Fashion brand Balenciaga has opened its first retail location in Berlin, which continues the brand's Raw Architecture aesthetic and boasts monolithic concrete slabs and distressed surfaces.
Located in Charlottenberg in western Berlin within the Grade II-listed Haus Cumberland building, the store occupies 296-square-metres across the ground floor.
In sharp contrast to the building's neoclassical exterior, the store's interior features Balenciaga's Raw Architecture concept, which the brand introduced to its retail locations at the recent unveiling of its Sloane Street store in London.
Balenciaga decorated the store with a concept it describes as Raw Architecture
The Raw Architecture concept aims to produce an "unfinished" quality designed in juxtaposition to retail's typically refined surroundings. "The newly designed space continues Balenciaga?s Raw Architecture concept, which preserves and responds to existing sites, effecting an unfinished or in-progress quality, the roughness and nonconformity of which contradicts with a store?s mostly polished surroundings," said Balenciaga.
The stone facade of the Balenciaga Berlin store and its arched windows and awnings were adorned with the sans-serif Balenciaga logo. Inside, digital screens display the fashion house's campaign imagery and content.
Aged concrete panels reference the modernist history of Berlin
The floor of the store is blanketed in squared poured-concrete slabs that reflect the sidewalk paving out...