Architecture Tours of Ferdinand Kramer’s University Campus in Frankfurt Bockenheim

Emerging from a seminar I taught in the Department of Media Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt titled Goodbye Bockenheim! Frankfurt’s Educational Complex, in 2023, I collaborated with Julia Krohmer (Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Center, Scientists4Future Frankfurt) and Tim Driedger (in_design architektur, Architects4Future Frankfurt) to do a tour of the “old” university campus in Frankfurt Bockenheim. What started as a focused tour for my students with Julia of Kramer’s renovated building used by the Research Center developed into a public tour hosted by the local groups of Architects- and Scientists4Future. As part of the Kulturcampus Festival in the Summer 2025, we will offer this tour again which was met with great interest from locals the first time around.
The buildings itself are an impressive–and mostly unprotected–example of the clean-cut, yet elegant rationalism Kramer strived for, meeting the demand for an ideological fresh start for Frankfurt’s university after World War II and the NS regime. With philosopher Max Horkheimer as the first new director of the university, emphasis was placed on democratic pedagogy enabled through the architectural spaces students and faculty would be using day to day. I, too, still studied in these buildings in the 2010s and experienced the vivid campus life as the heart of the Bockenheim neighborhood. As the last institutes left the campus and moved to the so-called Campus Westend and its monumental new buildings nearby, this era has officially come to an end. Nonetheless, initiatives like the Kulturcampus and the Cafe KoZ are keeping the former campus grounds alive and promote interim uses of the empty buildings.