Retail: The Latest Architecture and News

Big, challenging, creative. Designing a retail store may very well define it’s success in the future. Check our first part of previously featured retail stores in ArchDaily. And to finish our week, we bring you our second part of retail. Enjoy!

Our friends from kadawittfeldarchitektur sent us their latest project, the new Adidas administration building “LACES”, located in the city of Herzogenaurach, Germany. The roofing ceremony was yesterday, and the shell of the new building will be finished in the 2nd quarter of 2011.

“Laces“ forms a bright white counterpart to the horizontal black volume of the adjacent adidas Brand Center. The clearly contoured building fits into the existing “World of Sports” campus, with the campus park floating in the interior space, yielding a tempered atrium. This plaza forms the heart of the new building – a forum and meeting space. The office floors organized around this central space provide views into the surrounding landscape of the Herzo-Base. Catwalks above the plaza link the departments, offering a high degree of interaction. Like laces, they tie the building together, forming a multilayer workspace and conveying an atmosphere of creativity.

More images after the break.

Brazilian architecture has produced interesting works in the business/retail area, often limited to just interior design. Recent works by Marcio Kogan, Marcelo Alvarango or Tao Arquitetura are good examples of a tradition that, in my personal opinion, has a peak at Mendes da Rocha’s Forma store in Sao Paulo. If you ever go to Sao Paulo to visit local architecture, don´t be afraid of your girlfriend/wife taking you to shopping, there´s lots to see there.

Leonardo Finotti shared with us an interesting project by local architect Isay Weinfeld that is up to this brazilian standard, the Libraria da Vila bookstore in Sao Paulo. An hermetic volume with a pivoting book facade contains an interesting space filled with books distributed over 3 levels as you can see on the photos: