Niketown Berlin

Set in the heart of Germany’s capital, in 1999 Niketown Berlin stepped aggressively into the land of Nike’s greatest rival. A 40,000 sf store set on Berlin’s grandest shopping boulevard, the design of the first Nike flagship store in mainland Europe was a demanding exercise in exploring the definition of Nike’s global versus regional brand agenda.

Each category pavilion used a mix of custom architectural treatments to create distinctly different sport environments—suspended ceilings, drop-in floor materials with applied graphics, lighting, sound effects and interactive media.

At the center of the store an empty wood paneled round chamber was filled with the three-dimensional sounds of sport—on the pitch at a football match with the passionate chants of the crowd, at center court with balls whizzing by, the rhythm of runners footsteps in the Berlin marathon.

The Tech Training pavilion, featuring Nike dri-Fit apparel that wicks moisture away from your body, displayed vessels containing comparative quantities of sweat generated in marathon races around the world.

The challenge was to retain Nike’s unique style of humor and technical language, in both German and English, for the discerning and typically skeptical German audience.