"The way Urban evolves between type and incident, factory and discontinuity, history and design time. This dialogue strongly influenced the design of Museum of Decorative Arts in Frankfurt am Main. The game was developed from a notion of context that takes not only elements geographical but also historical and typological. In this sense, in contrast to some of my earliest buildings to more rural sites or less historical, the museum is emphatically a public and urban, a rejection of modernist building insulation as an autonomous object detached from its surroundings. The scheme here is designed to connect: to respond, enlarge and strengthen the public context and urban fabric. "
Richard Meier.
Photo Courtesy of Darrel Godliman . The Museum of Decorative Arts in Frankfurt , Germany, was the first museum designed Richard Meier, who was the winner of a contest in which Robert Venturi participated among others. This detail is significant in the context in which it occurred, and that was 1979, a time when the historicist postmodernism was raging, and Venturi was one of his most prominent exponents. Meier's proposal is valuable because the project resolved taking into account one of the most graceful of postmodernism claims, integration into the historical context, but did so using a modern language, with characters Corbusian and without falling into the easy to copy and icons languages immemorial. But perhaps most important of the museum is its urban architecture and role in the assembly of volumes and surrounding areas.
Photo courtesy Richard Meier & Partners Architects
The Museum of Decorative Arts in Frankfurt was also a reference for the design of the High Museum in Atlanta , that although it was designed a year later, he completed before his German counterpart. 
Destruction Frankfurt in 1944 CONTEXT
Many buildings were Frankfurt destroyed in Allied bombing during the Second World War. A group of mansions of the early eighteenth century is based on the peaceful banks of the River Main (Main in German), some of them faithfully rebuilt to the original.
One of them, the Villa Metzler, was built in 1803 by pharmacist Peter Salzwedel, and then acquired by the banker Georg Friedrich Metzler in 1851. Between 1862 to 1863 he expanded a third floor and additional attic.
Given its heritage significance was acquired in 1961 by Frankfurt and converted into the Museum of Arts and Crafts in 1967.
The bombing had left an open area beside the house, so we decided to expand the museum in 1979, by convening an international competition, which emerged winner Richard Meier. CONCEPT
Meier left the volumes of this house for the development of your proposal, carefully analyzing the proportion of it and reducing it to a cubic grid. Thus, considering the size of the town and the size and pace of the windows of the same in the new building.
Transverse sections show the integration of the new volume using the same proportion and height of the existing village. 
The two volumes by the river Main. then made three copies of this cube symmetrically on the ground and generating a virtual grid computer. Subsequently, overlaid a grid rotated 3.5 °, whose rotation is due to the orientation of the river, and mainly houses the circulation, both external and internal. All items fit into the composition of these two overlapping frames.
Planimetry general. Originally planned a complementary building to the far east of the park (the plans and drawings are oriented to the south) 
This set of relationships can integrate frankly the building with the surrounding park, enjoying a spatial flow that invites passersby to approach the building.
A semicircular pergola tensor appears as a space that receives the passer and leads to the museum. Similarly, the square of the museum has a similar pergola, housing a bank, acts as an expansion of the museum.
this integration between interior and exterior also helps the generous glazed area of \u200b\u200bthe museum. The main entrance is located laterally to the flow approaching the building, is just a small cylinder that sticks within a partition, but the proportion of the volumes that define the input space, both outside and inside the manifold height, gives a significant size.
INTERIOR
The museum consists of three levels, organized around a central space.
In the first, the functions are arranged around a courtyard. Here is the volume curved foyer of access, whose side are attached showrooms. In another section of the restaurant is located Emma Metzler. Across the piazza lies a library and administration, while in the mansion nineteenth-century living rooms are located.
Tier The second level includes showrooms, mostly devoted to European art. There are four areas that are linked together by glass bridges. Starting with the volume of income and against the clock handles are displayed designs of Dieter Rams, medieval and Renaissance art, Baroque art at the other end and the villa is displayed antique furniture.
Second level, emphasizing the stairs. 
Third level. A leading element that weaves the various levels and galleries is a ramp located next to the foyer. This ramp, which recalls the architecture of Le Corbusier , allowed plenty of light through the skylight and the surrounding screen, and offers the visitor splendid panoramas city \u200b\u200band the river Main.
This same technique to organize the galleries around a ramp was used in the High Museum of Atlanta , although in that case it is a movement against a large curve atrium inspired New York Guggenheim Museum of Frank Lloyd Wright , but worked on the basis of the proposal meieriana in Frankfurt. The use of ramps in museums, also present, for example, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona, \u200b\u200bdue to the architect's interest in allowing a work of art seen from different points of view. 
En todo el edificio está presente el impresionante manejo de luz, ya sea directa o lateral, así como el juego espacial y volumétrico producto de la colisión de ambas grillas giradas. Sin embargo, el museo se enmarca dentro de un ordenamiento lógico debido a la rigurosa geometría que lo acoge y una solemne uniformidad gracias al impecable uso del color blanco en todo el conjunto. 
COLECCIÓN 
Precisamente es el uso del color blanco el que, según el architect can provide a framework for the exhibits, composed mostly of furniture and decorative elements (hence the name of the museum), but belonging to different eras, styles and regions.
effectively in many environments the target serves as the backdrop for this multiplicity of styles, but in some cases gave me the impression that the size of the displayed objects were lost in the huge scale of these areas glaucous.
LA VILLA METZLER
Reminiscent of an old landscape Frankfurt, this graceful home is linked to the museum via a glass bridge, which is embedded directly into one of the rooms of the same in the second level. The transition between modernity and the past becomes so eloquent but not unexpectedly.
The different environments of the second and third levels to illustrate, in a period context and environment, examples and European furniture styles of the baroque. Clearly the contrast between the display of the furniture as individual objects within a white background and then see them in an area that recreates the atmosphere of the time. Furniture players here are no longer isolated to be integrated into a comprehensive decorative ensemble.
"I think you can see all my work as a series of investigations into the spatial exchange between the public and private sectors. This exchange is expressed in a variety conceptions, but is always related somehow to the 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 it can be to extract of our eternal and culture topic.
Richard Meier.
SEE ALSO
- OTHER WORKS OF RICHARD MEIER
Greetings to Samira, a person who worked at the museum and showed me some interesting places in the museum. Vielen Dank! 
