Description

Hans Hollein’s museum building fills its site, a plot of land in the form of an extended right-angled triangle at the edge of Frankfurt’s old city, right up to the very edge of the road. The form that thus came into being, referred to as the ‘slice of pie,’ allows the volume to appear as a solitaire, although it does refer to its surroundings through its use of light coloured plaster and red sandstone. The monolithic-seeming block, whose façades consist of an interplay between large, closed areas and decorative, convex and concave fanned out window openings, concludes at its sharp angle as a stepped sculpture. In combination with the carefully arranged structures on the roof, it evokes associations with the steamship motif (im­portant in recent architectural history) that is used as an ambiguous symbol. The main entrance is not located in the middle of the largely symmetrically designed narrow side as the large flattened arch under the projecting window front seems to suggest, but instead, to the right of it, at the corner of the building, thus creating a connection – sensible from an urban planning perspective – to the historical city centre and to the cathedral. Above all, though, this way, the diagonal for accessing the building is introduced, from which the entire tension of the internal spatial structure derives.

By inscribing another triangle for the three-storey building onto the triangular ground plan, a symmetric structure was created, whose apparent clarity is overlaid and deliberately disrupted by a masterly system of stairways, ramps, bridges, and galleries that render each of the museum’s rooms accessible in at least two ways. According to his maxim that there is “no neutral space, but only characteristic spaces of different sizes,” Hollein grouped the exhibition rooms in a refined interplay of top light, lateral light and artificial light around the central trapezoid-shaped hall with a glass roof, its walls studded with balconies slanting outwards in the upper third of the room, and the adjoining staircase. It is not only both the goal and starting point of the complex, three-dimensionally laid out circulation, but also celebrates architecture itself as a veritable spatial work of art.

wettbewerbe aktuell 8/1983, pp. 459-474 • Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani (ed.), Museumsarchitektur in Frankfurt 1980-1990, Munich, 1990, pp. 74-87 (Michael Mönninger) • Baumeister 8/1991, pp. 12-23 • Bauwelt 28/1991, pp. 1474-1483 (Peter Rumpf) • Connaissance des arts 473-474/1991, pp. 58-63 • Domus 731/1991, pp. 29-41 (Jean-Christophe Ammann/Joseph Rykwert) • GA document 31/1991, pp. 22-43 • Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main, ed. Magistrat der Stadt Frankfurt am Main, Frankfurt, 1991 • Räume für Kunst, exhibition catalogue, Graz, 1993, pp. 36-37 • Josep M. Montaner/Jordi Oliveras, Museums for a New Century, Barcelona, 1995, pp. 96-97 • Frank Maier-Solgk, Die neuen Museen, Cologne, 2002, pp. 112-117

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