Sihlpost

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View of the Sihlpost building from the Gessner Bridge

The Sihlpost is an important urban office building southwest of Zurich's main train station . The building , constructed in the New Building style between 1927 and 1929 , has always housed the Zurich main post office . For over seven decades, the Swiss Federal Railways were the main users of the upper floors. From 1992 to 2009 there was a letter distribution center in an extension behind the Sihlpost , the area of ​​which is now occupied by buildings on the Europaallee area . The Sihlpost is listed in the municipal inventory of buildings worthy of protection .

description

The building is located on Kasernenstrasse at the junction with Lagerstrasse, opposite the Sihl . It is separated from the main station by Europaplatz, the foremost part of the Europaallee area . The rectangular building, 123 m long, has six storeys and has two staircases, of which the northern one is designed as a prominent tower. Since 2016, the tower has been further accentuated by a dark gray paint, although this measure was controversial among architects because, contrary to the client's statements, it is not the original color of the paint and is therefore clearly too light.

The facade is divided into a strict window grid with narrow gaps so that partition walls could be inserted in as many places as desired. With the exception of the roof structure, all load-bearing parts are made of reinforced concrete . The hipped roof is covered with slate, the straps of the window sills are made of Mägenwil shell limestone . The only jewelry are two stoneware - mosaics of the artist Carl Roesch at both entrances. The rooms in which the sorting machines were once located did not need ceiling joists so that the machines could find space. In order to be able to transfer the high loads over large spans, the ceilings are designed as mushroom ceilings up to the second floor .

Since the renovation, which was completed in 2015, the Swiss Post needs a much smaller space than before. However, it is still present with a branch on the ground floor. There are two restaurants and a retail store next to it. For decades, the Post and the SBB had used the upper floors for their administration. Today the KV Zurich Business School occupies the first two upper floors and Google the three floors above.

history

Construction and commissioning

From 1873 the Zurich main post office was located on Bahnhofstrasse (in the east wing of today's Credit Suisse headquarters) and from 1898 in the Fraumünster post office opposite the town hall . Since 1893 there was a branch in the north-east wing of the main station , from where the rail mail cars were loaded and unloaded. Due to the unfavorable location of the Fraumünsterpost and the increasing disruption of the other rail operations, the SBB and the PTT jointly planned a modern main post office on Kasernenstrasse from 1923 onwards. Under the direction of the architects Adolf and Heinrich Bräm, construction work on the building began in September 1927, and the shell was completed at the end of 1928. The civil engineer Robert Maillart was responsible for the reinforced concrete work. Single-storey additions for parcel delivery, parcel dispatch and the seven-track post station were built behind the main building; workshops and a garage were added. In autumn 1929, SBB District Directorate III moved into the offices on the third to fifth floors, and the post office started operations in mid-1930.

The counter hall, the post office boxes, the bulk acceptance and the customs office were on the first floor, the mail dispatch and the offices of the railway post office on the first floor, the letter distribution and the offices of the district post office on the second floor. Parallel to simultaneously started urban underpass between Kasernenstrasse and Sihlquai (now the passage of Sihlquai ShopVille ) ran a narrow tunnel with a lift to each baggage Perron in the Gleishalle was connected to the central station. Inside the building, the conveyance of letters and parcels was largely mechanized, which made Sihlpost one of the most modern systems in the world at the time.

Post subway

Electric motor car of the Post-U-Bahn

From 1930 to 2007, a short distance from the Sihlpost, the Zurich 23 post office was located in the south wing of the main train station and handled very large volumes of mail. The transport of mail between the post office and the Sihlpost turned out to be difficult because of the tight conditions when crossing the Sihl and the increasing road traffic. For this reason, the PTT built a 340 m long underground rail connection with a track width of 600 mm in 1938. It led in a tunnel parallel to track 1 and under the sidewalk of the post bridge to the basement of the Sihlpost. There the tracks ended directly in an elevator that brought the small driverless railcar to the ground floor. Copper wires were stretched between the tracks to power the railcar. The railway was initially operated with 220 volts three-phase current, in 1958 it was converted for direct current . A wagon with a 1.6 m wheelbase could hold up to 250 kg of mail. On October 11, 1980 the train ran for the last time. It has been replaced by a transport system with tire-worn vehicles.

Letter distribution center for a short time

A quarter of a century after commissioning, Sihlpost was gradually reaching its capacity limits. The PTT planned an extension to the northwest of the junction Kasernenstrasse / Lagerstrasse and at the end of the 1950s a working group formed together with the SBB came to the conclusion that only a split of letters and parcels could permanently solve the space problem. From 1985 the package sorting center in Mülligen, designed by Theo Hotz , relieved the Sihlpost on the border with Schlieren . Seven years earlier, the PTT's structural engineering department had started planning an expansion of Sihlpost, as it would still be too small despite the outsourcing of parcel processing. The contract for the exterior design went to the Zurich architects Stücheli and Fischer in 1982, and construction work began in 1985. The now four-track post station was ready for operation in 1988 as the first of three stages, and all work was completed in 1992.

