Salzhaus

It forms the northeastern part of the Frankfurt City Hall complex (Römer), on the Römerberg square in the centre of the Altstadt (old town).

It had a rich carved façade on the gable side, making it not only the most important artisan-produced civil building in the city, but also one of the greatest achievements of the Renaissance in the German-speaking world.

[1] Like most of the buildings in Frankfurt's old town, the Salzhaus was built on a massive ground floor made of local red sandstone.

The fact that the roof structure alone made up almost half of the total height of the building emphasised the late Gothic proportions, despite the rich Renaissance decorations.

This included all removable relief panels from the Salzhaus - only the carvings worked into the supporting beams of the actual half-timbered house remain on site.

[10] However, there was an architectural community and also large parts of politics, which were opposed to "historicism of the romantic kind" (Mayor Kurt Blaum),[11] and still a great shortage of materials and finance.

Nevertheless, the new Salzhaus belongs to the small number of buildings from the early 1950s which are to be regarded as an artistic contribution of a time that is primarily determined by material constraints.

Below the windows there is limestone cladding, the eastern side is occupied by a glass mosaic spanning the three full storeys by the artist Wilhelm Geißler.

Today the city's Salzhaus serves as an administration building with an information centre for tourists on the ground floor.

An exhibition of the fragments in the Historisches Museum Frankfurt in December 2004 also showed that not as much building substance was lost in the Second World War as is generally assumed - around 60% of the facade is still intact in city archives.