Coffee or Velvet?
"CR 16" stands for Caffamacherreihe 16, the location of this building in Hamburg. Caffamacherreihe is a street in the heart of Hamburg’s inner city, connecting Dammtorwall with Valentinskamp. But why “Caffamacherreihe”? Was coffee made here? No, in fact the name stems from the velvet weavers who settled here in the 17th century.
Since the 1960s, the cityscape of Hamburg’s Neustadt district has been largely shaped by the adjacent Unilever-Haus, which is now called the Emporio Tower and shines anew as a freshly modernised monument to the period of the post-war "economic miracle".
The CR 16 office and residential building, with its ten stories and four courtyards, extends seamlessly as a reinforced concrete skeleton construction for a total length of 120 metres. The recess of the ground floor facade posed particular challenges, as did the steel composite construction of the overhanging staggered storey.
With its distinctive architecture, CR 16 stands in exciting contrast to the existing developments in Hamburg’s Neustadt.
© Klaus Frahm / Thomas Robbin, Klaus Frahm, Klaus Frahm, BIN, BIN