Sihlpost with letter distribution center and post station (1992)
Back of the Sihlpost after the letter distribution center was demolished (2009)

The new building was divided into three parts. A narrow office building stretched along Lagerstrasse. Behind it, the company building sprawled along the entire length of the Sihlpost, which featured green enamelled glass facades . The Postbahnhof closed the facility to the west. The operations building contained the acceptance office, letter issuing, mailing, express delivery, rail post office and vehicle service. A new post tunnel established the connection to the main station, while the old one was added to the widened underpass as part of the S-Bahn construction. The renovation of the Sihlpost lasted until 1994, after which only the post office remained in it, while the SBB converted the first and second floors into offices. On February 8, 1994, the mail robbery took place at the Sihlpost : five robbers captured valuable items at gunpoint that were to be loaded onto a train. The case remains unresolved to this day.

Due to extensive rationalization, the letter distribution center only had a short life. From the end of August 2007, Swiss Post (successor to PTT) brought together all letter post in the eastern catchment area in five stages from the previous letter centers in Winterthur, Baden, St. Gallen, Chur and Zurich in Zurich-Mülligen, the last being the Sihlpost center in March 2008. The extension, which had only been completed 17 years earlier, was demolished in 2009 to make room for the Europaallee development. In a three-year construction period, the new building of the Zurich University of Education was built on the cleared area .

Shortly after the SBB and the postal administration moved out of the building, the old Sihlpost was extensively renovated from May 2014 to mid-July 2015. This created additional tenant space on the upper floors and space for shops and restaurants on the ground floor in addition to the post office that still exists. For the duration of the construction work, the Post moved its branch to the adjacent new buildings on the area of ​​the former mail distribution center. With the completion of the office space, the KV Zurich Business School moved into the first two upper floors and operates 30 training and seminar rooms there. Google has been occupying the remaining floors since January 2017 .

literature

Web links

Commons : Sihlpost  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Art in public space, Office for Urban Development (AfS), City of Zurich, September 28, 2009 (PDF; 1.3 MB)
  2. ^ A b c [sn]: The new Sihlpost building in Zurich: Architects Gebr. Bräm, Zurich . In: Schweizerische Bauzeitung . tape 97/98 , 13: special number Sihlpost building Zurich, 1931, doi : 10.5169 / seals-44671 .
  3. ↑ Werner Huber: The color streak. (PDF, 963 kB) Hochparterre , February 23, 2016, accessed on July 27, 2020 .
  4. ↑ The former and current locations of the Zurich post offices. alt-zueri.ch, accessed on July 27, 2020 .
  5. ↑ a b Huber: Zurich main station. P. 86.
  6. ^ Huber: Zurich main station. Pp. 86-88.
  7. ↑ Hans Waldburger: Zurich's Post-U-Bahn is no longer . In: Swiss Railway Review 4/1980, page 133.
  8. ^ Huber: Zurich main station. P. 186.
  9. ^ Huber: Zurich main station. P. 187.
  10. ↑ Martin Huber: Zurich's unexplained robbery of millions. Tages-Anzeiger , March 15, 2019, accessed on July 27, 2020 .
  11. ^ New Zurich-Mülligen letter center opens at the end of summer. Neue Zürcher Zeitung , July 3, 2007, accessed on July 27, 2020 .
  12. ↑ Anouk Hiedl: Lights out in the Sihlpost. In: Personal newspaper Die Post No. 4/2008. Swiss Post , April 2008, p. 14 , accessed on July 27, 2020 .
  13. ^ Huber: Zurich main station. P. 210.
  14. ↑ Conversion of the traditional Sihlpost. (PDF, 1.5 MB) Swisspro AG, 2015, accessed on July 27, 2020 .
  15. ↑ Until autumn 2015 at Europaallee 11. (PDF, 113 kB) Swiss Post , March 4, 2014, accessed on July 27, 2020 .
  16. ↑ The Sihlpost education center is open. KV Zürich Business School , March 2016, accessed on July 27, 2020 .
  17. ↑ Oliver Wietlisbach: Who doesn't want to work here? The new Swiss Google headquarters in 25 pictures. watson.ch , January 17, 2017, accessed on July 27, 2020 .

Coordinates: 47 ° 22 '38.5 "  N , 8 ° 32' 7.3"  E ; CH1903:  682825  /  247970