Peek & Cloppenburg

"1995 Tauentzienstrafle 19 Gottfried and Peter Bohm The Peek & Cloppenburg department store has made an original gesture as one of the conversion and new building projects along the central shopping promenades in the western part of the city. In terms of the interior organisation, the master church builder Gottfried Biihm based his first department store on that typology, which was arranged around an atrium, from the imperial age. Grouped together the escalator access point leads upwards from here to then be coupled over at head height with a painting by Biihm's son. The structural resolution of the facade can be regarded as a very free interpretation of a curtain wall consisting of supporting and filling parts. Glass curtain parts, which behave like inflated lengths of material swing between the slim concrete pillars that do indeed tower upwards. They form curved canopies, which firstly protect pedestrians and secondly represent a dual glass skin, which can be ventilated. At the eaves height, the concrete pillars link up to form a network of beams, which incline towards the roof junction like a hip roof. In overall terms, Bohm had adopted the type of monolithic department store in the form of the Peek & Cloppenburg building, which had already made the KaDeWe (no. 143) into a bastion of the retail trade a short distance from it."