Friday 12, April
Giant vertical garden to replace exploded aquarium at Berlin Radisson hotel
Back in December 2022, The Radisson Collection Hotel near Alexanderplatz made international headlines when its central 16-metre-high indoor aquarium burst, sending some 1,500 fish and a million litres of water flooding into the hotel lobby and onto the street outside. The hotel has been closed since then, but plans for a new lobby centrepiece have now been announced.
The new concept was announced on Thursday by the property owner, Union Investment Real Estate GmbH. “When it reopens, probably at the end of the year, a 16-metre-high vertical garden, reaching up to the sixth floor and covering around 120 square metres, will form the new centrepiece of the hotel lobby,” said spokesman Fabian Hellbusch.
The installation is set to feature almost 2,000 plants of 22 different species arranged on 36 tree-like vertical slats, complete with dramatic lighting which will change over the course of the day.
This “living tree” is designed to make use of as much of the aquarium’s remaining material as possible. According to Union Investment, by reusing the still-intact 150-ton-concrete base of the aquarium, “high CO2 emissions that would have resulted from demolition, removal and disposal have been avoided”.
After the dramatic aquarium explosion, experts had begun examining hundreds of acrylic fragments of the exploded aquarium tank to try and determine the cause of the accident. But the investigation was closed in October 2023 when experts couldn’t come to a clear conclusion. The 90 tons of acrylic glass is planned to be recycled by a certified waste disposal company this summer. At this time, Union Investment has declined to make the cost of the lobby rebuild public.
Source: Berliner Morgenpost
