Zeisehallen

Jentz • Popp • Störmer (till 1989) • Wiesner

cinema, gastronomy und retail trade
Hamburg

competition 1986 - 1.price
completion 1993
BGF 3.900 qm


The City Within  (text: Inge Maisch, from: Architecture in Hamburg, Yearbook 1993)

Close up:  Daisy Duck, completely in red and unmistakably made of metal-cut, long shot:  two elderly ladies, engrossed in eager conversation - a hovering light-green bridge, bathed in bright sunlight a red-headed punk, dreamily hanging over the box with bargain offers in front of the book-shop - some kids on skateboards whooshing down the gently-sloping plain… and getting stuck in the slightly raised tracks.
An advertising film about the new Zeise in the remains of the wall of Theodor Zeise’s former marine-screw factory wouldn’t just be a film showing a new cinema-center, it wouldn't just be a serialized novel describing the routine of an architect’s office in the same place at different times  -  the Eisenstein restaurant and the Media House came into existence in 1988/89, but it would be showing a little slice of life in the big city. Above all, it would be a documentary about what places of communication in the city can look like --those places where people meet each other to enjoy watching the show that’s never boring:  other people, in the permanent changing movie of metropolitan life, being both actors and audience – withdrawn, shy, loudmouthed, confident, arrogant, sure of themselves, quiet, still.
The new Zeise , complete with passage, has every chance of becoming such a meeting-place. Admittedly, it doesn’t really connect one part of the city with another, something that, for a lot of other passages, makes life hard indeed, but unlike most of the "downtown tinsel-town" malls, the Zeise is no temple to consumerism: with three cinemas, a public library and a kindergarten, offices, cafes and restaurants, you can be fairly sure there’ll be people knocking around in there from morning to late in the evening.
And then there’s the architecture. In the high-vaulted factory halls, which were never completely preserved and so not given extensions, me di um’s architects have created a city within a city, diversified and a bit on the small side - like the Ottensen quarter itself - where the old factory is located. There’s a public square: the cafe right opposite the entrance to the film-theaters. Zeise also has a town gate:  the tall iron door in front of the entrance to the cinema area with Daisy Duck, lots of flowers and, rounding it all off, a big bad wolf in rust-red wrought-iron. And, of course, there are the houses there - their fronts line the way with windows you can see into - well,  more or less.
(with Isabell Feest und Peter Dinse)