Finished in late 2020 Frobenstraße 1 offers for renting 11 variously sized apartments and 2 commercial units in an area of fashionable shops and galleries (Potsdamer Straße), street prostitution, social housing and huge investor driven developments of owner occupied apartments.

Frobenstraße 1 is a chorus member. It is not a Primadonna that steps out to front stage. The choreography of urban choruses is the Großstadt-DNA of Berlin, Paris or Barcelona. It defines the street line and the eaves line. In Frobenstraße 1 the upper facade limit is articulated with a recessed shadow line, a modest but significant detail.

The well behaved chorus anticipates a fictive future block-perimeter conclusion to the south, where there is now a Kindergarten with luxurious trees. Here the pink side wall (fire wall) presents itself for the kids with its giant footprint graphic.

Unlike the Bel étage of a Paris House the first floor here has the standard 3,10 m room height, but its special relation to the street is prescribed by the delicate and continuous railing.

The window composition to the street describes the internal layout where three apartments break out of the standard, but generous room height to 4,80 m and 6,50 m. The grey facade has therefore aspirations to be read as a palazzo, with the projecting penthouse window playing the classic attica.

The garden facade is more domestic, balconies meandering out for afternoon sun and individual planting.

For the interior communal stair and lift black and white tiles dignify homecoming.

The latest BOLLES+WILSON kindergarten is now, after a protracted incubation open for its 60 mini-customers.

It is beside a fire station and behind suburban villas in Frankfurt’s Bergen Enkheim district.

The `coat of many colours´ façade is wood, sustainable, a signal for the building’s `passive house´ status. Colourful sun awnings animate the south façade where the six group rooms open to the playground or to the first floor balcony (where stairs connect down to playground). Sliding white sunscreens on the East and West façades also give night time security for open windows.
The flat roof is planted for rainwater retention and for insect habitat.
The compact volume and upper level multi purpose room are consequence of the limited site and a ground level change 2,20 m.
The interior circulation gallery is animated by an optimistic green/yellow wall with giant foot/hand prints.
A thematicising of scale is endemic to a building whose customers are only 90 centimeters tall.

A house as a large family room suspended in the city.

A house with a child’s room suspended within.

A house with two legs and a usable roof.

A house glanced by a passing Ninja (Impressed Shadow Façade).

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.