Museum für angewandte Kunst Frankfurt

The Museum Angewandte Kunst is located in Frankfurt am Main, Germany and part of the Museumsufer. As a place of discovery, the Museum Angewandte Kunst focusses on the perception of currents and developments in society with a special emphasis on design, fashion and the performative element. The alternating exhibitions recount tales of cultural values and changing living conditions. Beyond that, they continually refer to the question of what applied art is today and can be and demonstrate the field of tension between function and aesthetic value.

The collections consist of more than 60,000 objects of European handicrafts dating from the twelfth to the twenty-first century, design, book art and graphics as well as Islamic and East Asian art.

Against the background of its collections of outstanding works of applied art, the Museum Angewandte Kunst strives to shed light on the obscure and create relationships between the events and stories revolving around things of the concluded past, the emerging present and the immanent future. The changing exhibitions tell of cultural values and evolving life circumstances given shape and expression with new forms.With its new presentation formats, the Museum Angewandte Kunst distances itself from the traditional criteria for museological collection and organization dating from the nineteenth century. The approach to the museum’s exhibits solely from the perspective of their history has made way for the negotiation of timely and untimely reflections. This leads in turn to the emergence of issues encountered in thematic exhibitions with ever new object constellations.The presentation Elementary Parts: From the Collections opened in 2014 is a core component of this endeavour. For this “heart chamber of the museum”, objects are selected from the many areas of the collection, regions of the world and eras of the past, and placed side by side in all their dissimilarity. In this way the Museum Angewandte Kunst shows its potential and exposes both the history of its holdings and the point of departure for curatorial praxis.

The architecture housing the Museum Angewandte Kunst was designed by Richard Meier. By integrating the Neoclassicist Metzler family villa built in the nineteenth century, he created an ensemble consisting of the surrounding park, the villa and the new building.With its re-opening in April 2013 and the restoration of the Meier architecture to its original splendour,

If we contemplate the Museum Angewandte Kunst building, we are reminded of Le Corbusier’s residential houses. For stylistic orientation, the architect Richard Meier looks to Classical Modern architecture, its straightforward forms and clearly articulated spatial bodies. In the late 1960s, Richard Meier belonged to the “New York Five” architects’ group, who further developed the functional style of 1920s and ’30s European modernism in the tradition of the early Le Corbusier. Their common attribute is the colour white. In his design for Frankfurt’s Museum Angewandte Kunst, Meier integrated the neo-classicist Metzler family villa in existence since the nineteenth century and thus created an ensemble consisting of the surrounding park, the villa, and the new building.

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