BlogTour Ambiente: Private Tour of the Richard Meier Museum in Frankfurt

Hello From Frankfurt!
I have just arrived and already have loaded up the images on my phone and camera and wanted to share a few with you all right away.

We were lucky enough to have a Private Tour this evening by Martin Hegel, the communications director of the Museum of Applied Arts in the heart of the city. A what a special museum it is.

Not only was I inspired by the pieces throughout, and most certainly by the very forward thinking way that they have been curated, but also by the building in of itself.

Designed by American architect, Richard Meier, it is in its 30th year and allows for each of the rooms to represent lifestyle settings and vignettes, Lighting through windows and openings within the structure play another crucial part in the journey throughout your visit and as it was dusk, we could really appreciate the differences of each room and how they impacted one another.

Meier was invited to take part in a competition during the 1970's, to create a museum which would attach to the original 1803 building and had never designed a museum before. He presented a model and won the competition. Although Frankfurt was in fact the first museum to be designed by Meier, the High Museum in Atlanta began and was completed before Frankfurt. 

The museum’s curatorial policy is to represent ethnology as a “unified diversity”, first through a series of independent, but linked, top-lit cubic forms, and then through alternative itineraries afforded by the plan. In this respect, the formal strategies adopted for the Museum of Decorative Arts and this museum are complementary in that the first consists of prismatic masses fed by an inner cruciform circulation system, while the second consists of the ramp-hall backed up by cubic pavilions along the Metzlerstraße.

Inspired by the Guggenheim museum and it's spiral ramp formation allowing to see through the galleries and get different and unique perspectives of the art and the exterior elements throughout.

Because of the small scale objects being shown, Meier felt the importance that the rooms needed to be scaled down and allow for the movement to be a slow and gradual experience. 

"I believe it is possible to see all of my work as a sequence of investigations into the spatial interchange between public and private realms. This interchange expresses itself in varying conceptions, but is always related in some way to a notion of architectural promenade. Finally, and again, mine is an attempt to find and redefine a sense of order, to understand, then, a relationship between what has been and what can be, to extract from our culture both the timeless and the topical."
— Richard Meier. from Eliot Noyes. On Architecture: Lecture by Richard Meier. p.30, 33.

Continue to follow along the hashtag #BlogTourAmbiente as well as my Instagram and Twitter pages for all the days activities as we visit the fair - Ambiente, tomorrow.