Great Railway Stations No.19: Hamburg Hauptbahnhof

The vast steel and glass train shed that spans 14 platforms at Hamburg Hbf was based on the Galerie des machines built in Paris for the Exposition Universelle of 1889 (casually and callously disposed of by the city authorities in 1910 to improve the view of the Champ de Mars).  An uninterrupted span was achieved with the support of steel trusses that flared out as they rose upwards and the hinged arch profile was identical to its Parisian ancestor.  It’s a through station with platforms set below street level - dramatic overviews of the station interior can be seen from the Nordsteg and Südsteg overbridges. The span measured 135 meters compared with 115 for the Galerie des machines.  Administration buildings and the main entrance were at the north end of the station, marked by two clock towers, one of which survived wartime bombing in 1943.  As planned, the buildings would have been decorated in Art Nouveau style but the story goes that Kaiser Wilhelm II took an interest and had them replaced with more austere Neo-Renaissance detailing giving a militaristic appearance more to his liking.  Planning the station was a complex exercise in rationalisation to combine the rail traffic from four existing termini, in and around the city centre, into a single through station.  An architectural competition was held and construction of the winning design took place between 1902 and 1906.  Today the city is connected by ICE trains to every major population centre in Germany and serves as a point of entry to European destinations for rail  travellers from Scandinavia.  Changes are on the way - in 2021 the city announced a competition for redevelopment of the station and surrounding area.

 

Bridges of 2018

This is the regular end-of-year review of bridges seen through the camera lens in the last 12 months. The most spectacular bridge of 2018 was the Rendsburg Höchbrücke, described and illustrated here but visits to two other cities in Schleswig-Holstein were well supplied with bridges – Hamburg and Lübeck, from which examples are displayed below. Above is the single bridge from the British Isles – a swing-bridge seen in Ramsey on the Isle of Man. Follow this link to see the 2017 selection.

Hamburg’s Chilehaus

There’s a longstanding building tradition in the Netherlands and North Germany of ingeniously exploiting the potential plasticity of brickwork to escape the monotony of undifferentiated surfaces. Architects and builders devised ever more inventive ways to introduce visual interest by twisting, upending, projecting and re-aligning individual bricks and by combining brick types (especially clinker bricks) of different colour and texture. This practice became an essential component of the early 20th. century style, largely developed in Hamburg and Amsterdam, that became known as Brick Expressionism. Hamburg’s close trading links with New York meant that North American architectural styles quickly found an appreciative audience on the part of architects and developers. German business came to see the value of large scale statement buildings as an expression of corporate confidence in the days of the Weimar Republic.

Hamburg’s Kontorhausviertel is a business district where the prevailing style is Brick Expressionism of which the Chilehaus is the most notable. Other examples include the Burkhardhof and the Sprinkenhof. The awkward, asymmetric dimensions of the Chilehaus building plot lent themselves to the maritime theme adopted by the architect, Fritz Höger. Shipping and international trade were at the heart of the Hamburg story – the references to marine architecture found ready acceptance. Höger’s design included three upper floors with wrap-around balconies to resemble the tiered decks of an ocean going vessel. At the eastern extremity, two flanks of the building meet at an acute angle to create a dramatic image of the prow of a ship. There are three internal courtyards, accessible to the public via generously wide arches allowing a sense of easy circulation between open and constrained spaces. Höger’s client was Henry Sloman, a recently returned German businessman from Chile, where he had made his fortune exporting nitrates to his homeland. Construction began in 1922 and was completed in 1924 – it was a difficult build requiring deep piling to cope with the instability of a site so close to the river Elbe.

