Walter Brune

He first worked for the heavy industry and built in the early 1950s – as a very young architect – the coal mine "Prosper Haniel", as well as several power plants, winding towers, etc..

For two decades, between 1950 and 1970, he developed alongside the major projects country houses for numerous personalities from business and industry (Helmut Horten, Wolf, Bauknecht, etc.)

The insight about the negative impacts of large shopping center (which he himself proposed in 1970 RheinRuhrZentrum in Mülheim an der Ruhr) is the reason for him to develop the concept of a "City Gallery", a multifunctional scale retail architecture adapted to the inner-block structures form, which he first implemented at the "Kö-Galerie" in Düsseldorf.

A symbiosis of old existing structures with a new architecture, adapted to the local tradition of building, which includes retail, services, housing and culture in the form of a concert hall, was the result.

Last but not least because of the negative impacts of large and non-integrated shopping center, he is an active publicist, inter alia with the book "Angriff auf die City" (Düsseldorf, 2006).