Today, 28 November 2019, is the opening of the first building of the Hamburg Innovation Port. It's the first step of a new, development in Channel Hamburg, the Hanse City’s southern high-tech hub, designed by MVRDV and Berlin-based morePlatz architects, who won the competition for the development of a dense and programmatic mixed-use urban plan in 2016.

The 20,000m2 site for Hamburg Innovation Port, developed by HC Hagemann, is located on Blohmstrasse, on the banks of old Harburger Schloss in the Channel Hamburg development. Around 60,000m2 of gross floor space will be built over several construction phases for more than 2,500 jobs and the planned expansion of Hamburg University of Technology (TUHH). It is also intended to facilitate the networking of business and science and offer an ideal environment to establish a vibrant start-up scene. Through its 1.35m grid, the masterplan of HIP offers enough flexibility to change the programme at any point throughout its realisation and allows enterprises of all sizes to occupy the various buildings. This flexibility is an essential characteristic, enabling each of the five buildings to be realised individually.

The first completed building at Blohmstrasse 15 is conceived as two stacked volumes which combined have a gross floor area of 6,000m2. It provides offices of different sizes, and on the 2nd floor includes laboratories for TU Hamburg and a start-up for Robotics. The ground floor area, with a transparent glass façade, hosts the Institute for Waste Management of the TUHH, forming an interesting dialogue with the city while the upper part of the building is clad with a ventilated tile façade. 

The completion of the first building marks the first step in the completion of what founding partner of MVRDV Jacob van Rijs envisions as a high density area “to create a vibrant neighbourhood and to make the best use of this fantastic location at the waterside, a former cattle food factory site.”

Image (c) Allard van der Hoek