Frankfurt City Hall

The city hall is located in the district of Niederrad in the South of Frankfurt, Germany. This project is aimed to reconcile two architectural trends: on one hand, the monumentality of neoclassical buildings and, on the other, the popular use of glass in the post-war buildings symbolising the transparency of democracy.

‘One town hall in Germany is much like another: see one and you’ve seen them all’ From afar, Niederrad town hall appears much like the office buildings dotted around its neighbouring business district. Hardly surprising is their seemingly similarity, insofar as the contemporary municipal services intend to integrate into their surrounding tertiary buildings. A building almost ordinary, but not quite. The town hall unveils itself with discretion. While, turned at 45o, it is disguised from the other side of the park as a compliant rectangular structure, it discloses at a closer distance its perfect cubic symmetry. This changing perception goes hand in hand with the subtle irregularities, only rendered noticeable by a vertical scan of the façade. Like the diminishing height of the five floors, the variable slabs gradually thickened in contrast or the slab nosing’s bluish tint which, interspersed with mirrors, lightens and disappears level by level into the blue sky. The slabs are pierced by ‘pilasters’ – small pyramid-shaped aediculae, signs of an introverted monumentality seen solely from an interior glance. The pilasters translate furthermore the homothetic deformation undergone by the plan at each floor. Repetitive plans, invariably composed of four rooms that, as the level rises, ‘contracts’ in size, compelling the in-between space to ‘dilate’. The spacious rooms of the lower levels harbour the civic facilities – council chambers, wedding hall, and public reception whereas the uppers ones house office floors, delicately partitioned and punctuated by service blocks/ served spaces. From above, an atrium travels through the entire cube. As an upside-down pyramid, it introduces light to the public servants and, meanwhile, offers a monumental perspective for flâneurs, bride and groom on lower storeys. This inversed homothetic structure enables the town hall to shelter its double functions under the same roof, rendering the cohabitation of two spatial translations possible, a continuous oscillation between room-divided plan and open space.