David Chipperfield’s offices for a German fashion company create a dialogue between the workplace and the landscape in which it is set. Text by Sebastiano Brandolini. Photography by Christian Richters.

David Chipperfield’s building for Ernsting is unusual in its simplicity and in its intermediate nature, halfway between production and logistics and administration and bureaucracy. The modern, horizontal architecture’s large windows, also horizontal, are set back from a dark-grey concrete prefabricated external superstructure that embraces the building on all sides, serving as both a loggia and brise-soleil.

The structure has numerous sides: twelve, to be precise. Lifted slightly off the ground, it is fragmented into three blocks, one of which serves as a central hinge. The result is a complex rectangle with a dialectical relationship to the surrounding land, designed by the Belgian Peter Wirtz according to the picturesque dictates of an English garden in a modern key.

We are in an industrial campus in the village of Lette, a few kilometres from Coesfled, between Münster and the Ruhr. The surrounding landscape is next to idyllic, with numerous trees, tidy plots, wind-powered energy generators and empty roads with just the occasional background noise. Ernsting is a private corporation specializing in the sale of basic clothing (it started life selling hosiery) on the high streets of small German towns. It identifies with a utilitarian idea of clothing, whereby quality and durability are expected to prevail over image and fashion. It’s a company that could be seen as doing for clothes what IKEA does for furniture. While the products distributed by Ernsting have no powerful image, the same cannot be said of the holding company, which takes great care over its presentation and communication.

Here at Lette, orders are received from nearly a thousand stores scattered across Germany, serving a population of more than 80 million. Each store is distinguished by a cheerful red-and-white-striped external awning. In the complex designed by Chipperfield, Ernsting designs products, negotiates retail prices for existing batches, dispatches and quality-controls orders, defines sales strategies and develops product ideas.

Production is outsourced around the world. The offices of various companies within the group are located inside the three blocks. There is at present a generous allocation of space, nearly 16,000 square metres for 125 employees, with plenty of room for growth. The net interfloor height is 3.34 metres. Many square metres are currently used to spread articles of clothing out on the floor as if they were carpets, exploiting the good natural light. This casual use of space has its fascination, and it is rather like watching a removal, even though the offices have been in operation for more than a year. One breathes an air of simplicity, and there is absolutely no perceptible stress. The owner – and inventor – of the business, Kurt Ernsting, maintains that this building has boosted productivity and efficiency.

Next to Chipperfield’s work are other distinguished buildings. The cladding of an existing shed, built by Reichlin Reinhart and Calatrava in the 1980s, and a 1990s building (with canteen) by Schilling Architects are both logistical structures allocated to the preparation and packaging of clothes. The bridge (by Reichlin Reinhart and Calatrava) that connects Chipperfield’s new service centre to the logistical buildings is particularly interesting and sensual. Trucks leave from here three times a week to supply the company’s shops. Ernsting relies on the fact that come what may, Europe continues to dress, and it seems to have clear ideas about the tastes and practical necessities of German families.

The ‘campus’ effect sought by Chipperfield in his modelling of spaces and communications between the inside and outside of his complex and in his creation of consequentiality between its different blocks produces a civilized idea of daily work, without any violent signals of branding. Architecture thus performs a transparent mission of efficiency and simplicity, generous in its forms and rational and direct in its contact with those who observe and use it. ‘Good architecture is a designed space in which I can grow’, explains Kurt Ernsting. There was a time when the ethical mission expressed by Chipperfield’s vocabulary could have been called modern. Today this no longer seems to make sense.

Chipperfield’s architectural ideas are at home in this business scenario. His method of composition is founded on the idea of a complete skin; he flanks and envelops entire volumes without articulating or tampering with them, so that each is legible in its integrity and clean clarity. In this way his work harks back to the peaceful and diagrammatic image of the American corporate headquarters of the 1950s and 1960s, a nostalgia that appears in the hybrid 8.1-metre length of the facade module; in the fanlike distribution of the interior spaces; in the double-height interiors, partly reminiscent of squares and industrial sheds; and in the green bay through which the garden flows into the heart of the building.

The modular simplicity of the building’s architectural rules is varied, moreover, by a preoccupation with thickness, which for Chipperfield represents the architectural quintessence of a structure whose purpose is to contain and represent the business world.

Three thicknesses can be recognized here. Calibrated according to space and light, they all seek to confirm the indispensable role played by the idea of a structural frame. The first thickness is that of the external facade and brise-soleil, a grid of deep niches resting on the building behind it, which is an ordinary box. This thickness produces deep shadows and dramatizes the three-dimensionality of the natural light. The second thickness, more attenuated, is that described by the walls of the entry hall and of the double-height interior spaces, which is modulated by natural and artificial light with a hovering chiaroscuro effect. Then there is a third thickness, related to sculpture, that appears in the contrast between solid and void, foreground and background, giving rise to pronounced spatial expansions and compressions.

This can be seen in the minimalist and monumental staircases that preside over the inner entrance hall and outer portico. The entry-portico-garden sequence is where the three thicknesses meet, together producing a spatial mini-catharsis. In paying homage to Le Corbusier, Chipperfield models his materials and light sources and mixes diverse objects together. Nature also comes into the composition, lapping the architecture with organic forms and unleashing a curious resonance (Chipperfield wanted a rich garden rather than a landscape).

Only two floors high, the Ernsting service centre is rich in architectural detail. The glazed front is recessed from the inner side of the brise-soleils, creating diagonal views; the broad external awnings are set obliquely at 45 degrees, while the brise-soleils rotate at the right-hand corners and make the facades asymmetrical. Fascinated by the structure’s formal simplicity, Chipperfield seems prepared to tread the dangerous ground of ordinariness. Dismayed by sensationalism and by the idea that each building must be a slave to its character and design, he insists on selecting the minimal elements necessary to the well-being of the workplace, demonstrating a respect for staff communication, nature, the idea of a campus and the notion of the workplace as a big family.