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MyZeil [guided tour]

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philzucker

philzucker

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Last week I visited a fairly new shopping mall in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. The mall "myZeil" is located at the main shopping street in Frankfurt, the Zeil - hence the name. It opened end of February this year, and its quite spectacular architecture - it was built by the Italian architect Massimiliano Fuksas - attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors, 120.000 of them on its first opening day!

So what is so spectacular about that mall that it draws so many people? Well, you're about to see. All pictures taken with K20D and DA10-17, and quite lot of panos among those ...

First a view from the outside - at first glance a normal glass façade, fairly common with modern buildings. But a second glance shows that something unusual has happened here: did someone throw an extra large ball at the façade? There is a big hole in it, and through it you can actually see the sky!



Okay, let's go indoors to find more about that damaged façade. Entering the building we're confronted with a set of Colani-style escalators, and looking upwards we see a set of elliptical shaped openings - and we catch a glimpse of a glass funnel that must belong to that opening in the façade we saw at the outside:



So let's jump on the longest elevator starting from the ground level, promising us a 46 meter ride up to the top level of the mall:



Looking down see the elliptical openings and the different levels of the mall give an impressive view:



But that's nothing compared to the view we get once we've reached the top level:



Now let's step back a bit to see more of the top level, giving a quite spectacular view of the whole roof construction - which is made out of 3.200 large glass triangles, BTW. We now see - looking towards the front of the building - that the glass funnel coming from the outside is connected to second one diving deep into the mall - on the far right you see the escalator we just came up with:



Another view of the top level, this time nearer the front of the building:



And moving back towards the restaurant area of the mall we get this nice backlit view of the construction:



Now our tour comes to its end with two final views of the mall - this one from the top level:



… and this one from a middle level:



BTW: The second funnel - the one that "dives" into the mall and is seen in this last pic - is used for collecting rain water. The collected water is not discarded, but used for sanitary functions of the building, e.g. flushing toilets.

Hope you enjoyed the tour!

And happy shopping next time in Frankfurt … ;-)

Phil

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GMT +1
http://www.pbase.com/phsan
 
Phil,

What a pleasant change to see a mall (or indeed any commercial building) that is not an oblong box. Your lens and your shooting display all the aesthetics of the place so well. Well done to you - and to the Italian designer.
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regards,
ife
http://www.pbase.com/iberg
 
Nice mall, very nice pictures, but it looks like a windowwashers nightmare.
 
Amazing design & photography Phil, ditto for the window washers headache.
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Regards Dean - Capturing Creation
 
Another great series Phil!

Did you use tripod and panohead or did you guestimate handheld? I suppose you are getting sufficiently good to go handheld, but still I can imagine, with all those lines running from the foreground to the background, you spent quite a few hours in Photoshop painting away all parallax problems?

cya, Wim

--
Belgium, GMT+1

 
Wow, looks good! Reminds me a bit of the buildings I saw in Japan, also many levels, much glass, large and long elevators, but less organic forms.
It's a four hours drive from here, a bit much for a day trip..
--
Menno
 
Ishpuini said:
Another great series Phil!
Click to expand...
Thanks, Wim!
Ishpuini said:
Did you use tripod and panohead or did you guestimate handheld? I suppose you are getting sufficiently good to go handheld, but still I can imagine, with all those lines running from the foreground to the background, you spent quite a few hours in Photoshop painting away all parallax problems?
Click to expand...
Well, let's see. All done hand held; #2, 6, 7 and 8 are the pano shots.
  • No. 2: One red neon line at the ceiling (top right corner) was broken and had to be repaired with a patch.
  • No. 6: No parallax editing needed. Or to be more precise: Haven't discovered the errors yet! :-)
  • No. 7: The lines on the floor at the bottom didn't match - here I didn't edit, but decided to crop away the offending parallax errors. The floor was large enough anyway ... ;-)
  • No. 8: No parallax editing needed. Same caveat as for #6 applies here too, of course.
I've learned to handle the DA10-17@10mm better by now, but I'm far from perfect. The most ambitious pano - a 360 degree one from a viewpoint near to the one of #6 - was beyond repair because of those parallax beasts, and of course isn't shown here. I had the handrail of one of the openings very close to me and in full view, and here my hand held technique clearly showed its limits. I do have to work on this!

Apart from that the DA10-17 really lends itself for hand held pano work, because its entrance pupil is very near the front at 10mm, and with some care I'm able to rotate approximately around this point.

One additional thing: Don't look too close at the people at the two escalators in #2. There are lots of little ones on the right escalator, and in real life they aren't dwarves at all - but in the pano they are! Since #2 is composed of 5 single shots, movement on the escalators was a real problem. The "dwarf solution" on the right one is not really satisfying, the "pano twin" solution on the left one neither. Maybe I'll tackle this again sometime ...

