The German Architecture Museum (Deutsches Architekturmuseum) (DAM) is located on the Museumsufer in Frankfurt. Housed in an 18th-century building, the interior has been re-designed by Oswald Mathias Ungers in 1984 as a set of “elemental Platonic buildings within elemental Platonic buildings”. It houses a permanent exhibition entitled “From Ancient Huts to Skyscrapers” which displays the history of architectural development in Germany. The museum organises several temporary exhibitions every year, as well as conferences, symposia and lectures. It has a collection of ca. 180,000 architectural drawings and 600 models, including works by modern and contemporary classics like Erich Mendelsohn, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Archigram and Frank Gehry. It also includes a reference library with approximately 25,000 books and magazines.
For the museum, a semi-detached villa in the Sachsenhausen-Nord city district was converted. Inside the house, a white steel-concrete construction, a house-in-house, was set up after the coring. The house was inaugurated in 1984. On the former garden floor, an exhibition hall was built. An entrance zone was built in front of the house, looking on the Main, which significantly changed the historical impression of the villa. This building is not only a house for architecture but also one about architecture, according to the architect Oswald Mathias Ungers, who should as well convert the Pergamon Museum in Berlin.
The DAM is part of the Frankfurt Museum Embankment along the Sachsenhauser Main embankment, which was planned and set up in the times of the financially strong banking city tradition by Hilmar Hoffmann. The art and architecture historian Heinrich Klotz from Marburg, who was also the first director of the museum, was responsible for the design. In the 1990s, a decline in visitor numbers began. Drastic reductions in funds and the discussion of a closure or transfer to Berlin seemed at times to mean the end of the DAM. In 2001 the DAM was renovated and reopened. Not only the building was overhauled, new tasks and goals were set. There should also be exhibitions by contemporary architects, the information and productions should be equally intelligible to professionals and non-professionals alike, the experience and entertainment character should be strengthened and the house should become a meeting point for industry, business and architects. Under the leadership of the Ingeborg Flagge (2000-2005), the museum was able to triple its visitor numbers.
Since 1980, the Deutsches Architekturmuseum has been the publisher of the annual German Architecture Yearbook, in which a changing jury presents a selection of outstanding works from the architecture of the previous year. Since 2007, the DAM Prize for Architecture has also been awarded in this context. Parallel to the yearbook, the architecture museum presents an exhibition in which the selected buildings are presented.
