Europa-Passage

The mall passageway’s graceful, elegant axis – a vibrant access juncture between pedestrian zone and lower lake partition – plays the leading role in the interaction of all regulatory measures and densification methods as applied to urban development. The direct linear connection of the main flows of pedestrians streaming from the central train station and HafenCity port development project to the specially attractive, detailed inner-city core and Binnenalster lake establishes the hub adjoining the city’s varied attractions that had been missing for so long.

Modern yet well aware of tradition, with a highly refined eye for detail and materials, discreet yet exhibiting a superior power of expression in its spatial dynamics, the Europa-Passage hits the right ‘key’ attuned between a mecca of the senses and a cosmopolitan city’s claim to architectural and urban historical uniqueness. As a hub for vital pedestrian flows, the mall passageway becomes a marketplace and meeting point sheltered from weather, a new centre in town, a venue crowned on each and every level with an incomparable view of the lower lake.

Granted, the once proud Europahaus structure on Ballindamm facing the lake that had been severely impaired due to wartime after-effects and later alterations had to yield to a new fronting edifice: the Europa-Passage named after its origins. However, in light of the multilayered waterfront façade with arcade, deeply recessed entrance portal and futuristic panorama lift, – a front whose depth so skilfully mediates between stone and glass and has turned out so well – the waves of initial controversy have long since calmed. A more balanced intervention in Hamburg’s globally present image as a waterfront city is no longer conceivable.

Viewed spatially, the particular cross-sectioning of the Europa-Passage unites the mall passageway’s streetside character, in which large retailers are restricted to the ground floor, with its gallery-like character, in which shops and restaurants are organised across multiple levels. Remarkable is that the deliberately exposed arches in a wooden look with their glassy summit continuously present the street-level area as a focus of events. The Binnenalster lower lake and Jungfernstieg promenade, the Alster arcades and Passagenviertel malls are all going to gain new life through this crowd-drawing attraction.

With so much water in between, the ‘amphibious’ nature of Hamburg’s Rathaus quarter around the town hall defines a new zenith of urbane representation: the Europa-Passage before the backdrop of waterfront Jungfernstieg and the Alster lake. Set at the centre of its historic primal concept of a cityscape cum waterscape between the Alster lake and Elbe river, this city of bridges, canals and passageways gains new appeal not only through the boulevard facing the Binnenalster that is unique worldwide. In the long history of a glass sky suspended over a glorious magnificence of goods, – attempts to festoon a city’s wealth shared by both ancient Rome and Paris of yore – here Hamburg opens a brand-new and surprising chapter in the chronicle of mall passageways.

The two elements involved, the old though newly rediscovered boulevard facing the lower lake on the one hand and the stylistic reinterpretation of constructing a passageway between Mönckebergstrasse and Jungfernstieg on the other, refer to and enhance one another. Their junction lies where Heinrich Heine, a poet otherwise never too abashed to serve up blistering criticism, describes the scenario in this waterside city so enthusiastically: “…when the afternoon sun doesn’t glow too savagely and merely smiles serenely in its stead; delightfully, almost magically showering the linden trees, houses, people, the Alster and the swans swaying upon it with its radiance.”

The Europa-Passage strengthens this city’s sublime landscape motif in the midst of its core via a new densification and spatial model unique to this type of construction. The  passageway doesn’t surreptitiously twist and wind across rear courtyards. Unlike conventional passageways, the Europa-Passage ‘urbanises’ an authentic street in the city. The new development itself is not penetrated until the last metres before reaching the Binnenalster front. With its exposed parabolic-shaped arch construction, the passageway’s new dynamics transpire in the middle of the erstwhile street while using sophisticated spatial penetrations and sightlines under glass to reach the adjoining roofs. As a result, not only additional opportunities for access arise from the intersection of Paulstrasse/Hermannstrasse: what emerges are interesting views inwards and outwards inside a 5-storey hall of glass, the passageway’s central emphasis. Never before has it been so easy for a big-city rambler to ‘get the most out of the town’ along its vertical axis, too.

140 years ago Paris was set on placing canopies of glass atop its boulevards, a technically impossible feat at the time. The appeal behind the Europa-Passage lies above all in using bridgeways and galleries to ‘unleash’ a typically built-up Hamburg street ‘canyon’ in an architectural sense and amalgamate it with the preserved abutting buildings to form an extremely out-of-the-ordinary functional unit.
Owing to the complexity of the overall facility in Hamburg, including 6 levels for parking, 5 floors as mall passageway and 5 floors of offices, the effective floor area distinctly surpasses that of the Fünf Höfe mall passageway in Munich. In a nutshell: a passageway with a direct, in-house connection to underground transit, 700 parking spaces, intelligent, concealed delivery supply for over 120 shops, restaurants and cafés, with office capacities set in detailed winter gardens beyond and above the shopping galleries, undreamt-of when viewed from outdoors, and despite all this the complex engrosses no more than 160 metres of street length in the heart of the city.

Structure and routing at the Europa-Passage are first obtained solely from the city’s floor plan. After that, the multifaceted urban spectacle offered by this mall passageway with a view of Jungfernstieg and the Binnenalster lower lake, all the way to Hamburg’s rooftops and beyond, extends across the directly accessible shopping levels. The proof is provided that convenient, appealing shopping continues to be an innate quality of a city. In the competition for a ‘beauty prize’ among metropolises, a good reason to hope that many others emulate the Europa-Passage. Towards reactivating inner cities and reanimating oft forgotten boulevards.

On the other hand, is there another, even more appealing site with even more surprisingly alternating spaces and scenery that exists for this new, future-capable type of urban building block? Heinrich Heine and, with him, many other prominent admirers of the pleasurable synthesis of city and nature called Hamburg would surely know how to answer that question.