The structural imprint made on the air spaces results in undreamt-of perspectives and views. Spaces arise in ways one never would have expected.
Hadi Teherani

Riverside tower cranes
With the line of three “crane houses” in Cologne’s Rheinauhafen, loosely based on El Lissitzky’s utopian “Cloud-irons” dating from 1924, a new typology of skyscraper has been created. The already completed Crane House 1 provides the public on the Rhine bank promenade not only with the classical plaza in from of a cubic tower. The pure cube is rather interrupted sculpturally and does not realise its much greater volume until far above the ninth floor: as a slender 70-metre-long horizontal boom, not as a tower. The promenade does not lead past the building but right through it. With its dynamic form and in its association with the original historic loading cranes, the building sets a prominent sign of the onset of an architectural commitment of the city by the river.

based on drafts of the 1st prize winners workshop "Rheinauhafen" 1992: Bothe Richter Teherani / Busmann und Haberer / Linster / Schneider-Wessling / Abing

Design team:

Hadi Teherani Architects