NowFrankfurt am Main

Architecture

Architecture in Frankfurt am Main

Frankfurt is the one German city with a skyline, and it has one because the banks arrived after the war had destroyed the old centre. Towers, museums and a rebuilt medieval square sit within a few streets of each other.

• European Central Bank

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  Completed 2014

  Coop Himmelb(l)au

  The bank's headquarters in the eastern docks, built around a wholesale market hall from 1928. Coop Himmelb(l)au set two office slabs in a twisted double helix and joined them with an atrium that leans against the old hall. The market hall is left standing and cut through by the new entrance block. A listed building and a headquarters are made to share one structure rather than stand apart.

• Städel Museum extension

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  Completed 2012

  Schneider+Schumacher

  An extension to the Städel, built entirely beneath the museum's garden. Schneider+Schumacher domed the roof slab and punched a hundred and ninety five circular skylights through it, so the lawn above rises as a low hill and the gallery below is lit from the ground. Twelve slim columns carry the whole span. The museum roughly doubled its floor area without adding a facade.

• Commerzbank Tower

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  Completed 1997

  Norman Foster

  A bank tower beside the old centre, planned on a triangular core. Norman Foster put the structure at the three corners and left the middle as an atrium running the full height, with sky gardens spiralling up the sides at four storey intervals. Each garden ventilates the offices facing it, so the tower could work without sealed air conditioning. It is a tall building trying to behave like a low one.

• Museum Angewandte Kunst

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  Completed 1985

  Richard Meier

  A museum of applied art on the river bank, built around a nineteenth century villa. Richard Meier took the villa's dimensions as the module for the new wings and set them on a grid rotated slightly against it, which produces the diagonal cuts through the plan. White metal panels and square windows continue his own vocabulary without deferring to the house. It was the first of the museums that turned this bank into a row of them.

• Römer

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  Founded 1405

  City of Frankfurt

  The city hall on the west side of the old square, made from houses the city bought and joined together. The stepped gable front is three separate buildings given one facade, and the halls behind were assembled over centuries. The whole block was rebuilt after the war from photographs and drawings rather than replaced. It stands for a city that chose to reproduce what it had lost.