Our century of German modernism — from a 1911 shoe-last factory to a chapel two farmers built themselves.
German architecture, in the popular imagination, is a castle on a crag — we have made that list ourselves — and the picture skips the century in which this country did as much as anyone to invent the thing the rest of the world now calls modern, then rebuilt itself twice over in two competing ideas of the future. A century that finishes with a city promising its citizens a concert hall for 77 million euros and handing them a bill for 789 million. The fifteen below run oldest first, and no two of them were solving the same problem.
What counts as modern here
Modern German architecture has no agreed birthday; this list starts in 1911, in a shoe-last factory in Lower Saxony, and Germans use three separate words for what follows. Klassische Moderne is Fagus and the Bauhaus. Nachkriegsmoderne is the rebuilding that came after the war, in both Germanies. Ostmoderne is what the East built once it stopped building wedding cakes. No Neuschwanstein here and no Cologne Cathedral, and the eastern buildings are in — a list without them is a list of West Germany.
Fagus Factory, Alfeld — Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer, 1911
Carl Benscheidt had managed the old shoe-last firm in town, fallen out with it, and set up in competition on the far side of the Hanover–Kassel railway. Then he pointed his new factory straight at them. The glazed front went up along the tracks as the Schauseite, the advertising face, in the sight line of the works he had left — and its corners have no columns in them. The glass turns and keeps going, the brick piers set back behind it. Fagus still makes shoe lasts. Guided tours run on Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays at 1pm, with an extra one at 11am on Sundays from April to October; the rest of the week you get the exhibitions, €11, and that corner.
Bauhaus Building, Dessau — Walter Gropius again, 1926
You can sleep in it. Twenty-three of the studio rooms in the Prellerhaus wing, the ones the students and junior masters lived in, are let to visitors from around €60 a night, booked by email with the foundation. What you wake up inside is the argument Gropius had begun at Fagus, taken to the scale of a whole school: three unbroken storeys of glass across the workshop wing, the structure hidden behind it so the wall reads as a single sheet. What he did not give it was a front. The plan is a pinwheel with no principal facade and no spot on the ground that resolves it, so you walk around it instead — at seven in the morning, hours before the building opens. It turns a hundred on 4 December 2026.
Karl-Marx-Allee, Berlin — Hermann Henselmann and a change of policy
Everyone reads this street as the East answering the West: tiled wedding cake all the way from Strausberger Platz to the twin domes of Frankfurter Tor. It began as the opposite. The first buildings on it are two flat-roofed access-gallery blocks at numbers 102/104 and 126/128, built in 1949–51 to designs by Hans Scharoun with Ludmilla Herzenstein — unornamented, cheap, 130 one-room flats. Then the thinking behind them was condemned as formalist and Western-decadent, Henselmann supplied a manner the leadership preferred, and the rest of the boulevard went up as workers’ palaces around two modernist blocks that were already standing. Both survive, listed, mid-street. The street gives you little to walk into, and the best of it is a screening: Kino International reopened in March 2026 after nearly two years dark.
Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin — Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, 1968
The Neue Nationalgalerie was commissioned when Mies van der Rohe was seventy-six, and a one-to-five model told him something most architects would have let go: a truly flat roof reads as though it is sagging at the corners. So the corners went up five centimetres high and the centre ten. The 64.8-metre steel plate over the glass hall, around 1,200 tonnes of it carried on eight cruciform columns, is bent on purpose. It looks flat. It is not. Thursday is the evening to go — the hall stays open until eight, and from autumn on it lights up against a dark sky — though on the first Thursday of the month it is free from four and half of Berlin is in it. Tickets.
Olympiapark tent roof, Munich — Behnisch & Partner with Frei Otto, 1972
The most famous roof in postwar Germany began as a pair of nylon stockings. An employee in Günter Behnisch’s office, Cord Wehrse, read a newspaper piece about Frei Otto’s tent pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal and suggested the idea; the competition model went in with wooden sticks and stockings stretched over them, and Otto was brought in afterwards to make the thing stand up across 74,800 square metres of cable net and tinted acrylic. The best view of it is from a pile of the war. The Olympiaberg, on the park’s southern side, is ten million cubic metres of bombed Munich heaped up between 1947 and 1958, and nobody charges for it or closes it at night.
Reichstag dome, Berlin — Norman Foster, 1999
Eighty designs went into the competition to convert the Reichstag. The jury could not pick a winner, so it picked three, and the Bundestag’s Council of Elders broke the tie politically, choosing Foster on one condition: that there be a dome, which his own scheme had done without. The dome he then built is a machine. Two 230-metre ramps spiral in opposite directions around a funnel of 360 angled mirrors that drops daylight into the debating chamber below, and the public walks above the parliament it elects, looking down into the room. Going up costs nothing, but you must register in advance with full names and dates of birth. Last admission is 9.45pm, and the dome closes for maintenance from 14 to 18 September, 28 September to 2 October, and 19 to 30 October.
Jewish Museum Berlin — Daniel Libeskind, 1999 and 2001
For two and a half years the finished building stood empty while Berlin argued about what belonged inside it, and around 350,000 people came anyway and walked the bare concrete — the rare museum whose most admired exhibition was the absence of one. Five voids run vertically through the plan, unheated, unventilated, largely unlit, technically outside the museum they interrupt, and stepping into one is nothing like stepping into a gallery. You pay only for the temporary shows. It closes on Mondays, and on 12, 13 and 21 September and 14 November this year; until 1 November 2026 there is a free exhibition about the building itself. Plan a visit.
