Hild und K

“Groovy” – An administrative building from the fifties, close to Munich’s Central Station, which accommodated takeaway eateries, cheap shops and the city drug squad was in severe disrepair and had to be torn down. In its place, Hild und K Architekten were commissioned by Bayerische Hausbau GmbH & Co. KG to construct a new building and to thus close the perimeter development at the corner of Bayer and Goethestrasse. When you now leave the station to the south, you face an eight-storey hotel building with a restaurant and lobby on the ground floor. The unusual relief on the façade is a real eye catcher. The tongue-in-cheek name given by Andreas Hild, Dionys Ottl and Matthias Haber to this design principle is “groovy”!

The outer skin of the building is covered with cross-shaped concrete panels, whose optical and haptic appearance resembles natural sand stone. Sand from the Main river and Jura Krone as additional materials create golden-yellow hues, the surfaces at the base were sandblasted and acid-treated on the upper floors. The edges of the individual elements are at right angles to the windows arranged in between.

Although the number of grooves in the facade could be reduced to a large extent, the basic dilemma of having grooves, which could be visually distracting, was not completely avoidable. The solution was to “face the music”! The profiled edges of the panels form curved cornices where they join, the “problem areas” are elevated to become ornamental. Simultaneously, there is an attractive transition of the traditionally horizontal building form into the vertical. The netlike relief thus created integrates the varying width of the windows of the different rooms inside and counterpoises the rhythm of the façade grid, like an offbeat.

The aluminium window frames and sills with their dark brown metallic powder coating contrast the otherwise light façade and accentuate the rhythm of their structure. The window front of the hotel on the ground floor is designed using the same colouring and materials. Reminiscent of the arcades that used to be there, the main entrance has been set back. This creates a protected space outside the actual entrance area.

The 184 hotel rooms are all on the upper floors, where some are grouped around a quiet courtyard, some facing towards the inside of the block in an additional wing of the building. Despite being situated in the centre of the city, the guests have sufficient room to retreat and relax. A steep mansard roof spans two floors. In this way there is space for hotel rooms across the whole top floor and the extensive technical systems for the house are concealed in the attic. The flat roofs looking out to both courtyards have been lavishly planted. Due to the close quarters in the city centre, deliveries to the hotel are made through a small access road at Goethestrasse and pass through a neighbouring property, which had previously been used by a petrol station in the former building.
In the basement, there is a garage with approximately 49 parking spaces, at the second basement level there are changing rooms, storage and technical service areas.

This hotel, run by the Aloft chain since August 2015, has become a new attractive landmark on the south side of Munich’s Central Station.