New city entrance: WestEndTower

Dortmund

The most important element of Dortmund’s new city entrance is the new 28-storey WestEndTower. In addition to its function as a landmark and city entrance, its significant appearance makes it an unmistakable and memorable symbol of the new Dortmund on the B1.

Based on the overall urban design concept, the tower appears as an ensemble of slabs of different heights. From the driver’s point of view, this makes it appear as a multitude of high-rise buildings, which further enhances its urban conciseness.

The staggered heights of the panes not only emphasize the pane facing B1 with its additional elevation of the antenna through its actual height. The perspective view of the driver makes the building appear even stronger and more significant as a vertical landmark and entrance to the city.

The reason for the staggering is not only the urban planning clarity but also the inner logic of the high-rise building. In the lower storeys, a broad functional base of the high-rise building is formed, similar to a plinth, in which semi-public uses such as conferences and meetings or staff restaurants are located in addition to the possible standard use as cellular, combined or open-plan offices.

Furthermore, the staggered height of the building enables an optimized structural system. The building also changes its static depth in line with the proportion of horizontal forces increasing vertically from top to bottom. The three individual panes are only connected to each other in the intermediate storeys via two or four St. Andrew’s crosses and stiffen each other.

The building opens up to the visitor as an open and glazed continuation of the plaza, which continues into the building on the first floor and offers a magnificent and unobstructed view over the Emscher valley.

The two glass atriums rise above the first floor, the entrance atrium with a large open staircase to the conference areas is 14 stories high, the tower atrium between the two high windows and the glazed elevators for the employees is even 28 stories high.

The clear division into a semi-public atrium on the plaza and a separate atrium for the office windows, which meets today’s security requirements, enables a clear but discreet separation of the different users without appearing forbidding and unapproachable from the outside. In addition, the uniqueness of the atriums allows optimum orientation at any time and at any point in the building.

The semi-public uses can be accessed and operated separately via the entrance atrium. They represent a functionally self-contained unit that can be opened up to the public, extended or reduced again in different staggered storeys as required.

On the mezzanine floors of the windows, which stand out from the outside as clear caesuras for the observer, there is the possibility of setting up representation and distribution floors, which can be connected to individual rental units as a sky lobby and foyer. These floors are statically connected to each other in the atrium area and serve to stiffen the building.

By arranging the bracing cores on the narrow sides, the office floor plans remain open and unobstructed and can be divided into rental units of different sizes. The floors can be interconnected in any desired form and, in addition to the large glass elevators in the tower atrium, can be linked via internal staircases.

In order to emphasize the urbanistic conciseness of the WestEndTower in the floor plans, large, representative and glazed meeting rooms are placed in a vertical band in front of the urban spine on every second floor, following the classic type of bay window. These Sky Rooms offer a 270° panoramic view of the Emscher Valley, the university as far as Bochum and Dortmund city center.

From a building services point of view, the building is also designed for high flexibility with optimized energy savings, as should have long been standard in future-oriented high-rise projects used as high-quality rental properties. An intelligent system of decentralized air conditioning and building technology reduces the necessary shaft cross-sections and sub-distributions and enables each individual user to control their personal workplace quickly and individually.