Chilihaus In Hamburg: Clinker Ship

2024 Author: David Durham | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 02:26

"Office House" Chilihaus - the symbol of Germany in the 1920s and the main attraction of Hamburg, a UNESCO World Heritage Site - and the most famous building of clinker.

zooming

1/6 Chilihaus Photo © ARCHITAIL
zooming

2/6 Chilihaus Photo © ARCHITAIL
zooming

3/6 Chilihaus Photo © ARCHITAIL
zooming

4/6 Chilihaus Photo © ARCHITAIL
zooming

5/6 Chilihaus Photo © ARCHITAIL
zooming

6/6 Chilihaus Photo © ARCHITAIL

Northern Germany is a country of bricks: it has been the main building material here for a thousand years. Not only rural houses were built from it, but also huge Gothic cathedrals, which are not inferior in beauty and grandeur to their stone counterparts in other regions and countries. Therefore, bricks, especially clinker bricks, are made here to this day very durable and attractive. It does not lose its appearance and strength either after ten years or after a century - which is especially important in the damp and windy climate of this part of Europe.

zooming

1/3 Chilihaus Photo © ARCHITAIL
zooming

2/3 Chilihaus Photo © ARCHITAIL
zooming

3/3 Chilihaus Photo © ARCHITAIL

Brick is an ancient material, but it was in the north of Germany in the 1920s that architects, who were perfectly familiar with its qualities, figured out how to use it for new, experimental buildings - in the spirit of their time, with its admiration for high speeds, scales, ambitions. This is how brick expressionism was born - an expressive architectural style that combines the capabilities of the North German clinker and experienced local masons, images of brick Gothic and the latest trends in architecture and art.

zooming

1/7 Chilihaus Photo © ARCHITAIL
zooming

2/7 Chilihaus Photo © ARCHITAIL
zooming

3/7 Chilihaus Photo © ARCHITAIL
zooming

4/7 Chilihaus Photo © ARCHITAIL
zooming

5/7 Chilihaus Photo © ARCHITAIL
zooming

6/7 Chilihaus Photo © ARCHITAIL
zooming

7/7 Chilihaus Photo © ARCHITAIL

The main master of this style was Fritz Höger, and his most important building was the "office house" Chilihaus, an amazing structure in Hamburg. It was built in 1922–1924 as the first building of the new "Kontorsky District", which replaced an almost slum development near the port, central station and warehouses of the famous Speicherstadt. After all, Hamburg, the richest city in Germany, at the end of the 19th century was chaotically built up according to the medieval scheme without any concern for the comfort and health of its inhabitants. Even after a catastrophic fire in 1842, the former boundaries of landholdings were restored, so small that more than 60 plots were then located on the site of Chilihaus. Only after the cholera epidemic that took away almost nine thousand lives in 1892 did the municipal authorities think about redevelopment by means of a massive purchase of land from the owners.

In order to completely exclude the return of the slums, it was decided to change the purpose of the district - instead of housing, to build it up, in modern terms, with office buildings, counting on the companies serving the huge port - shipping, trade, insurance. This was also a definite innovation - the construction of office buildings for renting in parts, and not by a specific company for their own needs, began only towards the end of the 19th century. The master plan of the "Kontorsky District" was prepared with the help of a competition in 1914–1915: the streets were widened and straightened, and diagonal driveways were added. According to the new scheme, one or two buildings were to occupy each block.

Construction began after the First World War, when Germany was plunged into the abyss of an economic crisis with incredible hyperinflation. In the Hanseatic Hamburg, since antiquity - the most important trading city in Europe, the severity of the situation was felt especially acutely. This is why Chilihaus, the first house in the "Kontorskiy district", visible for its size throughout Hamburg, has become for residents a symbol of the post-war revival of global trade and hopes for the future - also thanks to its modern dynamic appearance.

His customer was Henry Brarens Sloman, Hamburg's richest merchant. An Englishman, he made his fortune by mining and supplying Chilean nitrate to Europe - from Chile, where he spent a total of 32 years. He would like to call his office building Sloman House, but the city already had one, and very noticeable - from his relatives, owners of a shipping company. Therefore, Sloman dedicated his building to the country that gave him wealth. He acquired two plots on the sides of Fischertvite Lane and commissioned the project to several architects at once. Fritz Höger, by that time the author of a number of large and spectacular clinker buildings in and around Hamburg, proposed an innovative option that seemed to the customer and the municipality even too daring, but he was chosen.

Image

zooming

1/4 Chilihaus Photo © ARCHITAIL
zooming

2/4 Chilihaus Photo © ARCHITAIL
zooming

3/4 Chilihaus Photo © ARCHITAIL
zooming

4/4 Chilihaus Photo © ARCHITAIL

However, the architect largely followed the circumstances: one of the corners of the site turned out to be very sharp due to the new diagonal street, and in order not to leave this part undeveloped, the building got its famous "nose". The graceful bend of the southern "side" of the building also repeats the contour of the land tenure, but the building of the police station was inscribed earlier in the completely rectangular "stern". But there is also a slyness in this: the Hamburg building administration, headed by the chief architect of the city, Fritz Schumacher, was ready to make the outlines of the site more convenient by exchanging an area with a neighboring property or in some other way, but Höger himself was attracted by the possibility of such a game with curved lines.

zooming

1/4 Chilihaus Photo © ARCHITAIL
zooming

2/4 Chilihaus Photo © ARCHITAIL
zooming

3/4 Chilihaus Photo © ARCHITAIL
zooming

4/4 Chilihaus Photo © ARCHITAIL

The customer and the authorities had questions about the project on two main points: they were afraid that the facade with many windows would look monotonous (there are 2800 of them in the building, including courtyards, 2800), and the stepped completion seemed too newfangled to them. In Hamburg, since 1913, a rule was established that floors above 24 meters should be shifted back from the red line of the street at an angle of 60 degrees so as not to block out the sunlight to neighbors, but this was usually done using an attic roof, and not such unusual penthouses. Another stumbling block was the Fischertvite lane, which cuts the site in half. Höger let him through the Chilihaus, arranging for this a central courtyard with gates in the form of low Tudor arches - it is believed that the shape of the passage was chosen by Broken after the model of his own house, where it apparently reminded of the English origin of the owner. So in Chilihaus there were as many as three courtyards instead of one or two required for interior lighting.

