The old Quelle building is finally getting a makeover after the shutdown 2009.

Hello Peeps,

Im living in nuremberg and as most of the Analog shooters know the quelle mail order catalog was quiet famous back in the day, most of the cameras are rebranded they can be picked up for mostly half the price in Germany these days because everybody wants that original branding.

I went by today because there is a metro station on the exact opposite side of it and took this picture with my phone.



The city had talks for nearly 10 years now on what to do with this massive complex since it shut down in 2009. To give you a measurement in what size we are dealing here the Quelle area is about 10.9 hectares big. I copied some infos of the cities website what's exactly happening with the whole area.

Location:
The Quelle area is located in the west of the city between Frankenschnellweg and Fürther Straße. With the Eberhardshof underground station, the site is already directly connected to local public transport.

Site:
The site of the former Quelle dispatch center is 10.9 hectares in size. This corresponds to an area of over 15 soccer fields. The current usable area is 250,000 square meters. This makes the building currently the second largest vacant commercial property in Germany - right after Berlin's Tempelhof Airport. Gerchgroup AG is planning several light wells in the building so that the future usable area will only be 170,000 square meters.

With around 10,000 square meters, the Quartierspark in Eberhardshof, the so-called Quellepark, is slightly smaller than the Kontumazgarten at Hallertor. It is located on the southeast corner of the Quelle building on the former bus parking lot between Wandererstrasse, Augsburger Strasse and Adam-Klein-Strasse.

Future use:
Residential and commercial under one roof: 1,000 apartments for over 2,000 people, a daycare center as well as rooms for offices and retail. The city of Nuremberg is also moving into rooms with 1,300 employees: departments of the Office for Children, Young People and Families, the Office for Securing Livelihoods and Social Integration, the Office for Organization and Information Processing, the Office for Information Technology and the Office for Migration and Integration will in future be part of the Fürther Straße have their location.

An already existing use remains: The source collective works in the former Heizhaus. The association has created a self-managed coworking space there.

Owner:
The owner is the Bavarian Supply Chamber. Gerchgroup AG from Düsseldorf is carrying out the construction project. The company specializes in realizing residential and commercial real estate.

Cost:
The conversion will cost around 700 million euros

Just wanted to share it.

I attached some more images from the cities website below.

(if this is the the wrong subform please move it mods thanks)

Thank you!


To avoid misunderstandangs outside of Germany:

there was that photo mail-order house Porst, once to own saying the largest camera retailer of the World. Part of their business was selling rebranded cameras, of basic models often not available otherwise in the german speaking world.

This thread is about the department-store mail-order house Quelle.
The major one in Germany. And they did similar in their photo-department Foto-Quelle.
There was even a special photo-catalog. Their photo brand was Revue.


Here a old documentary on the Quelle firm:

from 4:55min onwards you can see what was going on in that building depicted above



That such a pioneering enterprise went under, when today retail-by parcel is booming, is puzzling.

I still have a Revue 6x6 my father gave to me - it's a Chinese Seagul 4A. It works but taking lense has haze.

Wow, that place is BIG.

So that was ONE Store or company at one time......like a Sears in the usa.?

And that was only their mother-plant. They got even more distribution centers, with up to 8000 employees.

Yes, it was a mail-order department store. From handkerchief to complete private homes, they had a wide range. Listed in their main catalog, depicted somewhere in that video, and in special catalogs, as their Foto one.

There even were two further, competing mail-order department-stores in Germany.


Concerning rebranded cameras, the dedicated photo mail-order house Porst and the photo-department of Quelle were the major sources in German speaking countries.

AgX said:

And that was only their mother-plant. They got even more distribution centers, with up to 8000 employees.

Yes, it was a mail-order department store. From handkerchief to complete private homes, they had a wide range. Listed in their main catalog, depicted somewhere in that video, and in special catalogs, as their Foto one.

There even was another, competing huge mail-order department-store in Germany.


Concerning rebranded cameras, the dedicated photo mail-order house Porst and the photo-department of Quelle were the major sources in German speaking countries.

Click to expand...

OK....Thank You
On a MUCH Smaller Scale...........we had two different Sears stores, in San Francisco close.one at Army Street and another at Masonic Ave
It is amazing how many different stores and office space occupy just ONE old Sears Store..!!!

and AMAZON has even BIGGER warehouses dotted all over the place.

Concerning their catalog photography:
When using a view camera for their product photography, why did they use 8x10?

AgX said:

Concerning their catalog photography:
When using a view camera for their product photography, why did they use 8x10?

Click to expand...

why not? they would have had a direct line to get the film, and could use the image in any size including a cropped image on a full page without having to arrange a re-shoot. Plus with an 8X10, they could probably shoot from further away and so have less close up distortion. {but having never seen one of their catalogs, I have no idea }

I do not understand this "from further away".

The making of the catalog is described about halfway that video.

AgX said:

Concerning their catalog photography:
When using a view camera for their product photography, why did they use 8x10?

Click to expand...

It's my understanding that large format photography and 8x10" was essentially the standard for catalog and product photography for a long time in the middle of the 20th century. In the US, many of the large mail order catalog houses were located in central places like Chicago (Sears Roebuck) and that's one reason large photography businesses arose there, in Chicago: Deardorff, Burke and James, Calumet, etc. Although these days we think of a Deardorff as the epitome of a field camera design, most of them originally got sold for studio/product work.

As for why 8x10" rather than the more tractable 4x5", you might have to ask someone who did product or catalog photography professionally. This old page from B&H suggests a reason is that retouching and other post-production was easiest on the 8x10": https://www.bhphotovideo.com/find/Product_Resources/largeformat1.jsp

One could think so too, but for other photos, both outdoors and in the studio they took as format 6x6cm.

Only for stills with movements they took 8x10. I thus wondered why they did not use 6x9cm instead,
I might argue that fresnel screen and groundglass were not optimal in LF, moreover at movements, so that for focusing under time strain they preferred the largesrt format they had.

Printed images were rather small. Practically only the cover photo was full size.