QUELLE VERSAND – Nürnberg

The third volume in Andreas Gehrke's survey of vacated West German corporate modernism, documenting the purpose-built mail-order headquarters of Quelle, once the country's largest catalogue retailer.

Designed by Ernst Neufert, a former Bauhaus student best known for his standardization handbook Bauentwurfslehre, the Nuremberg building served as Quelle's mail-order headquarters from 1956 until the company's insolvency in 2009. Gehrke's 27 photographs work through the emptied warehouse floors, dispatch halls, and office interiors of a building engineered for the logistics of a mid-century mail-order empire, now silent. Drittel Books published the book, the longest of the trilogy at 64 pages, as a numbered edition of 300 with a foreword by Christine Dissmann and design by Katrin Oeding.

Andreas Gehrke, a Berlin-based photographer who founded Drittel Books to publish this and related projects, has built a recurring practice around buildings suspended between use and obsolescence. Quelle Versand completes the trilogy begun with the Der Spiegel volumes on Hamburg's former Spiegel towers and IBM Campus on IBM Germany's Stuttgart headquarters, together forming a portrait of the physical infrastructure left behind by postwar West Germany's media, technology, and retail industries.