HafenCity Hamburg GmbH has opened a new venue, Hafen.City.Horizonte., to act as an information hub aimed at bringing to life themes running through its current urban development projects.
The Forum für Stadt und Zukunft (Forum for the City and the Future) is situated in the district of Baakenhafen, right at the heart of the final major HafenCity construction site, close to Grasbrook and Billebogen. It throws particular light on project progress in these three zones, focusing on key themes of sustainability and innovation.
On show are multimedia exhibition artefacts and plans, with regular guided tours and other events also on the programme. The display is aimed at a professional audience – including developers and investors – as well as at pupils, students, tourists, local residents and the general public.
At the heart of the new exhibition at Hafen.City.Horizonte. is a large-scale, 3D, wooden, 1:750 scale model, accompanied by a digital presentation.
This form of display allows for varying themes to be highlighted and visually overlaid on one another – showing land-use developments and use categories, concepts for mobility and open-plan design, as well as designs for energy supply and flood protection.
Anyone entering the three-storey space of the Info Centre instinctively looks up and marvels at the impressive ceiling height. We designed an installation, which we named Flow, for this vast space, made up of a cloud-like mass of wire and fabric elements.
As visitors move around the space, differing perspectives on the installation open up, and the constituent elements appear to flow and float into one another. The organic forms, which are reminiscent of waves, sea spray or clouds, expand the sense of space and underline Hamburg’s close relationship with wind and water.
In much the same way as the scale model on display unveils new layers of knowledge by means of image projection, the variations in Flow’s lighting scheme create differing moods within the Info Centre. By altering the colour and intensity of the light it emits, the installation takes on a temporal dimension, allowing for ever-changing shifts in atmosphere within the space, which can be altered in response to varying usage requirements.
HafenCity Hamburg GmbH takes a highly sustainable, resilient and innovative approach to urban development. Environmental needs were catered to, and designs to address them were implemented, at an early stage in the new HafenCity project, demonstrating the planners’ commitment to ecological issues over the decades of the project’s duration. Not only were these environmental objectives embedded in the urban planning process from the start, but they have also been implemented to date in designs for individual buildings, since it is at this microlevel that a major impact is made on energy consumption and emissions, affecting the social and cultural quality of each respective zone throughout the life cycle of each structure.
Our goals in respect of sustainability are crucial to our designs, and we are always looking for new ways to make our construction projects as resource-efficient and environmentally friendly as possible. We try to find alternatives to standard practice, particularly in relation to cement-based building materials, and we always seek to devise our own technical solutions. For example, in the case of our Embassy for Wild Animals scheme, in place of the usual cement screed, we installed deadwood plank flooring on a timber substructure. We returned to this tried-and-tested construction method for our Hafen.City.Horizonte. proposal. Thanks to our use of CO₂-positive deadwood and wood fibre boards as sound insulation, we were able to save 16.5 tonnes of CO₂ for this project alone.
The structure of the walls for the ancillary space and the gallery (with the exception of the suspended elements) is also made from timber, and features hemp insulation. An old 40-foot long container was the source of our sheet steel, a material closely linked to the industrial history of HafenCity, which we gave a new lease of life by repurposing it for the outer cladding of the Hafen.City.Horizonte. service cube.
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