saai | Archive for Architecture and Engineering

Competition Mannesmann AG office tower
1954

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Competition Mannesmann AG office tower

The site is located on the Rhine embankment promenade - a narrow gap between two broadly positioned buildings of medium height - the Landeshaus and the old Mannesmann-Haus by Peter Behrens. To the rear of the Landeshaus, the new building of the Ministry of Reconstruction was planned as a multi-storey tower block.

These specifications resulted in essential design conditions:

- the bank of the Rhine was not to be impaired by excessive building heights;

- the Peter Behrens building was to remain untouched;

- the new Mannesmann building was to be clearly recognisable as belonging to the old one;

- a spatial relationship to the Ministry of Reconstruction was to be sought.

These conditions led to the rejection of an excessively high building solution. A long rectangular disc with a height of around 40 m was planned, which was moved out of the central axis of the site towards the old Mannesmann building and pushed far back from the Rhine bank building line to the east. This creates a space that allows the Behrens building and the Landeshaus to exist in a physical form and softens the impression of the height of the new building. The consequence of this pushing back was the building over Bergerstrasse and thus the creation of a correspondence between the new building and the Ministry of Reconstruction.

Immo Boyken, „Entwurfscharakteristika im Werk von Egon Eiermann aus der Zeit nach dem zweiten Weltkrieg“ , Diss., Universität Karlsruhe, Fakultät Architektur, Teil III, S. 103