The Facade

© HamburgMusik gGmbH/Nadin Hanzig

Contrast is the distinctive feature of the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg’s architecture, giving it particular appeal: The Kaispeicher, built in the 1960s from red bricks, and the base of the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, comes across as rough, archaic, and massive. Above this foundation the shimmering glass structure seems to float.

Its roof line captures the movement of the waves on the River Elbe in broad swells. The glass façade is made up of 1,100 individual panes, each measuring four to five metres wide and over three metres high. In the foyer area they even measure five metres in height. The glass surface of the Elbphilharmonie covers 21,500 sq m – a size equivalent to three football fields. However, if the glass elements were really laid out on those fields, the grass would be completely flattened – each one weighs about 1.2 tonnes, the equivalent of a car. To manoeuvre such heavy glass panes into position, a special monorail was set up, running around the building like a curtain rod.

The windows themselves are a masterpiece of engineering. Never before have glass panes been separately marked, coated and then shaped at 600° C with millimetre precision. The curvature of each pane depends on the particular area of the building. Hatches resembling fish-gills characterise the hotel and foyer while horseshoe-shaped recesses form the balconies for the flats on the westernmost tip of the building. The glass panes were designed to withstand extreme conditions as Hamburg’s stormy weather is legendary. In quality-control tests the glass panes withstood gale-force winds up to 150 km per hour and torrential downpours with ease.

Small reflective dots have been applied to the window panes to keep the structure from heating up due to sunlight – a real eye-catcher in the architecturally exciting HafenCity. On the side facing the water a specially developed raster enables ship radar to locate the building. To achieve an optimal effect the configuration of the dots is computer-calculated for each glass pane based on the respective mounting positions – making the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg unique, both in every detail and as a whole.