The house within a house
Ungers kept the old villa walls and built a white house inside them.
CC BY-SA 3.0 · Colling-architektur — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Peter Christian Riemann — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Lettkemann — CC BY-SA 4.0
The German Architecture Museum sits on Schaumainkai, the stretch of the south bank that Frankfurt turned into a row of museums and still calls the Museumsufer. It opened in June nineteen eighty-four as the first museum in Germany given over entirely to architecture, and it has held the national collection of the subject ever since. Behind the exhibition floors is an archive of roughly one hundred and eighty thousand drawings and six hundred models, running from Erich Mendelsohn and Mies van der Rohe through to Archigram and Frank Gehry. The building is the museum's most argued-over object. Oswald Mathias Ungers took a villa from the end of the nineteenth century, gutted it until only the outer walls remained, and set a free-standing white house inside the shell, floor rising through floor to a bare gabled room at the top. The permanent display climbs with those levels as a line of large white models tracing how people have built, from a shelter of branches to a tower. The museum reopened on the first of June twenty twenty-five after a refurbishment that took close to four years and about thirteen million euros, twice the time originally planned; during the works the programme ran from a temporary hall in the Ostend. It is a compact place. An hour covers the permanent floors and two is enough if a temporary show holds you. Wall texts are German-first with English alongside, and the late Wednesday evening is the quietest slot of the week.
Ungers kept the old villa walls and built a white house inside them.
A line of big white models climbing the building floor by floor.
Schaumainkai 43, 60596 Frankfurt am Main
German Film Museum (DFF)On Frankfurt's museum embankment stands the German Film Museum: a journey throug1 minute walk4.6
Museum for Communication FrankfurtThe Museum for Communication in Frankfurt traces how people have communicated th2 minutes walk4.6
MuseumsuferThe Museumsufer, or museum embankment, is the name given to the south bank of th2 minutes walk4.5
The BibelhausThe Bibelhaus is a museum on Frankfurt's Museumsufer, but it is not a religious 4 minutes walk3.9
Städel MuseumThe Städel is Frankfurt's most important art museum and among the most important4 minutes walk4.7Yes if you like buildings as objects. The permanent models read easily with no training at all, and the shell-and-core building is worth twenty minutes on its own. If what you actually want is a skyline view, spend the money on the Main Tower instead.