Spiegel editorial office, 1969

Some people know the canteen of today's Spiegel editorial building from films, music videos or at least from photos. Very few people, however, know that it is the work of Verner Panton. In January 1969, the Spiegel publishing house and editorial team moved into a new headquarters in Hamburg. The local architect Werner Kallmorgen had planned the glass high-rise building with its twelve floors and realized it on the corner of Ost-West-Straße and Brandstwiete. Verner Panton was chosen to design the building. The then Spiegel publishing director Hans Detlev Becker commissioned him to fill the cold shell inside with warmth. Verner Panton realized what is probably his greatest complete work.

Company canteen in restaurant guise

For the interior design, the Dane largely used his own designs. For the furniture, however, he was obliged to incorporate products from Knoll International. The corridors up to the tenth floor were painted in color - each in a different shade of the color palette from orange to red and violet to blue. Carpet was selected and laid out to match the ceilings and walls. When it got dark and the office doors were open, a unique play of colors could be observed from the outside. The canteen was (and still is) visible from the outside. Countless orange-colored Flowerpot-lights, which were suspended in different lengths. Woven from metal chairs with red seat cushions. Round tables with orange, pink and red dotted table tops. Walls and ceilings completely clad with rows of square mirrorslights, which were also found in the foyer and swimming pool. The room looked more like an avant-garde restaurant than a business dining area.

Canteen and snack bar as a monument

Before these premises were renovated in the summer of 1998, the canteen and snack bar were placed under a preservation order. The owner of the Spiegel building, Robert Vogel GmbH & Co. KG, was obliged to preserve the original condition. Fortunately. Because while other interiors such as those in the Gruner & Jahr publishing house, Restaurant Varna or Visiona 0 no longer exist, this unique document of Panton's work has been preserved thanks to the Hamburg Office for the Protection of Monuments.

Loss of color

The other interiors of the offices, conference rooms, waiting areas with green circular flokati carpets to fun shellpendant lights and foam stalactites covered with green fabric, as well as the wall and ceiling cladding made of so-called mirrorlights in the foyer and swimming pool, which was specially developed for this work, no longer exist. While the swimming pool was destroyed by fire, the foyer was bathed in grey granite in the 1990s and most of the colorful editorial corridors quickly gave way to neutral white again, the eighth floor remained the last bastion until the beginning of 2005. Then the foreign department was also renovated and azure blue was painted over. Once run as a publishing and editorial building, the tower block housed only the editorial offices until September 2011.