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House of the Book
Berliner Strasse 25 - 27, Frankfurt
1956
This office and residential building at the Berliner Strasse in Frankfurt is one of the outstanding buildings by the local architect Otto Apel. Since 2011, the Association of German Publishers and Booksellers is housed in this building. The same Institution also uses two adjacent buildings dating back to 1926. The building by Otto Apel has since then been used as so-called House of the Book. With the combination of living and working area, as well as a commercial ground floor, Otto Apel proposed an adaptation of the Pavillon Suisse by Le Corbusier from 1931. On the top floor there was an apartment with a roof garden, which inhabited Otto Apel himself. Below the office floors, a gallery was housed on the ground floor. Initiated by the documenta-founder Arnold Bode, the Göppinger Gallery was a design institution of the fifties to the sixties, where gathered the elite of international furniture and product designers. The five-storey building, which brought back the "white modernism" to Frankfurt after the Second World War, impresses with its clear design and color concept. The internal functions are clearly visible on the exterior. The façade of the attic with a roof garden and the mentioned apartment facade is closed whith exception of a slit-shaped opening to the access balcony. The rest of the facade, with the offices and the ground floor which is the set back from the street front, is fully glazed. The modernist monument was rebuilt by the office Scheffler + Partner in accordance to the original design. On the facade the filigree steel profiles of awning windows were preserved. Likewise, the complete cirulation of the building including the cantilevered staircase, the elevator, the portico on the top floor and the courtyard with Mangolie could be preserved.