Hamburg is a city with a strong sense of self. In its design for the Empire Riverside Hotel, David Chipperfield Architects has created a building that reflects upon this. At once cosmopolitan and particular, it has the confidence to remain somewhat understated, in spite of its scale and the pivotal role it has in stitching together disparate pieces of urban fabric. One generally associates this deliberately reticent quality with the work of the practice, but in this instance it is a characteristic shared with the city itself.

Won in competition in 2002, the hotel and its adjacent commercial building collectively form the principal element of a 110 000 m2 development. Split across five plots, within an outline plan drawn up by the city, this development transforms the former Bavaria Brewery site, previously the largest industrial workplace within the inner city. The site’s introverted nature, a consequence of its former use, constituted an urban void, separating two highly divergent contexts. To the east, the grandeur of the commercial and institutional buildings of central Hamburg; to the north and west the domestically scaled, 19th century, working class district of St. Pauli, famous for the lurid reputation of its principal thoroughfare, the Reeperbahn.

Elsewhere in Hamburg, notably in the enormous Hafencity docklands redevelopment, a model of urbanism has been adopted that understands buildings not as tectonic components within a connective urban tissue, but rather as competing visual commodities. In contrast to this tendency, Chipperfield’s proposal for the hotel draws its immediate contexts into a dialogue, both programmatically and formally. Unfortunately, the architects of neighbouring plots have generally not chosen to follow this lead.

If this attitude is untypical of current practice, there are models for it in earlier phases of Hamburg’s development. Notably, a remarkable series of buildings in central Hamburg, of which the masterpiece is undoubtedly the Chilehaus, by German Expressionist architect Fritz Höger, 1922-24. This forms the centrepiece of the Kontorhausviertel, the first dedicated office district in Europe. Despite their different architects, their extended period of construction and their new sense of scale, completely filling their respective urban blocks; this group of buildings achieves a synthesis with their surroundings. Stepped forms relate to the contrasting scales of the immediate context, whilst material coherence is established through consistent use of dark, clinker brick.

The competition brief for the hotel required a minimum of 300 guest rooms; flexible conference spaces; a ballroom; generous public and lobby spaces including lounge, bar and restaurant; a spa; car parking for 260 cars and associated back of house space. Furthermore, the client wanted office and restaurant areas for commercial use, not directly connected to the hotel. The masterplan stipulated a 1000 m2 building footprint and a height of 70m. As with the Kontorhausviertel, these requirements do not immediately suggest a capacity to mediate between pieces of city.

Physically, the architects achieve this through a sequence of carefully scaled and connected volumes. The hotel plot is located at the western end of the larger site and the tower is placed hard against the eastern edge of this plot. Two gently splayed setbacks, struck at different levels across its East and West faces, establish a scale relationship to adjacent buildings within the masterplan and define the tower as a slender form facing the River Elbe. It makes a convincing ensemble with the sculpted brickwork of a new extension to the Bernhard Nocht Institute, by Architekten Kister Scheithauer Gross, which stands opposite. The asymmetrical placement of the tower maximises its distance from the four storey residential buildings on Davidstraße, running north/south along the Western perimeter of the site. Two equivalently scaled volumes address this streetscape, arranged around a new public space. One extends from the base of the tower; the other, a separate structure christened the Brauhaus, contains the additional commercial functions. A continuous façade of rhythmical, bronze construction unifies these displaced volumes.

Internally, the ground floor is defined by three rooms connected around a spine of staircase, forming a pleasing promenade. The three-storey lobby atrium has an almost classical feel, defined through a heavy, square section, concrete frame, it offers a sense of the mass of the tower above. Opening from the lobby, a horizontally proportioned bar has large windows to street and river. The third room is a small but vertically proportioned snug, complete with fireplace. This looks into the public space and leads back towards the reception.

At upper levels, the atrium gives access to the ballroom, conference suites and restaurant, with generous balconies providing ante spaces. These are accommodating, well-tempered rooms, employing a consistent, muted palette of materials. The primary elements being dark bitu-terrazzo floors, which run throughout, and walls lined in dark, ammonia smoked, oak boarding. Both materials have a pleasing, haptic quality and will patinate, offering a sense of equivalence to the bronze exterior. Next to them, white acoustic ceilings feel disappointingly banal.

Regardless of their individual qualities, the collective intention of these public rooms is to confront the visitor with the extraordinary landscape that the hotel surveys, dramatising and extending the moment of revelation. Arriving, you are swept under the corner of the building, a hollowed-out porte-cochere, with the river glimpsed between heavy concrete columns. Entering through tall, polished-copper doors, the lobby absorbs you into its own scale, leaving the exterior behind. Whilst the outside might be glimpsed again through adjacent spaces, for most arriving guests this suspension lasts until they unlock their bedroom door, where one is immediately drawn to the window.

The 328 rooms are in the tower, which rises above the city to offer breathtaking views. Here the building operates at a different scale, as a new figure on the city’s horizon. From the vast water landscape of the Elbe it appears as an elegant, vertical volume, taking its place within the celebrated Hafenkrone; the ensemble of prominent public buildings and church spires that define the Hamburg skyline. Simultaneously, the tower establishes relationships with other equivalently scaled objects. The enormous hulls of container ships which lie, disconcertingly suspended, in the dry docks, on the opposite bank of the river. At the very top, the tower wears its own crown, a lofty bar which allows the panoramic view to become a public event.

