Schloßstraße

Von-Bernus-Park is a quiet, almost hidden spot in the western part of the district of Bockenheim in Frankfurt. Created in 1771 in the English landscape style, this was originally a residence park around the Baroque palace of Princess Henriette Amalie von Anhalt-Dessau. The palace was destroyed in the Second World War and in the post-war period the park seemed to have been forgotten. Its entrances were hardly recognisable, the development around its perimeter was irregular and without form. From the 1970s onwards, next to the main entrance on Schloßstraße (which means castle street), there was an unremarkable flat-roofed building, occupied by various cafés and bars over the years. This building was sold shortly after 2010 to project developers Ardi Goldman and Ronny Weiner. During the planning phase for a replacement building, the City of Frankfurt also regenerated Von-Bernus-Park and significantly upgraded the entrances. 

For the new apartment block with children’s day nursery, Stefan Forster Architekten developed a reduced, archaic-looking building volume. Along the line of Schloßstraße it stands at the end of a sequence of 1960s residential blocks. Despite its contemporary design, the new building does not jar in this context, as it takes up and re-interprets distinctive elements from its surroundings, e.g. the line of development, the cubic volume, the figure of the pitched roof with the ridge parallel to
the street (with the exception of a high-rise block standing at a right angle to the street). The symbolic structure, deriving its impression from the primary effect of materials, proportion and colour, sets up a clear spatial line to Von-Bernus-Park, making the entrance to the park once again easy to see. Its strong presence is further enhanced through the use of red-flamed water-struck clinker bricks with mortar coloured to match. From the concrete window sills to the textile screens and the parapets of expanded metal – all elements in the façade are kept to the same tone of red. The only exception, for reasons of cost, is the emergency staircase at the back which Is made of galvanised steel. Deep window reveals and loggias carved out of the building volume continue the typological theme of the “primitive hut”.

The street faces and the gable ends are articulated by windows spaced on a simple grid of four or five axes. Spacious loggias with floor-to-ceiling windows open towards the park on the south side, as does the garden of the children’s nursery. The strict symmetry is broken only by the entrances, positioned off-centre, and the wall of the ground floor which continues to the high-rise. This new building on Schloßstraße provides space for a children‘s day nursery, offices on the first floor and 13 rental apartments above.