The Cinnamon tower was conceived as freestanding campanile – a pin on a piazza was the concept behind the premiated competition design by BOLLES+WILSON for the existing 19th century Harbour Masters Building.

A tower was not anticipated in the competition programme, but the jury agreed that a tower anchors the public functions around the only remaining historical building to survive between the megablocks of the ‘Overseas Quarter’ master plan. The historic building will also be more autonomous.

Slenderness is essential for a campanile. Over the course of its 8-year gestation this was respected – even while its function mutated from stacked restaurants to housing. The 13 x 16 m floor plan tapers towards the top. With a height of 56 meters the tower is 4-times higher than it is wide.

How can such a thin chap be efficient?
The efficient answer is duplex apartments. Originally the concept foresaw seven apartments, each on 2 floors, a panoramic living deck on the upper level and bedrooms with punched windows below. Precise market analysis led to a variation of this formula: one triplex apartment at the top and some 1-floor apartments at lower levels. Built were ten apartments, four with 130 sqm, five with 185 sqm and one with 300 sqm. The tower has a gross floor area of 4.300 sqm and a volume of 16.000 cubic metres. At the ground level, the piazza level is a commercial area of around 300 sqm.

Strict high-rise regulations demanded an escape route from every floor via secured escape stair. The possibility to clean every window from the inside was also a criterion to be met. The spectacular view of the New Elbphilharmonie should not be blurred by dirty windows. Room-high windows on three sides of the living room also allow the tracking of incoming cruise ships.

Facade panels of anodized aluminium sheets in different gradations of dark red correspond to the patchwork of BOLLES+WILSON’s pavilion from 2008. This was the first realized component of the Harbour Masters ensemble. In sunlight these aluminium panels take on colourful nuances while on cloudy days they assume a darker, more serious Paul-Klee like appearance. This is a building that changes its character according to the incidence of light, a new figure on Hamburg’s skyline.

In 2009 BOLLES+WILSON won the 1st prize for housing and a kindergarten on the site of the 1960ies St Sebastian Church. It was expected that the emblematic oval form of the church be demolished. Instead the kindergarten colonized the nave. It was opened in 2013 – a much published reuse with interior green weather protected play decks.

2015 phase 2 was complete, a peripheral frame of housing protecting the kindergarten from a noisy street and giving a precise edge to the adjacent park.

Market realities are clearly visible in the differentiation of the social (subsidized) housing with its bright white and pink plaster facade to Hammer Str. and the owner-occupied flats with their noble dark brick facade facing the mature trees in the park.

One corner tree is explicitly embraced by the projecting white sheet of the street facade.

Only kitchen and bathroom windows are allowed to receive traffic noise; living rooms and balconies turn inwards to the quiet green space surrounding the kindergarten.

Unexpected colour animates the lift and stair tower and the setback roof apartments. This polychrome trope also animates the skyline of the park elevation. Here big white frames give a grand order, a vertical hierarchy. But ultimately it is the grandeur of the existing trees that claim the status of leading actors in the spatial choreography.

The former embarkation point for emigration to the New World – a ‘Holland/America’ theme. Two landscapes (intimate Dutch gardens and a prairie-like American event- space) are divided by a conceptual border. Large scale text (like a Steinberg drawing) is inlayed in the pavement. To date the Dutch side including the Hotel Terrace, Maaskant Pavilion, vent Funnels, playground and intimate Dutch gardens is complete. despite regular dockings of American warships the narrative landscape on the American side of the Dutch-Amerika border remains unexecuted.

When is a warehouse a lake? – in Münster.

This is the third BOLLES+WILSON building for the German-wide furniture chain RS+Yellow, an extension of the homebase storage and distribution centre by 7,000 sqm. The new rectangular building volume stands adjacent to the original 1992 corrugated aluminium warehouse.

The 60 x 66 m two stores ‘Big-Box’ is (as is usual for industrial architecture) reduced to a regular grid of pre-cast columns and widespan floor slabs. Facades are a standard lightweight concrete system. Verticality is emphasised with pyjama colour stripes interspersed with zinc coated grid stripes. These absorb all windows and necessary smoke outlets into an uninterrupted colour curtain.

This warehouse and even perhaps the 1,500 sqm of offices above the delivery bays are precisely realised but relatively conventional. The big surprise comes on arriving at the rooftop meeting rooms and executive offices. Through the intervention of the fire brigade (choreographed alarm) the roof of the building has been flooded – a 45 x 65 m reflecting pool.

The edge detail, laser levelled into invisibility, increases the metaphysical unreality of this sky reflector. Underwater compartments eliviate the risk of mini-tsunamis. Spillage is collected in edge channels and channelled to an internal cistern.

A wooden boardwalk fronts the large format sliding glass facade. A pier extends out to the centre of the water world. Here one can sit surrounded by geometric groves of bamboo. From here the south facing glass front of the roof pavilion reflects again the rippling expanse of water. The facade itself is shaded by a projecting steel pergola and a curtain of louvers descending at the press of a button from its outer edge.

This choreographed overlap of inside and outside, of natural and artificial, of direct and reflected light, create a unique atmosphere which could be described as an industrial scaled Japanese Tea-House.