City-Haus

City-Haus is a 42-storey 142 m (466 ft) skyscraper in the Westend-Süd district of Frankfurt, Germany. It was constructed from 1971 to 1974 and designed by architects Johannes Krahn and Richard Heil. Today it is part of the headquarters of DZ Bank.

History

City-Haus is also known under the name Selmi-Hochhaus after the Persian owner Ali Selmi. The project was very controversial. On the night of 23 August 1973, a fire broke out in the upper floors of the building shell fire, which was widely visible throughout the city and attracted many onlookers. The fire was put out until eight hours later, as the Frankfurt Fire Department at that time was not yet equipped for fire fighting in this amount. Many onlookers cheered the fire ("Citizens for Fire"), students should even satirical songs ("Today, we have to burn the Selmi be small cottages intoned"). Arson was later called, however, unlikely as the cause of the fire, apparently a defective welding was the woodwork of the 40th and 41 Floor set on fire. This fire was the starting point of modern fire protection for buildings in Germany and the start of the career of the chief fire fighter Ernst Achilles.

In 1976, the DG Bank (today: DZ Bank) purchased the tower and set up their headquarters there. In 1985, a seven-storey building called City-Haus II was built on the adjoining property and in 1993 the DZ Bank also moved in the newly built Westend Tower.

Construction

The building has a reinforced concrete structural frame. It consists of a centrally arranged core group with external dimensions of 17.4 m × 14.2 m and two mutually offset storey wings, each 40 m long and 14.1 m wide. Apart from the core to bear in each tract four columns arranged inside the vertical loads. Rule projectiles have a height of 3.2 m. The floor slabs are T-beam construction. The plate thickness varies between 10 cm and 20 cm, the total construction height of 40 cm and 60 cm. The tower stands on a thick bottom plate up to 4.15 m, with 2000 m² of floor space.

Renovation

From October 2007 to December 2008, City-Haus was redesigned by Christoph Mäckler fully rehabilitated and was thereby a new facade and an overall brighter appearance. During the conversion time could damage the renter will be minimized because the new facade was suspended during the week from outside the Altfassade and Altfassade was just on the weekends. The new facade of the building, reducing energy consumption by around 35 percent. The cost of the renovation were US$53 million.

Text imported from Wikipedia article "City-Haus" and modified on 23 July 2019 under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license.