Riverside tower cranes

With the line of three “crane houses” in Cologne’s Rheinauhafen, loosely based on El Lissitzky’s utopian “Cloud-irons” dating from 1924, a new typology of skyscraper has been created. The already completed Crane House 1 provides the public on the Rhine bank promenade not only with the classical plaza in from of a cubic tower. The pure cube is rather interrupted sculpturally and does not realise its much greater volume until far above the ninth floor: as a slender 70-metre-long horizontal boom, not as a tower. The promenade does not lead past the building but right through it. With its dynamic form and in its association with the original historic loading cranes, the building sets a prominent sign of the onset of an architectural commitment of the city by the river.

Architect
BRT Architekten, Bothe · Richter · Teherani, Hamburg
(auf Grundlage der Entwürfe des Workshops der ARGE 1. Preisträger Rheinauhafen Köln: „Bothe Richter Teherani, Busmann und Haberer, Linster, Schneider-Wessling und Abbing“ vom April 1993)

Client
Kranhaus Nord: PANDION AG, Köln
Kranhaus Mitte: Development Partner AG, Düsseldorf
Kranhaus Süd: Deutsche Immobilien AG, Rostock
moderne stadt Gesellschaft zur Förderung des Städtebaues und der Gemeindeentwicklung mbH, Köln

Start of construction
October 2006

Completion
May 2010

Use
Office, Residential

Gross Area
Kranhaus Nord: 26.858 sqm
Kranhaus Mitte: 22.680,30 sqm
Kranhaus Süd: 22.680,30 sqm

Photos
Jörg Hempel, Aachen