from
Catrin Lorch
A low fortress on the Eifelwall pushes itself forcefully into the entrance to Cologne city center. The front of evenly placed metal ribs looks like an insurmountable fence, behind which a dark, bronze-brown cube rises up. That Cologne City Archives, which was opened with a ceremony on Friday, sits heavily in the web of the city. It should be – after all, it is the architectural answer to a disaster, a built counterweight to the trauma that the collapse of the previous building on Severinstrasse meant.