>> Frankfurt Skyline Countdown # 6 <<      

The 190-meter Omniturm was completed in 2019 (except for a few odds and ends that they are still working on) and is now Frankfurt’s sixth-highest building.

As the Latin prefix Omni- implies, the Omniturm is intended to be all things for all people (except for the poor, of course). In addition to masses of traditional office space, it has (or will have) several floors of expensive apartments, as well as a “dynamic technology start-up center” with creative-office space (whatever that is), co-working space, a cafeteria, an event hall, restaurants and various joint-use areas.

Offset floors on the Omniturm

Architecturally, the Omniturm is a plain-vanilla glass-and-metal box except for one distinguishing feature, namely that several floors (from the 16^th to the 23^rd, if I have counted correctly) are offset slightly from the rest of the building and from each other, either to the left or the right or the front or the back, depending on your viewpoint.

Some critics have suggested that these offsets make it look as if the upper floors were too heavy and had squashed these eight storeys, making their contents squish out in all directions. (It doesn’t look like that to me, but I thought it was a clever idea.)

The eight offset floors are the ones that will be used for apartments, according to the website skylineatlas.de.

Omniturm and nearby buildings

From left to right: Garden Tower, Omniturm, Japan Center, Taunusturm.

Schiller ignoring the Japan Center and the Omniturm

If the poet, historian and playwright Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) had any interest in seeing the Omniturm, he would have to turn his head to the left, where he might see a few windows of the Omniturm sticking out from behind the Japan Center. (His view would be better in the winter, however, when there were no leaves on the trees.)

Gutenberg and colleagues lost among the high-rise buildings

Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing press, lived in Frankfurt for several years in the 1450s. During this time, he worked with the local printers and publishers Johannes Fust and Peter Schöffer. The three of them together on their monument seem somewhat lost among the high-rise buildings: on their left (our right) the Omniturm and Japan Center, behind them the Silver Tower and to their right (our left) the Commerzbank Tower.

My photos and text in this post are from 2020.

Next: Frankfurt Skyline Countdown # 5.