Fritz Höger (1877-1949) began his working life as a carpenter and technical draughtsman. Despite a lack of formal training as an architect he developed a successful practice designing substantial dwellings in the wealthy suburbs of Hamburg before going on to design many commercial buildings elsewhere in Berlin and Hannover. Office blocks and factory premises for the most part. Höger joined the staff of the Volkischer Beobachter (Nazi party newspaper) in 1927 and took up party membership in 1932, but his efforts to ingratiate himself with the regime came to nothing. Brick Expressionism was no more acceptable to the authorities than Bauhaus Modernism - despised as impure thus denying him the prestigious public building projects he coveted. His advocacy of Hanseatic clinker brick had a nationalist tinge – he held that its earthy quality corresponded to the enduring nature of the Germanic people.

In 2015 the Kontorhausviertel and adjacent Speicherstadt were awarded Unesco World Heritage status. In the written submission it was clear that the Chilehaus is the landmark building and the focus for all the elements that make the district so special. These photos come from a visit in June 2018 and attempt to show something of what makes this building so arresting. Unlike most maritime inspired buildings that follow a streamlined template, the Chilehaus is angular and aggressive in form. It has the quality of a massive cliff face – an intimidating force of nature, which is balanced by the spatial flow that exists at ground level between enclosed and open spaces. Owen Hatherley has pointed out there was a brief and unsuccessful revolution in Hamburg in October 1923 at the time the Chilehaus was under construction. KPD militants stormed police stations, seizing weapons and building barricades – yet within 24 hours the authorities regained complete control by which time 100 lives had been lost. In the aftermath the German left was fatally divided, to the advantage of the Freikorps and the insurgent NSDAP. Meanwhile construction of capitalist citadels in the Kontorhausviertel continued unabated.

Elbtunnel – some postcard views

The Elbtunnel in Hamburg was one of the wonders of the age when it opened in 1911 at the height of the picture postcard boom. This small selection shows how postcard publishers marked this triumph of technology. The cameras have been focused on the tunnel entrance or the tiled roadway and associated vehicle traffic. The second from last is, unusually for a postcard, almost a documentary image foregrounded by two working men, presumably on their way to or from Blohm & Voss shipyard. Most of the other figures and vehicles have been clumsily imported from another source. This applies to nearly all the figures visible in these cards – all victims of slapdash montage and heavy-handed re-touching. The antiquated vehicles enhance the period charm of the images – a charm that is purely retrospective and would have been invisible to contemporary purchasers.

Tunnel walking in Hamburg

There are two tunnels under the River Elbe in Hamburg. The most important is the Neue Elbtunnel, large enough to carry 8 lanes of traffic on the Bundesautobahn 7. Built in 1975 (and extended in 2002), it can take up to 150,000 vehicles per day. The other is the 1911 Elbtunnel, which although superseded by the 1975 tunnel has been kept in use and still offers pedestrians, cyclists and motorists the opportunity to cross the Elbe. The original Elbtunnel took 4 years to construct and has two large lifts to transport vehicles down to the tunnel entrances. Only one of the two tunnels is in use at present so the traffic flow is regulated to provide for north to south crossings in the morning and the reverse in the afternoon. The principal aim of the tunnel was to enable the 40,000 workers employed at Blohm & Voss shipyard on the south bank of the river to make the journey from their homes in St. Pauli without the need to queue for a ferry.

The Elbtunnel entrance is a grandiose, domed building, designed to impress. The lifts and balances occupy half the volume while a metal staircase winds around and through the cavernous space in the other half. A high level of decorative finish was applied as befits a prestige project. The entrance lobby is lined with mosaic tiling and Jugendstil fonts have been used for public notices. Inside the tunnel, the tiled lining is embellished with terra-cotta panels of marine creatures. Entry is free and the tunnel is well used by pedestrians and cyclists. Motorists must pay €2 per trip and observe a speed limit of 15kph. Many cyclists ride at much greater speeds and frequently display a casual disregard for the safety of those who must rely on their feet for locomotion.

On the southern side are the still busy Blohm & Voss shipyards (now part of Thyssenkrupp Marine) and the suburb of Steinwerder. There’s a viewing area overlooking the Elbe and two bilingual signs that relate some of the wartime atrocities involving the use of forced labour in the shipyards.