Eden Tower has received the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat's Best Tall Building Award of Excellence, the most consequential recognition the project has earned to date.
The 98-meter, 28-story residential tower at the eastern edge of Frankfurt's Europaviertel was designed as an inquiry into how vertical density and continuous landscape can occupy the same structural rhythm. The result is one of the highest green residential façades in Europe — more than 2,000 square meters of living walls, planted at grade and carried unbroken up the elevation. The crystalline balconies that articulate the perimeter are not punctuation between the planted bays; they are part of the same façade system, detailed for the German climate's freeze-thaw cycles.
CTBUH recognition arrives in a year when Eden has also been named a Gold Winner of the Global Future Design Awards and shortlisted for The Plan Awards alongside 1000M, JAHN's Chicago landmark-district tower. Taken together, the three honors mark a moment of consolidation for the firm's residential portfolio — a portfolio that now extends from Veer Towers in Las Vegas, through 50 West in New York, to 1000M in Chicago, and now to Eden at the edge of a German city remaking itself in vertical.
Photography by Roman Gerike has documented Eden across the seasons, recording how the vegetation reads differently in March than in September — a record of the building behaving the way the design intended.
The CTBUH award affirms a thesis JAHN has been testing for two decades: that a tall residential building's relationship to its city is not given by its silhouette but by what its façade does for the people who use it and the streetscape that has to live with it every day.
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