Museum Embankment Walk

The Eiserner Steg is a narrow, neo-Gothic iron truss bridge supported by heavy stone piers that spans the Main River. Completed in eighteen sixty-nine, it was financed by Frankfurt citizens because the city council refused to pay for a…

The Museum of Applied Arts in Frankfurt hides behind the cream-colored walls of the eighteenth-century Metzler Mansion, though a modern glass addition wraps around it like a translucent shell. Architect Richard Meier designed this complex…

The Museum of World Cultures occupies three connected nineteenth century villas on the banks of the Main River. Its distinctive white facades feature intricately carved wooden balconies and tall, arched windows that face the water. Behind…

The German Film Museum hides behind a facade of red sandstone, but the true identity of the building appears on the rooftop. A massive, rotating mechanical eye projects light and images across the river, signaling the museum’s obsession…

The Deutsches Architekturmuseum sits inside a traditional nineteenth-century villa, but inside that shell, architect Oswald Mathias Ungers built a second, independent structure. This house-within-a-house uses a white, grid-like frame to…

The Städel Museum wears a roof studded with one hundred and ninety-five circular glass skylights, a pattern that ripples across the garden like bubbles on a pond. Johann Friedrich Städel, a local spice merchant, died in eighteen sixteen…

The Liebieghaus occupies a villa built in eighteen ninety-six for the Bohemian textile industrialist Heinrich von Liebieg. Its most distinct feature is the steep, white-stuccoed tower topped by a dark, pyramidal roof that rises above the…