Architect：J. MAYER H. und Partner

Location：An der Alster 1, Germany

Project Year：2007

Category：Offices

The building site is situated at the intersection between Hamburg’s lively downtown and its urban landscape that is rich in water and mature trees. It is at the transition from city to nature, and the gateway building to the bustling metropolitan core. The horizontal striped facade with its floating “eyes” celebrates the view onto this unique context. A public park in front of the building continues the design strategy of the facade into the landscape. The “eyes” in the facade and the platforms in the park enable the places to meet and contemplate.

The office spaces serve both a generic spatial layout and specific moments related to the “eyes”. Large spans provide for various office layout configurations in combination with balconies and climatically tempered outdoor spaces of the “eyes”. The eyes are just a bigger space inside the double skin facade, which work the same as the whole facade. This kind of facade highly economizes on energy, because the windows of the inner facade can be used to ventilate. This is the reason why no additional air conditioning is needed for the office building. In Germany, the companies mostly don’t want buildings with air conditioning because of the high running costs. Furthermore an air conditioning is also problematic in terms of health conditions. In addition to that the concrete core activation system inside the concrete ceilings cools the building during summertime and heats it during wintertime with the help of water. The warmed surfaces allow lower heating costs in wintertime and thus save energy.

The office building “An der Alster 1” links its interior and exterior spaces to the public park in front of the building and to the city context of Hamburg, becoming a new anchor at the prestigious Aussenalster waterfront.

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