Description

The neoclassicist Villa Metzler on the southern bank of the River Main, which had provisionally housed the renowned Frankfurt Museum für Kunsthandwerk since 1965, formed the starting point for the museum building which carries on the tradition of the modernism of the 1920s. The cube of the old building becomes the module for the angled new building laid out around it, kept in brilliant white and linked to it only by a glass bridge. In their ground plan and their elevation, both the three corner cubes with their regular window openings and the playfully emphasized, asymmetrically arranged passages, galleries, arcades, and freestanding walls around them obey down to the last detail the strict stereo­metry governed by a square grid whose sides each measure 1.10 metres in length. Over the grid oriented on that of the Villa Metzler is laid a second grid network aligned with the river bank and therefore deviating noticeably from the first one, so that between the four quadrants of the building site, an axial intersection of routes widening out conically comes into being. It not only emphasizes the caesurae between the volumes and allows selective views, but also contributes significantly to the tension of this architecture through its form gained by slightly turning the basic square.

The interior of the museum is accessed by means of a light-flooded ramp positioned transversally to the entrance axis. In changing perspectives and varied overlappings, the ramp allows the interpenetration of interior and exterior space to become an intellectual game. The circulation system leads visitors counterclockwise through a succession of exhibition rooms whose sequence mirrors the basic structure of this architecture. Sophisticated display-case architecture, which is staged using the same means and as effectively as the whole building, renders the exhibition rooms – most of them illuminated naturally from the side – a logical continuation of the external architecture and only rarely allows the primacy of the architecture over the works of art on display to be forgotten.

Baumeister 8/1980, pp. 767-775 (Competition) • Bauwelt 71/ 1980, pp. 1132-1141 (Competition) and 20-21/1985, pp. 766-777 (Peter Rumpf) • Architectural Record 4/1981, pp. 87-95 • The Architectural Review 1012/1981, pp. 34-38 (Lance Knobel) • Lotus international 28/1981, pp. 95-110 (Competition) • Norbert Huse, Richard Meier. Museum für Kunsthandwerk Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, 1985 • Museum für Kunsthandwerk, ed. Hochbauamt der Stadt Frankfurt am Main, 1985 • Casabella 515/1985, pp. 4-17 (Mirko Zardini, Kenneth Frampton) • Detail 5/1985, pp. 457-465 • Deutsche Bauzeitung 8/1985, pp. 22-27 (Falk Jaeger) • Domus 662/1985, pp. 3-11 (Fulvio Irace) • Techniques et Architecture 359/1985, pp. 103-108 • Hannelore Schubert, Moderner Museumsbau, Stuttgart, 1986, pp. 162-164 • Heinrich Klotz/Waltraud Krase, New Museums, London, 1986, pp. 22-24 and pp. 121-132 • Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani (ed.), Museumsarchitektur in Frankfurt 1980-1990, Munich, 1990, pp. 113-115 (Kenneth Frampton) • Jost Schilgen, Neue Häuser für die Kunst, Dortmund, 1990, pp. 82-105 • Werner Blaser (ed.), Richard Meier. Building for Art/Bauen für die Kunst, Basel, 1990, pp. 53-89 • Laurence Allégret, Musées, vol. 2, Paris, 1992, pp. 18-23 • Josep M. Montaner/Jordi Oliveras, Museums for a New Century, Barcelona, 1995, pp. 102-105 • Silvio Cassarà, Richard Meier, Basel, 1996, pp. 92-95 • Twentieth-Century Museum I, London, 1999 (Michael Brawne)

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Originally published in: Paul von Naredi-Rainer, Museum Buildings: A Design Manual, Birkhäuser, 2004.