by Claudia Simone Hoff, 06.12.2011
It was legendary, the canteen of the Spiegel publishing house. The brightly colored pop interior from the sixties, which the Danish designer Verner Panton had come up with, had contributed significantly to the creation of this legend. However, the publisher's move to Hafencity has now put an end to this pop candy. The new building by Henning Larsen Architects from Copenhagen at Ericusspitze 1 also includes a new canteen and snack bar. This somewhat delicate project was taken on by the architecture and design firm Ippolito Fleitz.
The Stuttgart-based firm is the perfect choice for this task, having already excelled with the design of the Württembergische Versicherung canteen in Stuttgart and the new interior concept for the Wienerwald restaurants. Similar to the Wienerwald, the Spiegel canteen also has a lot of memories attached to it.
The Snackbar
These are now made visible - albeit in a modified form - in the Snackbar on the fifth floor of the 13-story new building with a total of 30,000 square feet of office space. While the majority of the original Panton furnishings have migrated to Hamburg's Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, where the public will be able to marvel at them in their original architectural context from summer 2012, some set pieces have migrated to the new snack bar - the "window to the city. However, things are much less garish there now. The wildly patterned orange-red carpet has remained, red and orange armchairs from Vitra's Amoebe series also invite you to lounge around, and the famous plastic honeycombs of the wall paneling are used once again - but the height of the room and the light-flooded window front make the ensemble seem far more airy than in the squat room height of the old Spiegel building in Brandstwiete. Even though there were considerations to completely relocate the Panton canteen to the new building - its square-based modular space concept had become obsolete in the polygonally constructed new building and was probably no longer desired.
The canteen
Ippolito Fleitz came up with a completely different concept for the new canteen. It is dominated by the color scheme of black, white and gray paired with yellow and comes across as far more restrained than its predecessor - which is admittedly not difficult. The new color concept offers more visual relaxation for Spiegel employees than Panton's color scheme. The floor plan of the canteen, which is not open to the public and is located on the first floor of the office building, which stands out due to its exposed position on the water, is polygonal in design. Continuous window strips on two sides allow plenty of natural light into the interior of the flexibly usable space, which measures just under 600 square meters. As a result of this spatial flexibility, the ceiling has become the canteen's identity-forming element.
The light
In addition to various building services installations, the ceiling also accommodates the sophisticated lighting system designed by the Pfarré Lighting Design office in Munich. More than 4,000 rounds of micro-perforated, matte-finished aluminum were applied to a sound-absorbing carrier material and then mounted on the ceiling. They reflect the daylight and the movements of the water and transfer them into the slightly undercooled and strangely lifeless looking room. The futuristic-looking, silvery shining rounds are complemented by light bowls of intense color. Further illumination is provided by the dimmable, likewise circular pendant lights, which were mounted directly above the tables and produce warm white light.
The furnishings
The circular shape of the bright yellow light bowls and pendant lights is echoed by the round tables, which feature black powder-coated steel frames and laser-grid granite tops, as well as Plexiglas rods suspended from the ceiling that zone the large space. Additional zoning is found on the white, seamless terrazzo floor: curved black lines. Their black is echoed in the black chairs, which can be moved at any time to give the space a different use.
The terrace
When the sun is shining - and that has to be taken advantage of in Hamburg - the large waterfront terrace in front of the canteen invites people to linger. And here, the conversations of the 1100 Spiegel employees - who are working together under one roof for the first time at Ericusspitze - about business, politics, culture and the like are sure to continue at a lively pace.
With Spiegel-Verlag's move to its new home in Hafencity, a book on the architecture and design of the new and old publishing building has been published, richly illustrated.
Susanne Beyer and Martin Doerry (eds.):
Das Spiegel-Haus in der Hafencity Hamburg
Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt (DVA), Munich 2011
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