ↑ HOCHTIEF Construction realizes “Emporio” for Union Investment Quarter in Hamburg. Union Investment Real Estate GmbH, April 2, 2009, accessed on May 20, 2019 .

Coordinates: 53 ° 33 ′ 21 ″  N , 9 ° 59 ′ 0 ″  E