Weltstadthaus Peek & Cloppenburg.Cologne, 2005
The façade of Renzo Piano’s design for the P&C Weltstadthaus department store is covered with 6,500 glass panels mounted in delicate wooden girders. To meet the budgetary requirements, the doubly curved surface was to be assembled from flat quadrilateral panels.
designtoproduction conceived a parametric model of the façade and optimized the horizontal and vertical panel segmentation so that the distance between the edges of the planar panels could be absorbed by the framing.