Museum Angewandte Kunst

This is the design museum on the Museumsufer, and the building is as much the exhibit as the collection. Richard Meier, the American architect known for the Getty Center in Los Angeles, designed it and opened it in April 1985. The collection runs to more than 60,000 objects: European applied art from the 12th to the 21st century, design, book art and graphics, plus Islamic and East Asian holdings.

The curatorial approach is unusual and worth knowing before you go. Rather than arranging objects chronologically by origin, the museum deliberately mixes them. The core presentation, Elementary Parts, opened in 2014 and places objects from different centuries, regions and disciplines side by side to see what happens. Rotating exhibitions focus on design, fashion and performance, and keep circling the question of what applied art even means now.

Meier came out of the New York Five, the group of architects who in the late 1960s carried forward the European modernism of the 1920s and 1930s, and his signature is white. Here he wrapped an L-shaped complex of three cube-like volumes around an existing neoclassical villa, linking them into a single ensemble with the surrounding park. Inside, a pedestrian ramp connects light-filled exhibition levels, and large windows keep the park and river in view.

A 2013 renovation removed partition walls and additions from the 1990s, restoring Meier's original spatial idea. If you have any interest in architecture, that alone justifies the ticket.

The Villa Metzler at the center of the complex was built in 1804 as a summer house for the apothecary Peter Salzwedel, a square plan with five window bays a side and a pyramidal mansard roof. The banker Georg Friedrich Metzler bought it 50 years later and enlarged it. Since 2009 its nine period rooms have shown domestic interiors from the Baroque through Jugendstil, furnished from the museum's own holdings of furniture, porcelain, carpets and objects.

The park is a small pleasure in its own right. Salzwedel planted ginkgos, red oaks, a tulip tree, a giant sequoia, beeches and chestnuts across roughly 10,000 square meters. Goethe, by then living in Weimar, is said to have known and praised the garden, and his 1815 poem Ginkgo Biloba was written for Marianne von Willemer of Frankfurt with a leaf from this ginkgo.