Federal Audit Office (building, Frankfurt am Main)

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Federal Audit Office as seen from the corner of Kornmarkt Berliner Strasse
Federal Audit Office 1977
Listed part of the building (2015)
Construction site in June 2017
With an annex on the theater tunnel ramp that is not listed as a historical monument

The building of the former Federal Audit Office is a listed building in Frankfurt's old town , in which the Federal Audit Office was located until it moved to Bonn in 2000. The Kornmarkt Arkaden were built on the site from 2015 to 2018 , for which part of the building was extensively renovated and the demolished part was supplemented by a new building.

Construction and use as the seat of the Federal Audit Office

After the German Bundestag in 1949 voted for Bonn as the provisional seat of the German Parliament, it was decided that Frankfurt am Main should in return become the seat of the Federal Audit Office. Initially, the agency's employees were spread across five locations. In 1950 the federal government acquired a plot of land in a central location in Frankfurt for a new building. The property was behind the Paulskirche between Bethmannstrasse, Kornmarkt and Berliner Strasse. The property was in ruins; the current building was by the Allied bombing of the Second World War has been completely destroyed.

In 1951 there was an architecture competition in which the design by Werner Dierschke and Friedel Steinmeyer emerged as the winner. A Z-shaped building with a flat roof was created. The central wing had eight floors and a height of 26.5 meters, the two side wings consisted of five floors, each 17.2 meters high.

In the opinion of the appraisers, the steel frame construction was a “happy counterpart to the Paulskirche” due to its light, high construction. 1100 windows and cladding with colored windows would visually reduce the structural dimensions. The inauguration of the building took place on November 19, 1953 in the presence of Federal President Theodor Heuss ( Ludwig van Beethoven's anger over the lost penny was played ).

In 1955, an extension was built in the direction of today's theater tunnel , but it was never a listed building. The construction costs for the entire ensemble amounted to 3,651,697.64 DM (according to today's purchasing power this corresponds to 9.3 million euros).

In keeping with the times, the rooms were small. The 400 employees each had around ten square meters of office space. The senior officials also had just as little exaggerated space at 20 square meters as the President, whose office on the first floor measured 25 square meters. A total of 8071 square meters of office space was available.

The curved, seemingly free-floating staircase in the central wing is one of the building's special features. In the entrance hall there was a picture of Potsdam by the artist Eberhard Schlotter . Potsdam had been the seat of the audit office of the German Reich .

The building had to be renovated several times. The renovation of concrete and the installation of thermal insulation windows in the 1980s cost three million DM (around 2.7 million euros based on today's purchasing power).

21st century

Since July 1, 2000, the Federal Audit Office has had its seat in Bonn due to the Berlin / Bonn Act . The building in Frankfurt has been empty since then. There was long uncertainty about future use. Wolf & Partner Grundstücksgesellschaft, which had owned it since 2002, wanted to accommodate a luxury hotel here. After this plan failed, the main creditor ran the foreclosure auction. The estimated value was 33.5 million euros. On July 27, 2010, the building went to BS GmbH und Co KG, a subsidiary of Helaba, for 16.8 million euros .

The "OFB Projektentwicklungsgesellschaft", which stands behind BS GmbH and Co KG, was then in negotiations with the State Office for the Preservation of Monuments in Hesse , as it no longer saw monument protection after changes to the building and also considered any use under the conditions of the State Office to be no longer profitable . It was also stated that the building was dilapidated. The office initially ruled out a revocation of the monument protection.

In 2012, the office and the client agreed on a comprehensive renovation of the east wing and the demolition of the annex in the direction of the theater tunnel, which is not under monument protection . The new Kornmarkt Arkaden was built from 2015 to 2018 on the area that was now vacated and the part of the property on Berliner Straße that was previously used as a parking lot . The project includes space for shops and restaurants, 21 rental apartments and a hotel from the Motel One chain with 470 rooms. The listed part has been extensively renovated and has been used as office space since 2018.

literature

Web links

Commons : Bundesrechnungshof Frankfurt  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The new owner is the Heleba subsidiary . In: Frankfurter Rundschau . July 27, 2010 ( fr.de [accessed July 24, 2011]).
  2. ↑ Hotel with expiry date . In: Frankfurter Rundschau . July 20, 2011 ( fr.de [accessed July 20, 2011]).
  3. ↑ The Federal Audit Office stops . In: Frankfurter Neue Presse . December 6, 2012 ( fnp.de [accessed May 26, 2015]). The Federal Audit Office stops ( memento from May 26, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
  4. ↑ Kornmarkt Arkaden will be finished in mid-2018 . In: Frankfurter Neue Presse . July 30, 2016 ( fnp.de [accessed December 1, 2017]).

Coordinates: 50 ° 6 ′ 38.2 "  N , 8 ° 40 ′ 43.4"  E