The commercial and office building at Sögestrasse 62-64 is a striking representative of a freely historical - often baroqueizing as well as monumental style of the early 20th century that combines abstracted and historical architectural forms with modern construction methods.
A representative business and office building
The entrepreneur Siegfried Meyer, owner of the ready-made clothing store "Seidenhaus Koopmann", had a representative six-story business and office building built in 1910/11 by the Bremen architects Behrens and Neumark on the corner of Sögestraße and Knochenhauerstraße, which extended over six narrow lots in the old town. The Behrens and Neumark office, which existed between 1907 and 1935, specialized in commercial and office buildings and achieved outstanding results in this field in downtown Bremen.
The building has a sophisticated and strongly relieved shell limestone facade with plastic building decoration (putti, antique parapet field reliefs, etc.) as well as an increased verticalistic tendency due to the steep roof pitch. The ground plan of the building is an elongated rectangle with a slightly curved long side towards Knochenhauerstraße, which is caused by the building line. Behrens and Neumark made creative capital out of the given curvature of the front.
The building gains a strong dynamic and a tension through the slight curvature, which is emphasized and at the same time absorbed by the static as well as block-like heaviness of the two triaxial corner risalites. The facade is characterized by a decorative variety of windows, whose arrangement conceals the room height and the floor plan of the interior. Originally, the two lower floors were mainly occupied by two large showrooms and salesrooms of the company Seidenhaus Koopmann. The upper floors contained rented office space and so-called “studios”.
A cultural monument in Bremen
The interior has undergone various changes due to a series of changes in ownership and use. However, with the exception of the modernized store floor, the facade still largely shows the original appearance of the building. As a relatively well-preserved, typical and representative commercial building of its time, the building of the office of Behrens and Neumark is a special work of architectural history. It is therefore a cultural monument for reasons of architectural art and history, the preservation of which is therefore particularly in the public interest.
