Glass and Steel 'Cloud' Redefines Hamburg Harbor

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Glass and Steel 'Cloud' Redefines Hamburg Harbor

I

n 2010, visitors to Hamburg, Ger­many, will be greeted with a strik­ing view: a glass and steel “cloud” with a wavelike roof that will rise from a brick warehouse built after World War II in the center of the city’s harbor. The addition is a multifaceted struc­ture designed by Switzerland-based Herzog & de Meuron; housed within will be the 2,150 seat Elbphilharmonie, the new concert hall for Hamburg’s renowned North German Radio Sym­phony Orchestra, better known as the ndr Symphony Orchestra.

The trapezoidal warehouse, designed by Werner Kallmorgan, was constructed between 1963 and 1966 to replace the ' symbolic landmark of the harbor, the Kaispeicher warehouse, which was damaged during the wai;. The postwar warehouse was the only one in the har­bor at which seagoing ships could moor to unload goods. On the landward side, the warehouse is connected to a road and rail network. For most of its work­ing life, the edifice housed cocoa beans.

In its new incarnation it will include a 510-space parking garage, a children’s museum, and storage facilities and spe­cial rooms for the concert hall.

The trapezoidal footprint of the

61,000m² addition mimics that of the

58,000m² warehouse, and the contrast between the wavelike roof of the glass and steel addition and the postwar sto­lidity of the warehouse will make the new structure all the more striking. The new roof, supported by curved beams and vertical columns, undulates to a maximum height of 108 m at the tip of the peninsula, sloping down to the eastern end, where the roof is 20 m lower. In addition to the Elbphilharmo­nie, a smaller auditoriuip, a 250-room luxury hotel, and 45 luxury apartments will be housed in the new structure.

The “cloud” that will float atop this sturdy brick and concrete structure

appears to begin three floors above the existing roof level—37 m above the sea—and features a freely accessible open-air plaza. Inclined steel columns in the first three floors above the plaza transfer forces from the new building’s perimeter columns to another line of columns located 5 m inward, thereby creating space for the plaza. Three trap­ezoidal reinforced-concrete cores (12 by 10 m, 22 by 12 m, and 11 by 7.5 m) extend down to the existing warehouse’s foundation. Bored piles will be added to the current foundation’s 1,111 piles to accommodate the addition.

The internal space of the concert hall is groundbreaking, according to Herzog & de Meuron’s design state­ment. “The people,—that is the audi­ence and the musicians—-determine the space,” the statement says. “In this respect, it resembles the typology of the football stadium that we have devel­oped in recent years, with the goal of allowing an almost interactive proxim­ity between ajidience and players.” The audience galleries cantilever seamlessly from the curved walls of the concert hall, completely surrounding the sym­phony and conductor.

because the Elbphilharmonie will be located at Hamburg’s busy har­bor, noise was an important concern. Yasuhisa Toyota—one of the most renowned acousticians in the world and the director and U.S. represen­tative of Nagata Acoustics, Inc., of Tokyo—designed the acoustics for the

Civil Engineering June 2007

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