Vodafone Campus Deutschland

Düsseldorf, Germany

Photo © Ralph Richter

Architects: HPP Architects

Location: Düsseldorf, Germany
Year: 2012
Client: VCD-Realisierungs-GmbH & Co.KG ein Unternehmen der ZECH GROUP Bremen
Gross floor area: 108.276 m² gesamt
Competition: 2003, 1st prize
Green Building: LEED Gold sought

On the left bank of the Rhine, on the brownfield site of a former brewery in the Heerdt quarter of Düsseldorf, stands the new headquarters for Vodafone Germany, which brings the various departments of the company, previously scattered across the city, together in one campus. With a seventy-five-meter-high elliptical office tower, the complex, conceived for a total of 4,700 workstations, is a new landmark that provides a striking entrance to the west of the city and assumes a place in Düsseldorf’s tradition of high-rise buildings.

In conjunction with the radially curved building wing immediately adjacent to it, the nineteen-story high-rise follows the course of the nearby highway and forms the backbone of the ensemble. The defining characteristic are the horizontally structured façades with variably oriented external shading elements of white, perforated aluminum sheets that convey the company’s corporate identity, an impression of speed and dynamism. Behind this block of buildings, which shields the rest of the complex from the road, a large plaza opens up to form the central point of the ensemble; the two longitudinal sides of the plaza are bordered by perimeter buildings of seven to nine stories. The office blocks have a depth of about twenty meters, allowing for a flexible, modular division of the open-plan, communicative spatial structure. With a restaurant facing the plaza and a new landscape design that provides direct access to the public, the campus also possesses urban qualities that contribute to employee identification with Vodafone.