City Tower Essen, High-rise office building in Essen, Germany.
City Tower Essen, now known as Magna Tower, is a 15-storey office high-rise about 57 metres tall, built 1961–1963 to a design by Friedrich Wilhelm Kraemer west of Limbecker Platz. A glass curtain wall fronts a steel-concrete skeleton, and a flat two-storey base building sits in front of the tower, a composition modelled on New York's Lever House. Each floor offers around 700 square metres of usable space.
The tower was completed in 1963 by architect Friedrich Wilhelm Kraemer during Germany's period of economic expansion and urban renewal. Its construction marked Essen's transition from a post-war industrial city toward a modern commercial center.
The tower was designed for the Iduna insurance company, which gave it its first name, Iduna-Hochhaus. Until Karstadt's new headquarters opened in Schuir in 1969, part of that company was housed here. From 1999 to 2014 the financial services firm GFKL occupied the building, and since 2017 it has been named after its owner, Magna Immobilien AG.
The tower is centrally located in Essen with good public transportation access from nearby train stations and bus stops. The surrounding area offers restaurants, shops, and other office buildings that make it easy to navigate the commercial district.
The building's two-part composition—a 15-storey glass slab set behind a low, flat two-storey base—follows the Lever House in New York, which also served as a model for Essen's Postbank-Hochhaus. The west side is adjoined by a parking garage with 535 spaces.
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