Chilehaus

About this audio guide

This guide to the Chilehaus in Hamburg centers on the paternoster, an open elevator with no doors whose compartments never stop moving, and the split-second timing riders have used to jump aboard since the building opened in nineteen twenty-four. It also follows the money behind the tower: Henry Sloman, who sailed to Chile in eighteen sixty-nine to mine saltpetre and came home decades later to hire architect Fritz Höger for a building the city would never forget. Craftsmen laid four million eight hundred thousand dark bricks by hand, with as many as four thousand of them working the site at once.