A volume no passer-by expects
You step in from an ordinary street into a high galleried hall.
Agrewe — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Ajepbah — CC BY-SA 3.0 de · Andrzej Otrębski — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Fred Romero from Paris, France — CC BY 2.0
A building of 1847 in central Hamburg, built as the main post office, and among the few things to survive the fire of 1842 and what followed. Alexis de Chateauneuf designed it in the neo-Renaissance manner, and in its day it was a modern administrative building: an inner courtyard roofed in glass and iron, with wide passages designed for the movement of mail and carriages. That technique — iron and glass in a public building — was entirely new in the 1840s. What makes it worth entering today is that courtyard: a high covered space with galleries on several floors, now used for shops, offices and cafés. You step in from the street and find yourself in a volume no passer-by expects. This is a Hamburg pattern: the city is full of covered passages and inner courtyards linking street to street — the legacy of a rainy climate and a trade that needed covered space. The courtyard is free to enter during working hours.
You step in from an ordinary street into a high galleried hall.
Among the few survivals of Hamburg before the post-1842 rebuilding.
The city is full of covered courtyards linking streets — a legacy of rain and trade.
Poststraße, central Hamburg
A network of inner courtyards and arcades cutting through the centre's buildings and linking street to street, most from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The best known are the Alsterarkaden near the lake, a continuous run of glazed arcades with shops. It is genuinely possible to cross a large part of central Hamburg without stepping into the rain — which was the point.
No. It is a five-minute step in from the street to look at the courtyard, within a walk through the centre. But it earns those minutes because it is entirely invisible from outside — an ordinary passer-by has no idea a hall lies behind the facade.
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