The distribution of mass across the site can be understood as a rational response to the divergent contexts that the building addresses. However the precise nuances of its articulation were developed through an iterative and intuitive process of testing and visual judgement. This is revealed in the many models through which the form of the project developed. Project director Christoph Felger describes the moment when the wrapping of a series of orthogonal volumes with tape and wire, undertaken as an attempt to describe a horizontally emphasised façade, unlocked the problem of how to dissolve the mass of the building. The horizontal definition, which investigated incorporating balconies, was later dropped in favour of the final, vertical articulation. However, the wrapped form continued to be refined through model-making, resulting in the subtle, geometrically shifting elements that define the character of the built piece.

Although unintentional, this evolving description of a rational but formally expressive volume is redolent of the characteristics so powerfully portrayed in the aforementioned Chilehaus. It is an echo which goes some way to explaining the strong sense that the hotel is a recognisably ‘Hamburg’ building.

The singular material expression and rhythmical character of the façades, further contributes to this impression. The solid, framing elements were intended to be extruded bronze sections, but economies resulted in these components becoming a ‘tectonic impression’ of 5mm raw bronze sheet. Despite this, the material offers the building an austere sensuality, responsive both to the exuberance of copper roofed church spires, the dull metallic sheen of ships hulls, and the rain-laden grey of a Hamburg sky. Particularly beautiful are the moments where panels have been replaced during construction. The brightness of the new bronze reveals a live material, recalling the toothing in of new stone on medieval cathedrals.

The completed façades, defined through a vertically emphasised beam and post structure with setback horizontals, suggest forces being brought to ground. However, the shifts in plane immediately undermine this impression and a glance at the section is enough to determine that these movements have no visible structural consequence. A further ambiguity defines the edges of each plane. Here the horizontal members are brought forward to sit flush, simultaneously registering the elevations as a skin; a series of surface ‘fields.’

In fact the façade assembly is a prefabricated system of room scale, self-supporting units. An aluminium substructure, itself hung from a steel section cast into the concrete structure, is wrapped by the pressed bronze components. The section of these components is defined practically by the need for impact resistance but equally provides constructional tolerance and visual depth.

The separate Brauhaus building illustrates the importance of this visual tolerance. Here, a slightly reduced sectional depth allows inaccuracies in the assembly process to become apparent. Indeed the relationship between the façades of the two buildings becomes an object lesson in such precise matters of judgement. On the Brauhaus, various small adjustments in proportion result in a visual transformation from frame to window/wall. Only subtly different, its elevations are nonetheless much less successful than those of the hotel.

Technically, the façade strives for a level of simplicity, with a few, synthesised elements resolving the complex interplay between acoustics, fire, solar gain, ventilation, structure and construction. This is the opposite approach to much contemporary façade engineering, which seeks to visually demonstrate this complexity through the layering of components. Instead, the hotel façades might be said to offer an elemental ‘image of construction.’ Beyond the superficial visual affinity, this intention engenders in them a distinctly Miesian attitude.

The façade defines the hotel at another scale: that of the bedroom. The original competition entry speculated on the relationship and degrees of openness between elements in a typical hotel room. As built, the rooms come closer to a sense of heightened normality. They follow a relatively typical arrangement that benefits from attention to detail. Pleasingly straightforward to use, they have only two light switches and a marked lack of technical clutter. This simplicity extends to the control of solar gain; a translucent inner curtain, with a slightly reflective outer face, works in conjunction with a pale sun filter in the glazing, allowing just the right amount of transmission and reflection. The rooms are perfectly quiet, with excellent acoustic insulation. The pre-fabricated, mosaic tiled bathrooms are spacious and well finished and the dark oak furniture is elegantly simple, combining the bed with a corner bench and table.

However, it is the window that dominates. Three, 800mm wide, full height openings are separated by two, 400mm wide, vertical piers. Scaled to the body, these proportions offset any feeling of vulnerability when standing against them. They offer stunning views, but height, weather, safety and aesthetics combine to preclude them opening. Instead you are offered perhaps the most beautiful moment in the building and one which overcomes any feeling that this is just another anonymous, hermetic hotel room. In the right hand pier, a hinged panel, identified by a simple latch, opens to reveal the back of the bronze façade, perforated to allow the sounds of the city and the breeze off the river to percolate into the interior. Whilst the rawness of this juxtaposition is exhilarating, even bad weather only produces a trickle of moisture down the back of the bronze and the faintest stirring of the curtains.

This small moment exemplifies the intention of the hotel to offer an authentic experience, at odds with the endlessly replicated, ‘decorated diagrams’ that dominate the industry. The building is culturally resistant to the idea of architecture as consumable and harks back to an understanding of the hotel as a civic and cultural edifice, with a sense of responsibility to the place in which it stands. In this it succeeds, with a laconic splendour.

Perhaps the last great iconic example of such an attitude might be Arne Jacobsen’s SAS hotel in Copenhagen. This building also offers a note of caution though, in that such uncompromising projects are often too fragile to be sustained and when they dissipate, what remains can seem ineffably sad. There is compromise, both commercial and architectural, at the Empire Riverside. Perhaps though, within the brittle, fantastical world of hotels, these only serve to make it more real; a level of reality that might lend its innate qualities robustness, in the fickle face of time and change.