Museum für angewandte Kunst

On Frankfurt am Main’s Museumsufer, the Museum Angewandte Kunst serves as a venue for the presentation of applied arts, design, fashion, book art, graphic arts, architecture, as well as performative and lifestyle-related forms of expression. The museum offers sensory exhibition spaces and encourages public dialogue and critical engagement with social developments.

The site comprises the Historic Villa Metzler, a striking new building made up of three interconnected white cubes, an adjacent museum park (today Metzlerpark) and a workshop building. A glazed walkway links the new building to the rear of the villa; on the park side there is a restaurant. The park is characterized by cross-shaped paths and a white fountain and forms a green connection to the Museumsufer.

The collection traces back to holdings assembled from 1877 by the Mitteldeutscher Kunstgewerbe-Verein; in 1879 this developed into a museum of applied arts with a school and library. After financial difficulties following World War I, the city took over the institutes and the collection retroactively on 1 April 1920. In 1937 it was renamed Museum für Kunsthandwerk. From 1938 the institution occupied rooms in the Rothschild-Palais, which was sold under duress and later destroyed; the collection remained in storage and did not reappear until 1966 in the Villa Metzler and in special exhibitions. The present museum building was expanded in the 1980s; in 2000 a conceptual realignment and name change took place, which was further consolidated after an interior refurbishment in 2013.

The holdings comprise around 65,000 objects spanning five millennia. The collection’s strengths include European applied arts and design from the 12th to the 21st century, book art and graphic arts (including the Gebrüder Linel collection), as well as Islamic and East Asian art. A branch functioning as an icon museum was established in 1990 in the former refectory of the Deutschordenshaus and was comprehensively renewed in 2020–2021. Since 2017 the museum has presented a permanent exhibition on the designer Dieter Rams; the Stilraum was redesigned in 2022. Since 2013 the museum has been supported by a foundation with several patron circles.