New Frankfurt Old Town

The project redesigned and developed a 7,000 m2 (75,000 sq ft) property between Römerberg in the west and Domplatz in the east, delimited by Braubachstrasse in the north and the Schirn Kunsthalle in the south, in an effort to remake the old city centre, the Altstadt (old town), which was severely damaged during World War II, in the style of the pre-war architecture.

Efforts to rebuild parts of the historic fabric of the old town began in the 1950s with the Römer city hall, which was built as a modern office building behind the old façade that was still standing after the war.

[8] During the Second World War, the medieval old town of Frankfurt am Main, until then one of the best preserved in Central Europe, was almost completely destroyed by bombing.

There were very few external reconstructions of buildings and the majority of the former old town was rebuilt in the style of the 1950s, largely abandoning the historic street network.

The area between Römerberg and the cathedral remained as a rubble clearance wasteland for many years and its development was debated for a long time.

In 1953, archaeologists uncovered the remains of a Roman settlement, and traces of the Carolingian period, beneath the area of the high medieval layers.

When the Dom/Römer underground station was built in 1970–71, it destroyed a large part of the oldest settlement floor in Frankfurt (which had not yet been archaeologically examined) due to the open construction method, Subsequently, after years of discussion, the Technisches Rathaus was created in 1972–1974 as the seat of the technical offices of the city administration.

[10] The city council then decided in December 2004 to carry out an urban planning ideas competition with the option of either renovation of the current building or demolition and subsequent small-scale development in its place.

The Chamber of Architects in Wiesbaden opposed the competition approach and considered the obligation to submit two drafts impractical and called for a clear decision by politicians.

They nevertheless insisted that the following requirements be in place for any further urban planning competition: small-scale buildings with facades and roofs need to fit harmoniously into the old town, housing 20,000 m2 of gross floor space within the property boundaries of the Technisches Rathaus, with overbuilding of the archaeological garden, but maintenance of it as an indoor museum, and a restoration of the old "coronation path" street layout between the cathedral and the Roman.

In this plan, the "Coronation Trail" was not going to follow the original route, but was to be built in a straight diagonal line from the Stone House (Steinernes Haus [de]) to the cathedral tower.

[15] At the presentation of the draft, however, Edwin Schwarz (CDU), head of the planning department, emphasised that it was only a suggestion of how the required building dimensions should be made: "What can be seen here will not be built this way".

[18] In October 2005, voters presented their concept for a historically accurate reconstruction of old houses, alleys and squares under the title "An Old Town for Frankfurt's Soul".

It became clear that the competitors were largely able to agree on a common line: the most exact possible restoration of the historical floor plan with its alleys, squares and courtyards, as well as the reconstruction of individual, significant houses.

[35] In April 2011, the designs were publicly exhibited in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt, while the planning services for the eight urban and nine optional reconstructions were put out to tender.

He recalls that the fountain on the chicken market was drilled as early as Roman times and that the Carolingian people were probably already aware that they lived on historical ground.

He describes the old town with Nietzsche as an architectural palimpsest that always keeps the memory of the past in the minds of city dwellers, no matter how often it is overwritten.

In contrast, the Technisches Rathaus, "rammed as a concrete juggernaut in the middle of the previously closed row of houses on Braubachstrasse", had remained a provocative and ignorant foreign body in the urban fabric for decades.

The citizen of the almost digitally located society insures the lost anchor of its origin and provides it with rock solid reinforcement made of cement".

It is a fairytale world, the danger is great that "only a dollhouse will be created, a backdrop for photographing tourists, selfie stick drawn and thumbs up.

The creative replicas are "fake architecture", "between the concrete structure and the exposed stone wall, the insulation wool peels out and proves that history is even possible in the face of today's building regulations cannot be reproduced true to the original".

This is no coincidence, "the reconstruction architecture in Germany is currently developing into a key medium of authoritarian, ethnic, historical revisionist rights".

It was "scandalous that the initiative of a right-wing radical without any significant civil society resistance led to a slick neighborhood with seemingly seamless repeat architectures".

The debate about the old town has historical roots, since 1880 the design has always been struggling anew, with opponents and advocates of reconstructions not fitting in a right-left scheme.

At the same time, Linke and Spontis had instigated the Frankfurt house fight, "sociologists see today as the beginning of a second homeland security movement".

[62] The "storm of indignation", which was triggered by the "remarkably mediocre facade views" of the winning design from the 2005 competition, was decisive for the reconstruction project of the new old town.

Paying tribute to the place with a multi-angle roof landscape, in the historical center of Frankfurt the "architectural sin" of the Technical Town Hall was to be replaced by the usual dreary cough of the real estate industry.

[63] Only through this was it possible to see, in addition to all banal re-creations and new creations, as well as detailed errors, the "subtle and not always legible references to breaks and discontinuity", for example in the house of the three Romans or the building in Braubachstrasse 21.

He then sits down First of all, basically with architectural reconstructions, using the example of the Dresden Zwinger, the Knochenhaueramtshaus and the Warsaw Old Town who kept the memory of their destruction in different ways.

In addition to the Belvederchen, he is particularly impressed by the Schönau house (Market 10) "a very narrow thing with a slate facade pulled down deep… and a slightly convex curvature of the elegantly stepped front.