Lomography

Double-XX - The glas sensation in Hamburg
written by wil6ka on February 3rd, 2009 , 3 comments (2 votes)

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I live just across an architectural sensation of our modern days. This is because where I live, nobody else lives and only people go to work. We are talking about „Double-XX“! A stunning object completely made of steel and glass. It’s two houses in form of X, which are surrounded by a facade made of glass. So the glass which you see as the outer shelves is not carrying the weight of the house.

It’s rather two buildings in one. And it’s such modern and clever architecture because everything makes sense. Between the X´s you have Hamburg’s largest Winter garden and at the bottom you have two little pools. This was all done to regulate the climate within the building. The glass-panels are heat-protected and also suck the noise of the large highway. Because the X´s are loosely within the building the air circulation is fantastic and there is always fresh air. And now guess who is having his office there? An insurance company. Bad job, good view I would say!

The mastermind behind it all is Hadi Teherani, who is one of the star-architects not only in Germany but worldwide. He has built many train-stations and they all looked stunning. His fame grew with the „double-xx“, which was built in 1999 and is comparatively cheap. Building two houses made it eventually more economic than building one high-tech-facade. So consequently Teherani was too ahead of his time….or we are too old-fashioned now. It is always a joy to see the facade-climber cleaning this huge building. Especially when the sun is shining I am happy, because it gets reflected straight into my flat! And when it is storming, which happens quite often in my world, the facade is shaking, but never was anything broken. Astonishing! If you want to go there take the s-bahn line 21 from the main-station to Hammerbrook. You step off and enter the Wendenstrasse. It’s at number 46.