Hilton Hotel in Frankfurt - VINCI Construction Grands Projets

Background

The project is the upshot of a call for tenders issued internationally by the city of Frankfurt to rehabilitate and showcase a site on which stood a municipal swimming pool, a designated historical monument built in the early 1950s.
Campenon Bernard SGE’s project, which included building a Hilton Hotel, was selected from among the competing submissions. In accordance with an agreement with the city, the municipal swimming pool, now located inside the hotel, is open to the city’s residents five days a week and is accessible to the public through a dedicated entrance.

Technical overview

To achieve this project, it was necessary to demolish an adjacent building (a designated historical monument). Following demolition works, two buildings had to be erected: the hotel (40 m high, 13 storeys) and the rebuilt swimming-pool building.
The structure of the hotel includes an atrium rising to about 40 metres in height. The atrium is covered by a glass roof from top to street level. The façade is in glass and aluminium with one section in stapled stone.
The foundations consist of 140 piles, each 1.2 metres in diameter and driven 10 metres deep.
To seal the foundations and protect them from water infiltration, the “baignoire blanche” (“white bathtub”) method was used, whereby layers of concrete are covered with a plasticiser that evacuates air and makes the concrete watertight.

The building’s standout architectural feature is its 40-metre atrium whose glass casing provides coverage from the roof to the ground-level floor. Two other outstanding features are the glass and aluminium façade, a section of which is stapled stone, and cantilevered rooms.

IMPACT

The hotel was inaugurated on January 26, 1999. On that date, Hilton International and Campenon Bernard SGE, which became the VINCI Group in 2000, signed an exclusivity agreement for further hotel construction around the world.
The agreement recognises Campenon Bernard SGE/VINCI’s ability to organise and manage complex financial and technical operations. It also reflects its longstanding cooperation with the Hilton Group.