When you enter the Romantic Museum, you can look through a floor-to-ceiling glass wall into the secluded garden in the inner courtyard.

Trees, perennials and blue blooming flowers grow there.

Is the visitor standing inside or outside?

It is not the only illusion that the architecture of the new museum plays with.

The steep stairs that climb to the exhibition rooms also seem almost endless.

But this, too, is an optical illusion created by the tapering of the blue-washed staircase.

Illusion and dissolution, longing and fulfillment, such romantic motifs are cleverly staged in the architecture of the Romantic Museum.

Rainer Schulze

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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The architect Christoph Mäckler was not faced with an easy task.

Because the manuscripts in particular cannot stand daylight, the exhibition rooms had to be completely dark.

Mäckler therefore placed the central staircase behind the facade and created small seating niches with flush windows at the height of the landing.

Because the architect absolutely wanted to avoid a windowless wall: “We have an obligation for public space,” he says.

Inserted into the sensitive environment

The Romantic Museum doesn’t come up trumps. A monolithic block on the Großer Hirschgraben would have put the Goethe House in the shade. In order for the museum to fit into this sensitive environment and not dominate the Goethe House, it was necessary to subdivide it into small pieces. Mäckler organized and structured the facade in such a way that the impression is created that there are three houses next to each other, which also have three entrances - a main entrance and two side entrances for school classes and the temporary exhibition. The color scheme in yellow tones, which takes a bit of getting used to, and the protruding facade with sandstone elements are based on the famous neighboring house, which Mäckler considers the Romantic Museum to complement.

Many details are reminiscent of the history of the place: The Goethe House itself becomes an exhibit.

The Romantic Museum is connected to its raw fire wall, in which a walled-up window came to light when the neighboring building was demolished, to the general surprise, because even on the historical Merian plan from 1628 the wall was not exposed.

After the reconstruction of the baroque half-timbered house, which was destroyed in the war, an office building was built next door, which the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels used it.

With the move of the Börsenverein, the area became free for the Romantic Museum and the adjoining Goethehöfe with apartments and cantata hall, which the architect Michael Landes planned.

"We stand on the old town"

When the bookseller's house from the 1950s was demolished, Mäckler had the stones recovered into which the rubble recycling company had ground the rubble of the old town. These rubble stones were re-sawn and set into the floor of the museum foyer, which looks like a mosaic. “We're standing on the old town,” says the architect. An informative media installation in the foyer also provides information about the adventurous prehistory.