--
GMT +1
http://www.pbase.com/phsan
 
Great images of a wonderfully innovative design. I can imagine this being worth a revisit, even though the first set of images are outstanding. How's Frankfurt otherwise, is it a worthwhile place to visit from a photographic point of view (old and new architecture, parks, lively culture?). Having had the privilege of visiting Berlin recently, and wanting to go back, I'm wondering about other cities in Germany. Munchen, maybe, or Hamburg?

Thanks for posting these images - great pano work.
 
iberg said:
What a pleasant change to see a mall (or indeed any commercial building) that is not an oblong box. Your lens and your shooting display all the aesthetics of the place so well. Well done to you - and to the Italian designer.
Click to expand...
Indeed congrats to the architect - and thanks for your comments!

I've seen a lot of innovative architecture in the last years here in Europe; on one hand it's nice that a commercial building shows such great ideas, on the other hand I somehow have the feeling that this sort of architecture is a bit wasted on a "mere" shopping mall. Would be great for a museum IMO, with the glass roofed top level as a special exhibition area! :-)

Phil

--
GMT +1
http://www.pbase.com/phsan
 
glasbak said:
Nice mall, very nice pictures, but it looks like a windowwashers nightmare.
Click to expand...
Indeed! But I do hope that they have some sort of lotus effect applied to the windows, so that there will only be a minimum of external cleaning necessary.

The guy you see in the last pic in the glass funnel is not a window washer, BTW. He was doing some maintainance work, tightening screws and applying some weather sealing - at least it looked like it. Rumours have it that the roof is a bit plagued by water leakage ...

Phil
--
GMT +1
http://www.pbase.com/phsan
 
mvb123 said:
Wow, looks good! Reminds me a bit of the buildings I saw in Japan, also many levels, much glass, large and long elevators, but less organic forms.
It's a four hours drive from here, a bit much for a day trip..
Click to expand...
Indeed that's a bit too far for a day trip. If you have more time you could include downtown Frankfurt after or before traveling along the beautiful Rhine river - not far from Frankfurt. Watch out for some Rhein pics I'll hopefully be able to post in the next few days! (Shameless plug ends here ...) ;-)

And thanks for your comment.
--
GMT +1
http://www.pbase.com/phsan
 
demondata said:
Great images of a wonderfully innovative design. I can imagine this being worth a revisit, even though the first set of images are outstanding. How's Frankfurt otherwise, is it a worthwhile place to visit from a photographic point of view (old and new architecture, parks, lively culture?). Having had the privilege of visiting Berlin recently, and wanting to go back, I'm wondering about other cities in Germany. Munchen, maybe, or Hamburg?
Click to expand...
Well, well - you'll find wonderful picture opportunities in each of these cities.

Frankfurt has a added a lot of new architecture recently, and meanwhile sure is worth a visit because of that - wouldn't have necessarily said that maybe 15 or 20 years ago. Cultural life has been traditionally rich, and still is IMO.

If you visit Frankfurt be sure to include a view from Main tower, a large high rise building in the heart of Downtown Frankfurt. This pano was taken in December 2006:


demondata said:
Thanks for posting these images - great pano work.
Click to expand...
Thanks!

Phil

--
GMT +1
http://www.pbase.com/phsan
 
Well, firstly, what an outstanding and stunning set of images!!!! - as usual, Phil. :-)

Secondly, what an outstanding and stunning building!!
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Lance B
http://www.pbase.com/lance_b

 
philzucker said:
Apart from that the DA10-17 really lends itself for hand held pano work, because its entrance pupil is very near the front at 10mm, and with some care I'm able to rotate approximately around this point.
Click to expand...
Hmm. Reminds me I should use the DA10-17 more for this kind of work. Somehow my new found love for the DA15 made me leave the DA10-17 out of my bag more often so I use it less.
philzucker said:
One additional thing: Don't look too close at the people at the two escalators in #2. There are lots of little ones on the right escalator, and in real life they aren't dwarves at all - but in the pano they are! Since #2 is composed of 5 single shots, movement on the escalators was a real problem. The "dwarf solution" on the right one is not really satisfying, the "pano twin" solution on the left one neither. Maybe I'll tackle this again sometime ...
Click to expand...
Pano twins are fun in my book, the dwarfs are another thing... Though they are sufficiently small so they don't bother me. Yet another thing to keep an eye on when shooting a pano... No easy business heh... ;-)

Wim

--
Belgium, GMT+1

 
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