German Architecture Museum

About this place

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.