Multiple appointment
Design concept draft
Client
Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg
Architecture
Peter Bohn Architects
Visualisations
Peter Bohn Architects with DAY & LIGHT
Completion of design concept
2025
Project Team DAY & LIGHT
Frank Vetter
Thorben Hansson
Our idea is ultimately very simple: we are not building anything new or additional – we are only gently enhancing the tunnel entrances – but are instead thoroughly colouring what is already there and stimulating the colours with a well-thought-out lighting concept. In this way, we define clear, fearless spaces of unambiguous geometry for pedestrians and cyclists, while cars simply penetrate the peat-brown marshland…
We borrow the colours from the nature surrounding Oberbillwerder. From impressionistic shimmering and flickering, we extract the colour worlds that, as an abstraction, will henceforth shape the design of the underpasses. These include a watery blue, the blooming orange of robust grasses and iron oxide, and the peaty brown-black of the moor, the marsh.
Both tunnels have their own unique identity through colour; the neighbouring and co-existing moor brown (we imagine the colour like the shell of a chestnut found after a long winter under melting snow...) with the watery blue and the vibrant orange-yellow. The moor black elegantly enhances the luminosity of the other two and creates clear zoning for road users.
The perception of an underpass is defined primarily by light. Therefore, the demands on lighting quality are no less than in a museum or an art installation. During the day, despite high luminance differences between outside and inside, and in the evenings, the interplay of form, structure, colour, and light creates a positive experience – more than a purely functional crossing of the railway embankment. The light sources are positioned as continuous light bands at the interfaces of the space, providing soft and warm illumination. They highlight contrast and material changes there, while the illuminated space within dissolves in contour and form. The light bands are glare-free with longitudinally arranged louvres.
In the western pedestrian tunnel, the idea of Vibrant City through the offer of an integrated boulder space, as well as some additional offerings, it should probably be met.
