Elbtower, Hamburg

The Elbtower was supposed to be Hamburg’s tallest building. Since the end of October 2023 it has instead been a 100-metre concrete shell at the eastern tip of HafenCity, beside the Elbbrücken rail station, with cranes standing over a site where nothing moves.

David Chipperfield Architects designed it, with Christoph Felger leading, for Signa Prime, the property arm of René Benko’s Signa group. The original Elbtower scheme reached 245 metres and 64 storeys, with about 104,000 square metres of office and hotel space and a total cost Reuters put at about €950 million. Finished, it would have been the third-tallest building in Germany, behind two Frankfurt towers.

Project Scope

Construction began in 2021 with Adolf Lupp as general contractor. The form is unusual for a tower: a four-to-five-storey podium on a roughly triangular plot along the Norderelbe, upper floors stepping back above it, and a slim shaft rising from that base whose top storeys shift again toward the northeast.

Then the money stopped. Lupp halted work at the end of October 2023 over unpaid invoices. Signa Holding’s insolvency followed that winter, and the Elbtower project company filed on 19 January 2024. Under the land sale, the filing opened a path for the city to use its repurchase rights.

A consortium led by Hamburg developer Dieter Becken, with Lupp among its members, has been negotiating with the insolvency administrator since December 2024. Its scheme cuts the tower to about 199 metres by dropping twelve office floors. The anchor tenant would be a natural history museum, the Evolutioneum of the Leibniz Institute for the Analysis of Biodiversity Change, taking roughly 46,000 square metres in the lower part of the building. The city has set a fixed price of up to €595 million for that space, payable only once the building is finished. In February 2026 the building permit was extended to 23 March 2029.

Why It Matters

A stalled tower is expensive to leave standing, and this one sits at the city’s front door. The rescue also inverts the original pitch. The Elbtower was sold as a privately financed landmark, and the plan to finish it now rests on a public museum buying nearly half the floor area.

In January 2026 the parties talked about completion in 2029. As of mid-August 2026, there was still no date to restart construction, and the cranes hadn’t moved.

Project Team & Details