These innovations forced Fritz Höger to submit design documents 17 times for approval by the building authority. But nevertheless, construction began safely, and the chief architect Schumacher even created a small square in front of the Chilihaus "nose" - so that its eastern corner, which is still considered the sharpest in Europe, was clearly visible.

But, despite this angle, Chilihaus would never have deserved poetic comparisons with a trout, an eagle's wing or feather, the orbit of a planet or a banner unfurling in the wind, and most importantly - and most important for Hamburg - with a huge ocean liner - if not for the material of the facades, clinker, and its inextricable connection with the general idea of the architect.

Image

zooming

1/5 Chilihaus Photo © ARCHITAIL
zooming

2/5 Chilihaus Photo © ARCHITAIL
zooming

3/5 Chilihaus Photo © ARCHITAIL
zooming

4/5 Chilihaus Photo © ARCHITAIL
zooming

5/5 Chilihaus Photo © ARCHITAIL

Brick, as it was said, is typical for the north of Germany and for Hamburg, so Schumacher conceived the "Kontorsky District" as a brick. The Chilihaus façades are believed to have consumed 4.8 million clinker from the Bockhorn factories near Wilhelmshaven, and this was not an entirely ordinary material. We do not know exactly how it was acquired, but Fritz Höger, satisfied with the result, claimed that he himself specially chose a brick that was uneven, bent due to the intense heat during firing, plastic, in which the traditional red surface received rainbow, blue, brown from high temperatures " glare ". Such clinker, by the way, can still be found in factories in Lower Saxony (Wittmunder Klinker, Torfbrandklinker).

Höger appreciated the North German brick incredibly highly precisely for its variety of colors and textures, sensual tactility. The architect believed that in three generations it would be possible to build a “big Hanseatic city of the future” on the site of Hamburg, but for now it is important to examine, iron and touch this brick until you understand and love it. It is the clinker that gives, the author of Chilihaus believed, to this huge building both inspiration and gravity.

Image

zooming

1/3 Chilihaus Photo © ARCHITAIL
zooming

2/3 Chilihaus Photo © ARCHITAIL
zooming

3/3 Chilihaus Photo © ARCHITAIL

Höger was called by his contemporaries a master of brick weaving, which he fully demonstrated. The main role on the facades of the Chilihaus was played by the fine rhythm of vertical, almost Gothic profiles made of bricks set at an angle of 45 degrees to each other. Thanks to this solution in perspective reduction - that is, when looking along the facade - many windows, as if dissolving the wall, disappear, and a solid, plastic "body" of the building reappears. The interpretation of architecture almost like sculpture, and brick as a material for sculpting, became the key features of brick expressionism, which was first and most vividly embodied in Chilihaus.

zooming

1/5 Chilihaus Photo © ARCHITAIL
zooming

2/5 Chilihaus Photo © ARCHITAIL
zooming

3/5 Chilihaus Photo © ARCHITAIL
zooming

4/5 Chilihaus Photo © ARCHITAIL
zooming

5/5 Chilihaus Photo © ARCHITAIL

The surfaces of the facades seem to be alive: on flat areas, elegant Brandenburg masonry was used (two spoons - a poke), on the first floor, the brick emphasizes the "buttresses", and above it, stars, diamond-shaped and crystal lattice patterns are made of it.

This huge house - the first skyscraper in Hamburg with a height of 42 meters, and with a total area of 36,000 m2 - perhaps the largest building in Germany of its time - looks completely man-made and alive from the ground to the ridge of the roof. Its facades at the same time resemble a luxurious curtain and jewelry filigree. The warmth and energy of the clinker is emphasized by the ceramic décor by Richard Kuol and his workshop. The most important of their works are the Andean condor, the heraldic bird of Chile, on the "bow" of the Chilihaus like a real ship, and small openwork pavilions on the sides of this corner - as if the foam waves that it cuts (there is now a restaurant with the self-explanatory name The Brick, so anyone can go inside).

An owl and a pelican, a heron and bears, a sheep and a penguin are hidden in the ceramic foliage of these pavilions: this is both a symbolic story about the nature of Chile and a free fantasy of the coming Art Deco era.

Chilihaus brought worldwide fame to Höger, who then built many more buildings in Hamburg, including the Sprinkenhof across the street from his masterpiece, and the Brocheck House in the very heart of the city, as well as buildings in Berlin, Wilhelmhaven, Hanover. All of them, of course, were cladded with clinker.

But Chilihaus himself became famous: sensational photographs "from the nose" quickly scattered around the world, and his simultaneously slender and clear, energetic and lively appearance inspired artists and poets. He even became the protagonist of an advertising poster published by the German Tourism Authority - along with famous cathedrals and palaces. It was in the 1920s, and today Chilihaus still accommodates many companies and institutions, but it is also included in the UNESCO World Heritage List and in a reader on architecture, and most importantly, it still boggles the imagination, and its unusual clinker is not at all has lost its expressiveness over the past almost a hundred years. Locals call Chilihaus the most beautiful brick building in the world - they seem to be absolutely right.