Mainpromenade

This guide to the Mainpromenade in Frankfurt opens with a sunbather stretched across the lawn by the Städel Museum, unaware of what sits beneath her. It follows the museum's 2007 design competition, held after city rules blocked it from adding a floor to its protected nineteenth-century building, and the Frankfurt firm that answered with a plan to bury the new galleries under the garden itself. The roof over those galleries rests on just twelve slender columns, tucked inside the partition walls below.