Kompressorenhalle Süd

Down the shaft

Read this venue the way the pit was worked

Scroll and the page descends. The gauge on the left reads the live depth in metres; each level of the old shaft carries one part of what you need to know about the building above it.

Schacht Dellwig I · 0–694 m

1. Pit bank · Depth ±0 m

   Level entry, which is rarer here than it sounds

   On a colliery almost nothing is step-free; this hall is. Guests come off the yard straight onto the hall floor, wheelchairs included, with no lift, no ramp and no separate entrance. That single fact makes it our default room for public and corporate audiences.

2. First level · Depth 160 m

   Four machines that set the rhythm

   The compressors stand on their tiled foundations down the centre line, so the room reads as two long naves rather than one box. Most productions put the stage across the short axis and use the machines as the audience division; it works better than a plan on paper suggests.

3. Second level · Depth 330 m

   Compressed air ran the whole pit

   Electricity was dangerous underground, so these machines pushed air down the shaft to drive the hammers, the pumps and the haulage. Everything a miner touched at the coal face moved because of this hall. It is the least spectacular building on the site and, mechanically, the most important one.

4. Third level · Depth 505 m

   Daylight, and how to get rid of it

   Nine arched windows give a genuinely good conference room by day. For a screening or a show we fit surveyed blackout panels in about three hours; they are stored on site, so a daytime conference and an evening show in the same room is a normal booking rather than a difficult one.

5. Shaft bottom · Depth 694 m

   From €7,800 a day

   An event day for up to 300 guests starts at €7,800 including hall, heating, power distribution, blackout and site management. If you have also booked the rooftop deck, this hall is already reserved as your wet-weather room and is charged at the held rate rather than a second full day.