Tall & Urban News

The HafenCity district of Hamburg-Mitte is currently undergoing expansion in the Elbbrücken Quarter. In the summer of 2018, the architects von Gerkan, Marg and Partners (gmp) won the competition that was held to design a Congress Hotel with a large conference hall on this key site at the tip of Baakenhafen basin.

After a comprehensive phase of revisions, the hotel is now presented in updated form. The site is located in close proximity to the Elbbrücken U-Bahn and S-Bahn stations, which are linked by a skywalk into a transportation ensemble.

HafenCity is located on the Elbe River island of Grasbrook, the former Port of Hamburg area. It was formally established in 2008, and includes the historical Speicherstadt area, which is an UNESCO World Heritage Site with the adjacent Kontorhausviertel.

The hotel will be built at the western edge of the Elbbrücken Quarter on Baakenhafen, with guest rooms for short and extended stays, a large conference area, a sky bar, and offices.

The building conforms to the shape of the plot, taking the form of triangular block with an inner courtyard. It has a base of eight to nine stories and a 19-story hotel tower that is also conceived with a triangular plan.

The tower, which is located on the north side, will make the building visible from the city center of Hamburg. The two-tone exterior of red and a nuanced white interprets Hamburg’s typical clinker brick and envelops the building as a punched-window façade with oblique wall reveals on one side.

The façade is horizontally articulated at each floor of the base, and on the tower, the design shifts to a two-story vertical articulation that emphasizes the upward movement of the 63.5-meter-high tower.

The heart of the new building is the conference hall on the ground floor, which can provide seating for up to 1,100 people and is framed by the congress lobby to the south and west. The walls of the hall are articulated by warm-toned wooden slats hung in varying densities. The control rooms for video and sound are located on the first floor, and arranged around the congress lobby are 14 meeting rooms on the ground floor and first floor. Also on the ground floor are the lobby of the short-stay hotel and the elevator lobby of the extended-stay hotel. Access to all these functions is provided by a double-height arcade along Baakenwerder Straße on the west side of the hotel. The offices and a café are accessed from the east.

The tower is crowned on the 18th floor by a sky bar with rooftop terrace and views over HafenCity.

For more on this story, go to www.gmp.de.