O.M. Ungers

Streaming video - 1986

In 1979, the city of Frankfurt commissioned Oswald Mathias Ungers, one of Germany's best-known architects, to design a museum for architecture. The museum was to be housed in an 80 year-old villa on the riverbank. Ungers came up with a scheme to preserve the villa, while designing new exhibition space inside the house and around its base on the perimeter. He gutted the villa to make a new house within an old one. Admired by post-Modernists, Ungers explores abstract intellectual ideas in his search for a new modern architecture, while referencing historical traditions and contexts.