The new "the niu" hotel, with its dominant shape of a square opening to the west, forms the prelude to the newly emerging "Speicherstadt Nord". Located not far from the Havel, the new building is an important urban building block between the Telegrafenberg and the historic city center with the state parliament in the rebuilt castle façade and the Nikolai Church by Karl Friedrich Schinkel. The slightly angled east façade on Heinrich-Mann-Allee forms the powerful frontage to the main railway station. The name "the niu Amity" is derived from "friendship", which refers to the friendship island opposite in the Havel.

The connection is made via the Long Bridge, whose rising course is echoed by the rising eaves of the building. The design of the hotel was the result of an expert opinion process to which five architectural firms were invited and which was won by wolff:architekten from Berlin. The new hotel belongs to the Hamburg-based Novum Group, which operates 150 hotels across Europe with around 20,000 beds. The prescribed roof pitches were designed as an unconventionally polygonal sloping roof landscape, resulting in a dynamic building figure with rising and falling eaves. A passageway was planned for the inner, publicly usable square to provide pedestrian access to the office and residential areas behind it. This is achieved by means of a bridge-like and column-free construction on the station side, which invites pedestrians to pass through with the glass façade leading diagonally into the interior of the block. An open staircase, which overcomes the height difference of six meters on the construction site, leads to a shopping arcade in the glazed base level. A restaurant, bakery, food stores and co-working spaces will be located here in the future.

The silver maple planted on the resulting city square forms the "green link" on the way from Potsdam's main railway station to the new "Speicherstadt Nord" district. The tree, which divides into three codominant shoots of roughly equal thickness near the base of the root, is a natural yet graphic architectural element whose plant trough extends through the entire building to the groundwater. The hotel building has four upper floors and two basement floors. The 198 rooms of "the niu Amity" hotel are arranged in a ring around the central outdoor area. The hotel offer is complemented by the long-stay residential area "acora Potsdam Living the City", whose 72 apartments will primarily serve the scientists of the nearby "Albert Einstein Science Park". The building won the international Liv Hospitality Design Award 2023 in the "Hotel Economy" category and was nominated for the German Design Award 2025 in the "Architecture" category.

www.wolffarchitekten.com

Photos:
wolff:architekten / Johannes Armanazi

(Published in CUBE Berlin 03|24)