Pressroom

The recent announcement that Galeria Karstadt Kaufhof would close a further 52 department stores has left affected parties and municipalities across Germany desperately searching for solutions to a widespread problem. “The ongoing demise of large inner-city buildings is raising the stakes – for investors but also for the urban fabric, for sustainability in the building sector, and for the future of the retail sector,” explains the architect Albert Achammer, the initiator of “NEW LIFE”. “As integrated designers we’re well aware of and familiar with this complexity.” For over two years the Managing Director of ATP Hamburg has worked alongside experts from consultancies and specialist design companies within the ATP Group, redserve, ATP sustain, and Mint Architecture, intensively addressing possibilities for revitalizing rather than demolishing these empty department stores.

A whitepaper as the initial output
“In 2022, we began to record our first thoughts about revitalizing department stores from a range of perspectives – economic, branding, architecture, and responsibility – in a whitepaper,” says Achammer. The idea is that we will now intensify these thoughts to create forward-looking solutions. This demands interdisciplinary and practice-related discussion with experts from the affected sectors. The aim of the initiative is to win over investors and municipalities with courageous and fresh ideas for realistic and forward-looking forms of inner-city life. To this end, the whitepaper will be intensively discussed and continuously developed in a further three Germany cities.