DER SPIEGEL – Hamburg Brandstwiete

A deadpan architectural survey of the tower block that housed Der Spiegel, Germany's leading investigative newsmagazine, photographed in the years after the magazine moved out and before the building's fate was settled.

The Brandstwiete tower was designed by Hamburg architect Werner Kallmorgen and served as the magazine's editorial headquarters from 1969 to 2011, its interiors famously outfitted by Verner Panton in psychedelic color and form. Andreas Gehrke's photographs, made after the newsroom's departure, record empty corridors, stripped offices, and the traces of four decades of use with a flat, inventory-like precision that avoids nostalgia. Published by Drittel Books in an edition of 300 numbered copies with a foreword by Christine Dissmann and design by Katrin Oeding, the book is the first of a pair documenting the two Hamburg buildings the magazine occupied in succession.

Gehrke, a Berlin-based photographer and publisher, has built a body of work around vacant and transitional architecture, from his own imprint Drittel Books to series on Berlin's undeveloped lots and Brandenburg's postwar landscape. Der Spiegel extends that interest to corporate modernism, pairing this volume with Der Spiegel – Hamburg Dovenfleet and, in the wider trilogy, with his studies of the former IBM and Quelle headquarters elsewhere in Germany.