Kontorhausviertel
Brick-expressionist office quarter of ship-prow towers built for a nitrate fortune and a city's trade.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Kontorhausviertel in Hamburg traces Henry Sloman, a trader who made a fortune in Chile's saltpeter mines in the 1890s and came home to Hamburg in 1898 one of its richest men. It follows how that money built the ship-prow tower called Chilehaus, raised between 1921 and 1924 by architect Fritz Hoger, and the district of brick office blocks that grew up around it. Sloman ran five mining camps in the Atacama Desert, worked by around six thousand laborers, before a tax break brought him home for good.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Sprinkenhof
Brick Expressionist office block with terracotta gulls and ships worked into its facade.
Chilehaus
Ship-prowed brick office tower with a nonstop open-air lift still in daily use.
Dockland
Ship-shaped office block over a river, with a free public staircase to a rooftop viewpoint.
Speicherstadt
Neo-gothic brick warehouse district on oak piles, built as a duty-free storage zone for global trade goods.
Mönckebergstraße
Wide commercial boulevard cut through a demolished slum quarter, lined with grand early-twentieth-century office buildings.
Speicherstadtmuseum
Museum inside a working brick warehouse, showing how sacks of coffee, tea and spices moved through a duty-free trading district.