Frankfurt Skyline Countdown # 15
The Marienturm, completed in 2019, is my nomination for Frankfurt’s most conspicuous mediocre building. While the developers praise its “elegant and clear architecture”, my impression is that it looks clunky and out of place among the more imaginative nearby buildings. At 155.0 meters, it is currently the fifteenth tallest building in Frankfurt.
The building gets its name from a small street called the Marienstraße, which goes around the south and west sides of the complex. The street has been there since the late nineteenth century, when a man named Louis von Brentano (1811-1895), a member of the then-prominent Brentano family, gave or sold the strip of real estate to the city of Frankfurt on the condition that the street be named after his late wife Marie, née von Guaita.
The address of the Marienturm is Taunusanlage 9-10, the Taunusanlage being a narrow strip of park where the city walls used to be, until they were demolished in the early nineteenth century.
The building consists mainly of office space. Reportedly the investment bank Goldman Sachs will have approximately 10,000 square meters of space on the top floors.
Schiller grimly ignoring the Marienturm
The German dramatist, poet and historian Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) can’t be bothered to turn around and look at the Marienturm directly behind him. The only Marie he cares about is Maria Stuart, better known in English as Mary, Queen of Scots.
Schiller’s play Maria Stuart, first performed in 1800, served later as the basis for the opera Maria Stuarda by Gaetano Donizetti (1797-1848).
Marienturm with Trianon (on the left) and the Deutsche Bank Towers
My photos and text in this post are from 2020.