DuMont Schauberg head office

  • Cologne, Germany
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Dumont-Schauberg image

 

A press group. An editor. A site already marked by old industrial buildings and a printing house. The program: a head office.

 

Nouvel wanted to create a strong company image, to make a building that could plainly illustrate end-of-the-century modernity and would, with the laying-out of a site, reveal layers of traces of older buildings, the printing house, and the cultural market.

 

Layering would be accentuated by the reading of an underground car-park invaded by water and vegetation, partially open to the sky and which appears to be disassociated and prior to the office building.

 

It’s about composing an urban landscape. The property is delimited by trees at the perimeter, with reinforced vegetation to create a dense background and efface transitions with the neighbors. Within this green framework everything is superimposed: reading through depth of space, transparency, views against the light, reflections.

 

Light in a glass building is composed of several successive layers. The facades affirm their glazed nature with their glass-fin structure. The principle structure, of round posts in mirror-polished steel, disappears.

 

Printed glass materializes each elevation. The ensemble is protected from overheating by a huge parasol canopy which has a controllable porosity to light, allowing a diffusion of light from 20% to 80%. The development is posed on a mirror of water reflecting the sky, light and buildings.

 

The building is a place for printing and constituting information, translated in the facades as production of signs of the present. The project offers great flexibility and density where one can change the nature of the levels or relations between the services. It is also a place based on the pleasure of belonging to a very elaborate visual world where the quality of views and light are factors of the blossoming of work.

 

 

 

Jean Nouvel