Vattenfall building

View from the east in 2012.

View from the southwest with Überseering in the foreground

The Vattenfall building , formerly the HEW building , is a building complex completed in 1969 in the Hamburg office district City Nord . It is probably by far the best-known building from this ensemble and is considered to be “one of the outstanding architectural achievements in administrative buildings” and “an important late work ” by the architect and designer Arne Jacobsen . The building owner and long-term user was the energy supplier Hamburgische Electricitäts-Werke (HEW). With the purchase of HEW by Vattenfall Germany , the building only changed hands, but the usage profile did not change.

Construction and architecture

In the architectural competition for the building carried out from 1962 to 1963, there was no first place, only four second places. Only in a second meeting did the jury, chaired by Dieter Oesterlen and Werner Hebebrand , decide in favor of the designs by the architects Arne Jacobsen and Otto Weitling . These designs provided for four high-rise building slabs, shifted parallel to one another , which share a central access core . The foundation stone was laid on June 29, 1966, the topping-out ceremony was on August 17, 1967, and the move began in February 1969.

Arne Jacobsen tried to give the building, which had been greatly reduced in form to pure function, a harmonious unity. He wanted to achieve an interplay of facade, garden design and inventory and meticulously took care of the designs of many details so that he could create a well-proportioned work of art. Therefore, he also designed the furnishing of the entrance areas, the representation rooms (conference rooms, stairwells, corridors, boardrooms) and the canteen . In many places he attacked z. B. back to his own designs for chairs and armchairs that were already known at the time .

The 153 m long and 44 m high building is constructed on a reinforced concrete skeleton and consistently positioned with its longitudinal axis in north-south direction. The basis is a basement, a lower, very spacious restaurant floor and an entrance floor at street level. The four skyscraper slabs, which are slightly offset from one another, are of different lengths, but are uniformly another 12 stories high. The eye-catching facade shows a clear light-dark contrast between the long and short sides. The long sides are clad with bronzed glass, which absorbs almost 70% of the sunlight and thus looks dark from the outside, but almost clear from the inside. The front walls were originally clad with Norwegian limestone , but this weathered heavily over time and was replaced by light-colored Indian gneiss . The building, viewed from the long side, is very massive, but from the front side appears rather light and narrow, and is one of the most impressive buildings on the City Nord area.

The elongated shape of the building resulted from the decision to forego the open- plan offices that were popular at the time of construction . At the beginning of the 1960s, a planning group from HEW dealt intensively with office building construction and came to the conclusion, among other things, that flexible small rooms could be better adapted to the foreseeable changes in work organization. The interior walls have been designed in a modular manner and can in some cases be easily moved. After extensive tests, a basic grid with an edge length of 62.5 cm turned out to be the most usable dimension. This basic dimension and its multiple can be found everywhere in the building, including window widths, wall cladding, built-in cupboards and the position of supply lines. The smallest office implemented also follows this scheme with a width of 3.75 m (six times the basic size).

The restaurant floor has three times the area of the normal office floors, as it was planned as a link between two buildings. The building complex could have been extended by a second, almost identical office building. The planning and realization of the restaurant floor was very complex, because the designs envisaged a wide window front to a terrace garden with a water basin and some combinations of skylights and planters. The integration of light, water and plants creates a transparent and bright impression for the large indoor area.

The building was realized on the first property sold and in the first construction phase of City Nord. From 1995 to 2004 the basic renovation took place step by step.

use

The building was designed for a maximum of 2,000 office workplaces; this number decreased in the course of slight changes to the building to 1,300 at the beginning of the 2010s. After completion, the HEW merged their administration, which had been spread over five locations in Hamburg, in the City Nord. Since then there has been no fundamental change in usage.

Despite adaptations to the requirements of the user, the interior ambience designed by Jacobsen has been retained in many parts. This is particularly noticeable for visitors in the entrance area, which is comparatively modest for a building of this size, and in the lecture room with its 190 seats, which is transparently embedded in the interior. There the original color scheme is almost unchanged, there are many pieces of furniture designed by Jacobsen and the hanging construction of the stairs to the lecture room is clearly visible. In an office on the upper floors, the original furniture from the construction period has been preserved.

House technic

Due to its advanced building services, the building was considered one of the most modern office buildings in Europe at the time of completion. It was constantly kept to a high technical standard and still shows comparatively low energy and water consumption. In 2013 it received the highest LEED certificate for existing buildings and is the oldest and only listed building in Germany that has achieved this status.

Photographs and map

53.607777777778 10.024722222222Coordinates: 53 ° 36 '28 " N , 10 ° 1' 29" E

Überseering 12

Hamburg

Glass facade from the west
Ribbon windows of the west facade
Light and dark contrast of the facade
Entrance to the associated parking lot
Entrance area with pergola
Front and longitudinal wall in sunlight

Individual evidence

↑ Quoted from Sylvia Soggia: City-Nord - Europe's model city of modernity . S. 106 .
↑ Article about Arne Jacobsen in Spiegel online from May 23, 2003. Retrieved October 16, 2017.
↑ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f Description of the building on le style . Retrieved October 17, 2017.
↑ Information on the material of the cladding according to Soggia, p.106 . On the other hand, Lange, p.190, writes about granite as a cladding material.
↑ ^a ^b ^c Description of the building on Vattenfall's blog page. Retrieved October 16, 2017.

literature

Sylvia Soggia [text] / Frank Schnelle [photo]: The Vattenfall house in Hamburg. Form & function. 3rd, updated edition. Hamburg 2016, ISBN 978-3-00-053340-2 .
Sylvia Soggia: City-Nord - Europe's modern model city . Dölling and Galitz Verlag, Hamburg 2009, ISBN 978-3-937904-83-2 , p. 106-115 .
Ralf Lange : Architecture in Hamburg . Junius Verlag , Hamburg 2008, ISBN 978-3-88506-586-9 , p. 189 f .
Heiner Scharfenorth: Architectural icon Vattenfall . In: Architecture & Living . No. 3 , 2011 ( online [accessed October 18, 2017]).

Web links

Commons : Vattenfall Building - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

[1] Quoted from Sylvia Soggia: City-Nord - Europe's model city of modernity . S. 106 .

[2] Article about Arne Jacobsen in Spiegel online from May 23, 2003. Retrieved October 16, 2017.

[ls-3] ↑ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f Description of the building on le style . Retrieved October 17, 2017.

[4] Information on the material of the cladding according to Soggia, p.106 . On the other hand, Lange, p.190, writes about granite as a cladding material.

[vfblog-5] Description of the building on Vattenfall's blog page. Retrieved October 16, 2017.