I have just realised that I noticed this remarkable building in July and took a photograph. A busy and colourful area with lots of bookshops -leider nebenbei mein Handy war geklaut!!
Warenhaus am Weinberg, or Kaufhaus Jandorf in Brunnenstraße as it is known today, was the third out of six department stores opened in Berlin by Abraham Adolf Jandorf (the last one being the now world-famous Berlin´s KaDeWe, or Kaufhaus des Westens).
Warenhaus am Weinberg in 1904 (author unknown).
It architects, Lachmann & Zauber, inspired by Alfred Messel´s designs for the Wertheims of the Warenhaus Wertheim chain, provided the building with a steel-frame grid – a step which made it both stable and modern. The steel skeleton frame it was built on and around – walls, floors and the roof of such buildings are, to put it simply, attached to the grid – was an invention which paved the way towards the construction of famous American skyscrapers. It also made those buildings particularly resistant: no wonder that most of the steel-frame buildings in Berlin survived WWII almost intact.
Next to Jandorf´s…
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