Lifeboats

A few weeks ago on April 7^th, our material studies class took a day trip to Hamburg to visit Hafen City (Harbor City). To be honest, I was all architecture-ed out at that point, so I wasn’t paying much attention to any of the buildings.

We visited the Chilehaus (which I didn’t like) and got to go up to the roof and see a nice view of Hamburg. We walked by a lot of new residential/office buildings designed by a variety of architects. We also visited the Dockland Building by BRT Architekten. The building is on a 65 degree slant to mimic the form of a ship. We got a very brief tour of the interior and then we climbed the exterior stairs to the edge of the “ship.” Overall I liked the building.

The highlight of the day for me was seeing two Behnisch buildings which I’ve only seen through pictures and heard about from my bosses. I finally made it to the Marco Polo Tower and the Unilever Headquarters. I didn’t go into Marco Polo, but it’s one of my favorite residential towers because of its form. Every floor is slightly different, so from the exterior the tower has this flow to it (much like the Aqua Tower in Chicago). Unilever was surreal. It’s that feeling of finally going somewhere after constantly hearing about it and studying it. 

Unfortunately I couldn’t go past the lobby, but nevertheless, I was ecstatic.

Hamburg was a great city, but I wish I could have gone by myself to enjoy the city itself instead of studying it.