Shopping Center VIVO

Roloff • Ruffing

Hamburg-Ottensen

competition 1998 - 1.price
completion 2003
36.000 qm BGF


The evolution of sporadic health-food stores into a competitive net of retail markets comprising ecological supermarkets, department stores and trade-parks is only slowly and with difficulty coming into being. With this in mind, the first real "Eco-Mall" initiative in Ottensen has to be rated as a brave, pioneering enterprise. The idea is that in the "living mall", christened Vivo, alternative shops, service-providers, physicians and craftsmen should interact synergetically.

In accordance with this concept, me di um architects have designed a complex, open structure. The heart of the facility is a market place in the glassed-in main hall. At its center, a free-standing, kidney-shaped sculptured staircase stages the ascent to the upper sales areas. Pleasant, wide galleries on the first floor and the all-glass shop-areas create an ambience compatible with modern shopping. Naturally, the standards of a sustainable building concept take effect here:  compact glass construction, rainwater collection, concrete storage-covers and non-composite materials are the basic vocabulary of resource-saving construction. Although specialties meriting the title "exemplary projects"  - for instance, the first-ever inner-city wind-power plant on the elevator shafts-- have been canceled due to lack of funding, an innovative ventilation-system remains in which air circulates through a system of concrete pipes embedded in the flooring similar to the system me di um successfully installed in the University of Film and Television in Potsdam-Babelsberg.
The transparent yet massive appearance of the 35,000m²  "sustainability center" has a bright-green ribbon exterior of coated recovered paper and the interior differentiated with colored clay walls and natural raw steel surfaces. The idea of variety as opposed to brand-culture can thus be effectively demonstrated without the whole market-concept dissolving into bazaar-like arbitrariness.

Comparing Vivo with more recent shopping-malls - for example, Herzog & de Meuron’s in the Basel soccer stadium, or the gas-holders in Vienna-- one is struck by the cleverly-modified contrast between external visible effort and internal lack of charm. Vivo’s gently undulating glass facade is neither affectedly over-assertive nor does the interior accord with the garish wretchedness of a “shop-till-you-drop” ambience. The homely Ottensen atmosphere merges with cosmopolitan modernity to produce architecture with a very humane quality about it.

Even if the "eco-mall" concept proves in the end to have failed, entrepreneurs will find a more exciting ambience here than in any other mall in the ECE.

(Till Briegleb in "Architecture in Hamburg, Yearbook 2003")