Excelsior House

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A picture of the Excelsiorhaus as seen from the nearby Tempodrom.
The Excelsiorhaus seen from the nearby Tempodrom .

The Excelsiorhaus is a residential and commercial building in the Berlin district of Kreuzberg at Stresemannstrasse 68–78. It was built between 1966 and 1968 as an apartment block based on the New York model by Franz-Heinrich Sobotka and Gustav Müller for Excelsior Tankstellen GmbH & Co. KG . The company belonged to the investor Artur Pfaff. After initial financing difficulties, the construction costs amounted to around 50 million marks (adjusted for purchasing power in today's currency: around 95 million euros). The building is 59.7 meters high and has 18 floors and 33,203 m² of usable space, including 506 apartments and 39 commercial units. The owner has been the holding company of financial investor Nicolas Berggruen since summer 2011 . The name refers to the Hotel Excelsior , which stood on the site before the Second World War and was considered one of the largest hotels in continental Europe.

use

On the 16th and 17th floors of the Excelsiorhaus there are rooms for a catering facility. They are connected to each other on the inside via a spiral staircase and can be reached via an external glass elevator that runs between the ground floor and the 16th floor on the northern facade of the building without stopping. When the Excelsiorhaus opened, the panorama elevator was the first of its kind in West Berlin and was considered an attraction. In the first few years, the Canadian restaurant Saskatchewan used the space. Its neon sign , visible from afar , gave the Excelsiorhaus the nickname “Saskatchewan high-rise”. Because of the height of the building and the proximity to the Berlin Wall at the time , the US secret service CIA reportedly also operated a listening post in the rooms. The Turn Tower disco later used the space, which in the 1980s was particularly popular in the West Berlin art scene. After several years of vacancy, the Solar Bar opened in the premises in December 2005 .

On the first floor of the Excelsiorhaus there was originally a bowling alley and, for a short time, the Café Europa , where cars could also be bought. In 2014 a branch of the supermarket chain Lidl opened on the ground floor .

In 1976, a shelter for around 3,100 people was opened under the Excelsior House . It has first-aid rooms , a soup kitchen , 40 toilets and sinks, as well as its own well system at a depth of 60 meters. The emergency power generator runs on diesel and requires 50 liters per hour. The tanks hold up to 27,000 liters, so that the occupants can find protection in the facility for up to 14 days.

particularities

  • The metal windows of the Excelsior house do not open up like a wing on both sides, as usual, but are fixed at the top and bottom in the middle and therefore rotate around the vertical central axis. The outside of the window can be turned inwards for cleaning, which makes cleaning much easier.
  • Since 2013 there has been an art installation on the facade of the Excelsiorhaus on Stresemannstrasse . It consists of elongated panels that are distributed over the facade and on which a pixelated cloudy sky is printed.
  • In October 2017, the Rommel film production Berlin Excelsior premiered at the 51st Hofer Filmtage . Director Erik Lemke - himself a resident of the house - concentrates on the post-war building, the constant ups and downs between high-flying plans and foreclosure auction are indicated in the film by archive footage of the SFB . Residents of the house are portrayed "who are unsuccessfully trying to keep our society's promises of happiness", with André Krummel's camera taking part in even the most intimate situations without being noticed. The documentary, recorded almost exclusively in the Excelsiorhaus, is one of the few films of its genre that does without interviews and voice-overs.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Thomas Loy: So close to the sun. Berlin houses (17). In: Der Tagesspiegel . November 10, 2011, accessed December 16, 2016 .
  2. ↑ Landesarchiv Berlin: B Rep. 010, Senate Department for Economics. Preliminary finding aid. Public version for 2006, p. 123. - Pfaff as client in Berlin: Germano Celant: The European Iceberg. Creativity in Germany and Italy today. Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto 1985, p. 354. Kleihues.com: Lewisham Türme Berlin. 1969 , online , accessed March 23, 2017
  3. ↑ a b c Bazon Brock: Understanding Prussia while walking. A cultural trail of historical imagination. In: bazonbrock.de. Kristin Riedemann, January 1, 1981, accessed December 16, 2016 .
  4. ^ Nicolas Berggruen Holdings GmbH. (No longer available online.) In: berggruenholdings.de. Archived from the original on December 21, 2016 ; accessed on December 16, 2016 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.berggruenholdings.de
  5. ↑ a b Judith Jenner: Towards the sun. In: Der Tagesspiegel . December 3, 2005, accessed December 16, 2016 .
  6. ↑ Peter Neumann: Hans-Joachim Beuke is responsible for the 23 air raid shelters in Berlin / Now he is retiring. Hand cranks for emergencies. In: Berliner Zeitung . September 5, 2005, accessed December 16, 2016 .
  7. ^ Gerhard Piper: Security and crime in the Spreebogen. In: Telepolis. Retrieved December 16, 2016 .
  8. ↑ Berlin Excelsior film review

Coordinates: 52 ° 30 '14.3 "  N , 13 ° 23' 2.2"  E