Eurogate Duisburg

The Eurogate - also known as The Curve since March 2016 - is a planned building complex in the inner harbor of Duisburg for office and service use. Its elliptical shape follows the arch of the wooden harbor , the open, low side faces south, and the roof is equipped with a large-scale photovoltaic system.

planning

Already planned in 1990 in the master plan for the inner harbor by Sir Norman Foster and Partners as a “competence center for structural change, urban development and for renewable energies”, it is the last building not yet completed. The original plan provides for offices (20,000 square meters), a hotel (9,000 square meters) with 150 rooms, conference rooms (1,500 square meters), retail and catering areas (5,000 square meters) and a multi-storey car park with 720 parking spaces.

The energy concept is intended to save 40 percent of the energy required by a normal building. For this purpose, a 7,500 square meter photovoltaic area will be installed and the harbor water will be used as cold and heat storage. The window areas, concrete parts and the ventilation concept are designed for low energy consumption. The energy concept comes from Schmidt Reuter Integrale Planning and Consulting Society from Cologne.

The Eurogate was presented again at the international real estate fair MIPIM 2006 in Cannes and at the beginning of March 2006 a competition for investors and developers on the specific construction plans was announced.

Construction preparation and development

So far completed promenade for the development of the building site

In October 2007, the development of the Eurogate building site began. For this purpose, part of the wooden harbor was filled with wash mountains and a stepped promenade made of reinforced concrete was created. At the beginning of the construction work, almost 16,000 cubic meters of harbor sludge had to be dredged and properly disposed of in order to achieve stable subsoil. The harbor basin was then filled with around 180,000 tonnes of washhouse material.

Step promenade

The step promenade is founded on tubular steel piles with a diameter of 1.4 meters. These were rammed from a floating pontoon with the help of a rope excavator and a crawler crane. A total of over 850 running meters of piles were installed. The step promenade itself consists of 574 precast reinforced concrete elements that were assembled using a mobile lattice boom crane. The largest beam was 37 meters long and weighed almost 70 tons. The promenade has a total length of around 370 meters and connects the eastern and western banks.

The construction costs amounted to nine million euros. The work was carried out by the Eurogate Duisburg Development Working Group consisting of Wayss & Freytag Ingenieurbau AG, Central Area, Düsseldorf (technical managing director) and Gebr. Neumann GmbH & Co. KG, Emden (commercial managing director). After a construction period of 13 months, work on the Eurogate grandstand was completed in November 2008.

The IDE (Inner Harbor Duisburg Development Company) and gfw (Society for Economic Development Duisburg) were also involved in the planning and construction of the Eurogate. In the absence of an investor, the start of construction for the actual Eurogate building planned by Sir Norman Foster had been postponed several times.

The Curve

In March 2016 it was announced that the development company “die developer” wanted to implement the The Curve project on the site , which is based on the Eurogate plans. The company has u. a. the first construction phase of the Düsseldorf Kö-Bogen successfully implemented. The new design for Duisburg comes from the architectural office Structurelab and envisaged an ensemble of four structures curved along the harbor basin, which should act as a link between the city center and the inner harbor. To do this, the waterfront would be extended and the pedestrian bridge to Duisburg's old town park ("Garden of Remembrance") would be better connected.

A mix of uses typical of the city center, consisting of offices, living space, a hotel and restaurants, was planned. Up to 100 residential units, predominantly oriented towards the water, with floor areas between 50 and 150 square meters were planned. The hotel was to provide up to 250 beds, with office space covering 20,000 square meters.

According to the project developer, construction should start at the beginning of 2018 at the latest; an opening was planned after 18 months of construction. Around 100 million euros should be invested.

However, complications arose in the preparation for building, as the load-bearing capacity of the soil, unlike when the city was sold, was not in a "ready-to-build" condition. The reason is that between 2007 and 2008, during the backfilling of the Eurogate, ore-containing waste material from hard coal mining was used by the Duisburg-based development company IDE. That is why it was planned to compact the soil with 3,500 vibrating columns. However, the ore-containing soil made it difficult to probe the ordnance that would have been required for the pillars.

In autumn 2018, the city paid the company a sum in the mid single-digit million range in order to get rid of the building preparation that had not been made. However, "die developer" demanded a further 5.5 million euros discount in 2019, including 5 million euros for the purchase price and a security fee of 500,000 euros.

At the beginning of 2020, negotiations with the development company were broken off. In total, the city of Duisburg has so far spent over 12 million euros on The Curve . It is planned to put the site out to tender again in the 4th quarter of 2020 under different conditions.

According to a credit from 2020, a foundation on around 600 concrete piles is possible and bombing in the boreholes is significantly cheaper.

Entertains

On the basis of a resolution by the Duisburg city council, 550,000 euros were made available from the city budget in June 2015 in order to regularly maintain the staircase-like, concrete construction of the waterfront.