Our industry celebrates diversity – but demands consistent quality.

large Festival Hall holds up
to 1,200 guests. On the sixth
floor lies the ‘Oval Office’ – a
multipurpose boardroom
complete with its own kitchen,
bar and an impressive
panoramic view across the
roofs of Hamburg – and the
roughly 135 square metre
‘Grand Suite’, which has accommodated
many celebrities,
among them the Dalai
Lama.
The five-star hostelry
houses more than 650
paintings, sculptures, prints
and photographs, acquired
and put together over 25
years by the business couple
Eugen and Christa
Block. The collection centres
on North German representational
painting from
1919 to the present day.
Quality reproductions decorate
the 511 hotel rooms.
eas and promenades created
in the old Speicherstadt (literally
city of warehouses, or
warehouse district). In the
west, star architects Herzog
& de Meuron from Switzerland
are setting a glass concert
hall – the Elbphilharmonie
– on the top of Kaispeicher
A. The city und HafenCity
are one, is the credo, based
on the magic formula: 50 percent
offices, 20 percent special
use, i.e. hotels or museums,
and 30 percent residential.
A master plan dating
from 2000 prescribed roughly
this mix.
The public promenades are
ten kilometres long. No building
is set directly on the waterfront,
visitors can always
walk in-between. A pedestrian
zone will extend from the
Speicherstadt to the Elbe.
The new cruise ship terminal
1/2010
Hamburg: Busy container port with
enormous warehouse space, packing
halls and cranes.
will be located there, with a
400-room hotel to be built at
the berth. Going forward, up
to 70,000 day-trippers are targeted
to stroll through a HafenCity
resplendent with the
cruiser terminal designed by
the Italian Massimiliano Fuksas.
The cruise boom guaranteed
the port a successful season
in spite of the economic
crunch. Following the opening
of a new terminal passenger
numbers almost doubled.
And next year is already expected
to bring 220,000 passengers
to Hamburg on more
than a hundred cruisers. “Demand
for cruises is brisk, the
market is enjoying steady
Hamburg’s biggest
building site
growth,” is the summary by
Gerd Drossel from the Hamburg
Cruise Center. And now
a musician – Udo Lindenberg
– has seized an entire ship, no
less. At the beginning of May
the first rock liner sets sail for
Dover with punk singer Nina
Hagen and the rocker, whose
repertoire nods variously to
nautical themes. The vessel
is scheduled to return on May
8 for the firework display dur-
ing the port of Hamburg’s
birthday celebrations. Then
the Queen Mary II will also be
paying a visit; the first time
she sailed into the harbour,
half a million people lined up
to greet her.
Extending over 3.3 kilometres
and covering a total of
HAMBURG
157 hectares, Hafencity is
still Hamburg’s biggest building
site. The Hafencity information
centre and a model of
the urban development project
are housed in the Kesselhaus,
where the power was
once produced for electrification
of the Speicherstadt. The