The Museum Reinhard Ernst recently opened in the heart of the Hessian state capital (mre)

After three years of planning and almost five years of construction, the Museum Reinhard Ernst in Wiesbaden opened on June 23, 2024. With its focus on abstract art, it enriches the international art scene and is establishing itself as a world-class museum. Over 4,000 visitors came on the opening day alone. The new attraction is located in the heart of the city, at the intersection of Wilhelmstrasse and Rheinstrasse. The museum is run by the non-profit Reinhard & Sonja Ernst Foundation from Wiesbaden, which presents the entrepreneur's private collection of abstract art there.

In 2020, a floor slab measuring around 46 × 65 m with heavy reinforcement was installed on an area of around 7,000 m². The thickness of the slab varied between 80 and 115 cm. The Wiesbaden ready-mix concrete plant of the Rhine-Main-Taunus concrete branch supplied a total of around 1,800 m³ of waterproof concrete of strength class C30/37 in consistency classes F3 and F4 in several stages, supported by the plant in Flörsheim. This concrete was produced using the blast furnace cement CEM III/A 42.5 N (na).

Dyckerhoff also supplied around 8,000 m³ of concrete for walls and ceilings, some with higher compressive strengths of up to C50/60, in order to meet the load-bearing capacity requirements. A “mixed cement variant” consisting of CEM III/A 42.5 N (na) and a CEM II/A-S 52.5 N was used here.

The museum covers a total of 9,700 m², of which around 2,500 m² is exhibition space. The striking, cube-shaped building with a white granite façade and central atrium is not called the “sugar cube” by locals for nothing. The museum building was designed by Japanese architect and Pritzker Prize winner Fumihiko Maki. 

The realization of the building was in the hands of Frankfurt architects schneider + schumacher, who were also responsible for the extension of the Städel Museum, for example. The companies Karl Gemünden from Ingelheim and Wolff & Müller from Karlsruhe (ARGE Museum Reinhard Ernst) were commissioned with the shell construction. 

The exhibition Color is Everything! offers a fascinating insight into the world of abstraction after 1945. 60 masterpieces from the Reinhard Ernst Collection are on display, impressively illustrating the groundbreaking changes in painting in the USA, Japan and Europe.

The first special exhibition Fumihiko Maki - Maki and Associates: For a Human Architecture can also be seen until February 9, 2025. This is dedicated to the star architect Fumihiko Maki, who died before the opening, and presents models of some of his outstanding projects, including Tower 4 of the World Trade Center in New York.

Further information can be found on the website of the Reinhard Ernst Museum: https://www.museum-re.de/de/ 

Photos: Cover picture, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Reinhard & Sonja Ernst Foundation, photo Helbig Marburger; 2, 3 Dyckerhoff/ Christoph Mertens

For further information please contact
Isabel Derstroff, Phone: +49 611 676-3173
marketing@dyckerhoff.com