Peek & Cloppenburg (P&C) department store, Köln, Germany
Renzo Piano Building Workshop, Architects

Funny how the position of lamp-posts help define a composition. As I wanted the traffic in the foreground to be 'moving = blurred', and of course didn't have a tripod with me, then I had to rely on street-lights to lean up against. The result is a series of pictures at ca. 25 m intervals.

From this perspective, one gets a real feeling of the facade functioning as a giant glass bubble protecting the flat planes of the floors.

One of the few glass buildings where the term 'transparent' even comes close to describing the structure.

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........is a lot of traffic

Peek & Cloppenburg (P&C) department store, Köln, Germany
Renzo Piano Building Workshop, Architects

I wanted to 'portrait' this building this way, as the sublevels played a very important role in the planning and building process. Basically, this plot of land wasn't a building site, as it was an open wound which the Nazi-planning dept. endowed Köln with. They cut a series of new streets through the heart of Köln, from north to south and from east to west. The is an intersection of the two, where N-S actually goes underneath E-W. This planning left a gap at the intersection--one which city planners had long been calling out for a band-aid. p&c was a good solution, and they spent equal amounts of time above and below street level during the building process.

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Arch Renzo Piano

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Peek & Cloppenburg, Köln
Renzo Piano, Architect

Still-life with ladder.
One of the architectural jewels in Köln--a department store.

This is basically left-over space at the top which has no official use, and the customers aren't allowed up.

Scan from a print.

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Peek & Cloppenburg, Köln
Renzo Piano, Architect


The owners of this department store chain have a weakness--or let's say hobby--of having famous architects (Piano, Böhm, Ingenhoven) build stores for them and have a such produced quite a collection of impressive stores around Germany.

Here, a view before the department store moved in. Unfortunately, the cloths, etc. are now arranged that nobody really experiences the atrium unless one makes an effort to go there. The circulation is all buried in the middle of the store. away from the facade.

The entire facade hangs from the top beam, is braced against the individual floors, transferring forces horizontally.

Scan from a print.

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