The Marco Polo Tower is a residential building in the HafenCity district of Hamburg‘s Mitte district. Together with the neighboring Unilever building, it forms a striking ensemble of buildings on the North Elbe.
The Marco Polo Tower is located in the western part of HafenCity’s Strandkai district. It was built on the triangular quay tongue tapering to the west, which is bordered on the south by the Norderelbe and on the north by the Grasbrookhafen. To the east, the Unilever building borders on the Marco Polo Tower, to the northeast is the public open space, the Marco Polo Terraces.
The Marco Polo Tower is a reinforced concrete skeleton construction. Each floor is rotated a few degrees around the axis of the building compared to the surrounding floors. As a result, the recessed facades are protected from direct sunlight by the overhanging terraces of the apartments higher up; In addition, the external appearance of the building varies depending on the viewing direction. Up to the twelfth floor, the floors become more expansive with increasing height; the floor with the smallest diameter is therefore the ground floor, and the largest floor is the twelfth. The top four floors are slightly smaller in diameter and reserved for apartments, each comprising at least one floor. The terraces surrounding all the apartments have a curved shape and cantilever out to different extents, which, in addition to the rotation of the floors around the central axis, characterizes the external appearance of the house. In the vernacular of Hamburg, the building is also known as the “kebab skewer” due to its unusual shape. The pillars of the house are not on top of each other; the loads of individual column strands are diverted via shear walls, and the building is largely braced by the stairwell and elevator core. The tower is partially cooled by vacuum collectors on the roof, which convert solar radiation into cooling using a heat exchanger and distribute it throughout the house. There are also solar collectors on the roof, which supply the building with energy for heating water within the scope of their capacities. The reception hall extends over two floors, with commercial spaces on the first floor forming a ring around the hall.
The urban design for the surrounding Strandkai district comes from the Hamburg office of Böge Lindner Architekten. The developer of the Marco Polo Tower is the Marco Polo Tower project company, a joint venture between Hochtief (70% stake) and Dahler & Company Immobilien (30% stake). Construction began in mid-2007; Marco Polo Tower and Unilever House were built in parallel. The topping-out ceremony for the residential building took place on April 3, 2009. The apartments were unusually sold as a shell, so that the buyers were responsible for the interior design, but had the appropriate design freedom in the dimensioning and purpose of individual rooms: the position of interior walls and pipes and thus the positioning of individual rooms, including functional rooms, within the apartment could be determined by the buyer. Seven international design offices were hired to support the buyers, including the office of the Hamburg architect and interior designer Ulrike Krages.