Hotel Quartier 65

Building in Historical Context

The café “Schwarze Café”, located on Schweizer Strasse near the German Museum of Architecture, is undoubtedly among the most pleasant places to spend an evening in Frankfurt. In 1986, architect Max Dudler, born in 1949 in Altenrhein, Eastern Switzerland, who worked for some time in Frankfurt after his tenure at the office of Oswald Mathias Ungers (1981-86), managed to create a masterpiece that combines a bar with a restaurant in minimal space. Both parts are separated by a black form housing supplementary rooms such as toilets or a telephone booth. Meanwhile, Dudler's office has moved to Berlin, where in recent years the architect has focused primarily on larger projects, including a high school in Hohenschonhausen, the federal Ministry of Transport, Building, and Urban Development on Invalidenstrasse, as well as high-rise buildings lining the forecourt of the Mannheim railway station. Although Dudler's work closely follows the doctrine of the “stone Berlin,” his buildings are sheltered from the currently rampant tendency in the villa districts of the Berlin suburbs to resort to conservative neotraditionalism due to their rational design.
Dudler’s talent, particularly in the area of small forms, is evidenced by the hotel realized in Weisenau on the outskirts of Mainz. The client learned about Dudler in 1997 from a film broadcast by the television station 3sat and requested a project from the architect. Departing from the common standards of other accommodation facilities, the project looks unconventional: a hotel with six rooms and one bar – no restaurant, no pool, no conference rooms, no minibar, and no television in the room. It is a hotel for individualists who have given up the standards of hotel chains and can appreciate the personal care of the hotelier couple and the reduced focus on the essentials. This idea corresponds best to the concept of Dudler’s entire design.
“Quartier 65” is separated from the Rhine by busy traffic and a railway line. The overall expression of the hotel with its pediment obediently fits into the partially historical riverside front in Weisenau. The hotel’s width, reduced to a mere six meters, acts as an extreme miniature of a house: resignation to any ornamentation and facade cladding with Portuguese granite transform the building into a monolithic sculpture. Although the narrow slit windows of the front facade suggest a three-story impression, in reality, there are four levels – on the ground floor is the bar, above which are three floors with two rooms each. The minimalist design also applies inside: the floor consists of black asphalt slabs, and the walls are painted white; in addition, there is a longitudinal wooden section shaded in gray tones, which contains the bar's backroom and stairs on the ground floor, and on the upper floors, cabins for bathrooms and built-in wardrobes. The tables and chairs are from Dudler's proven furniture program, Black Monday, and the floor lamps in the six spacious rooms are by Arne Jacobsen. “Quartier 65” surprises with luxury achieved by the renunciation of certain amenities. It is proven that innovative ideas in the hotel sector often come from the outside – in this case, from the owner who, after a successful career at IBM, switched to the hospitality business.