House of Gereon

Brief information

Gereon House did not emerge as a stand-alone office building, but as a large business organism on a street that, before the First World War, became Cologne’s center of banks, insurance companies, and offices. In 1909–1910, Karl Moritz designed an office and commercial building here for various tenants, with offices, storage rooms, exhibition spaces on the ground floor, and studios for artists.

The site is also important for understanding the scale. Five residential buildings were demolished to make way for the new building, and the foundation had to be sunk to a depth of nine meters because of old foundations in the ground. After the war, not everything of the building survived: the palace-like warehouse and the eastern wing of the rear building were destroyed and not rebuilt. Gereon House can therefore be read as an early 20th-century business building that underwent serious postwar alteration.

What to notice right away

It makes sense to compare the lower and upper parts of the facade. The original street facade was arranged on a strict grid: 13 axes and 14 columns rose up to the balcony slab above the second floor. Above the two portals were rounded bay windows, and higher up the third floor was crowned by three gables, conceived as a reminder of typical small Cologne houses.

After the reconstruction of 1950–1952, this logic changed. The front building became five stories high, the steep mansard roof gave way to a low-pitched gable roof, and the gables disappeared. The stone architecture of the front block was preserved, but the new fifth floor was plastered, and the bay windows were restored in a simplified form instead of their former rounded shape. These details help reveal not only the decoration of the facade, but also the boundary between the prewar concept and postwar reconstruction.