Waldspirale, Darmstadt — Friedensreich Hundertwasser with Heinz M. Springmann
Topping-out was 10 August 1999. Hundertwasser died six months later, of a heart attack aboard the Queen Elizabeth 2 in the Pacific, and the building opened on 15 September 2000 without him: 105 rented flats winding up to a 41-metre tower, 1,048 windows and, by the landlord’s count, no two of them alike, with lime, beech and maple growing across 4,500 square metres of roof. People live here. There is no ticket and no interior — the tower restaurant shut years ago. You look from the street, which is also the only ground German copyright law lets you publish a picture of it from.
phaeno, Wolfsburg — Zaha Hadid, 2005
phaeno stands seven metres up in the air on ten concrete cones, and the point of it is the ground it leaves alone. Hadid won the competition largely because lifting the building kept a public route open underneath, from Wolfsburg station across to the Autostadt, and walking that route costs nothing. Inside, the Feierabend ticket halves the price for the last ninety minutes. German critics went for the undercroft as soon as the building opened: draughty, dark, more bus station than plaza. They are wrong.
Marta Herford — Frank Gehry, 2005
Red clinker brick bent until the walls look like they are mid-movement, with brushed stainless steel poured over the top of them like something spilt: this is what Gehry dropped into a Westphalian town whose business is furniture. It needs sun to work at all. On a grey afternoon the steel goes the colour of dishwater and the building loses half its case; on a bright one it is the best thing for eighty kilometres. Gehry died on 5 December 2025, and Marta Herford is showing Mindset Los Angeles, made with Gehry Partners and the Getty Research Institute, until 10 January 2027.
Mercedes-Benz Museum, Stuttgart — UNStudio, 2006
A nine-storey atrium cannot be divided into fire compartments, so this one makes weather instead. Set into the core walls are 144 nozzles that spin roughly 28 tonnes of air into a vortex 34.43 metres high; the low pressure at its eye pulls smoke up and out through the roof and keeps the escape routes clear. It takes about seven minutes to form, and Guinness has recognised it. The double helix inside is a story of its own and we have told it elsewhere. Tickets are €16, or €8 after 4.30pm.
Bruder-Klaus-Feldkapelle, Wachendorf — Peter Zumthor, 2007
Two farmers, Trudel and Hermann-Josef Scheidtweiler, wanted a chapel on their own field to say thank you for their lives, so they wrote to one of the most guarded architects in Europe. Zumthor waived his fee — the saint was his mother’s — and handed the family a building they had to make themselves. A hundred and twelve spruce trunks were stood up like a tepee. Rammed concrete went round them in twenty-four layers, one layer a day, to twelve metres. Then a fire was kept smouldering inside for three weeks of autumn 2006 until the trunks charred loose and could be pulled out, leaving a blackened cavity with the grain of every log printed on it. There is no ticket and no roof over the opening, so rain falls on the floor. Park where the signs tell you and walk the last 1.3 kilometres — by local account the village objected to cars on its field tracks, and the walk is the right way to arrive. Open every day but Monday.
BMW Welt, Munich — Coop Himmelb(l)au, 2007
Free, open until midnight, and BMW counts more than three million people a year through it. It is a delivery hall. Between eighty and a hundred and twenty customers a day collect a new car on a lit stage, and the cloud roof and the glass double cone are choreography around that transaction. Cross the road instead to Karl Schwanzer’s 1973 museum bowl and the four-cylinder tower behind it, whose cylinders do not stand on anything: they hang from arms cantilevered off four concrete cores. That is the better building.
Stuttgart City Library — Eun Young Yi, 2011
Stuttgart called it the book jail before it had even opened — Bücherknast, and Stammheim II after the city’s high-security prison — for the 40-metre cube that went up on Mailänder Platz, with no windows a passer-by could see, only a grid of frosted glass blocks set in concrete. Eun Young Yi’s answer was that he had certainly never seen such a beautiful book jail. Inside, he had hollowed the middle out entirely: the lower floors wrap an empty cube holding no books at all, and above it the white reading hall steps up through five galleries — the reason the building sits in our roundup of Europe’s libraries. Nothing is charged at the door, and since 2 February 2026 it shuts at 7pm and stays shut on Sundays, so the back half of the year is when you can have the reading hall and the blue-lit cube on the same evening.
Elbphilharmonie, Hamburg — Herzog & de Meuron, 2017
It was not the city’s idea. In autumn 2001 a Hamburg developer, Alexander Gérard, and his wife, the art historian Jana Marko, walked an unsolicited proposal into the Senate: put a concert hall on top of Werner Kallmorgen’s redundant 1960s warehouse, the one that had held cocoa, tea and tobacco. They brought in Herzog & de Meuron themselves in 2003 and carried the project for about three and a half years, and then the city took it over and the two of them were out of it. What they proposed is now the public roof of Hamburg, a plaza 37 metres up on the old brick, reached by an escalator that curves as it climbs so that you cannot see the end of it for two and a half minutes. Walk round to the west side, which faces the Elbe. Plaza tickets rise from €3 to €5 on 5 October 2026.
Of the fifteen, only one is on a clock: Munich’s Olympic tent roof, back in 1972. From the middle of this year until 2029 its entire acrylic skin comes off again — part of a €298 million renovation, and the second time the whole covering has been replaced since the Games — so the roof walk and the Flying Fox are out of service for years yet. The rubble hill above it is unaffected. That view is the consolation, and everything else here you can take a town at a time.