For many decades, a number of urban master plans have defined where tall buildings can be built in Frankfurt. Since 1998, the city has been trying to group high-rise buildings into defined clusters instead of letting them spread uncontrolled across the city. The result is today’s dense Frankfurt skyline.

In the last twenty years or so, the focus of urban development for high-rise projects has been on the Financial District and the European District in particular. But especially in the newly built European District, not many new high-rise towers are to be expected in the transition to the main station.

The City of Frankfurt is therefore updating the high-rise master plan from 2008, which is expected to be presented in 2021. This time, however, the Frankfurt high-rise model is not presented by Prof. Jochem Jourdan and his team, but by two offices that have yet to be publicly named.

Furthermore, new high-rises in Frankfurt are not wanted to be built in established residential areas. Therefore, districts like Bahnhofsviertel, Westend, Nordend, and adjacent areas are ruled out for development. The planning conflicts of the 1970s showed that all too well.

The anticipated development priorities in the high-rise plan for 2021 have already leaked:

The Financial District will continue to be urbanized, particularly Neue Mainzer Strasse and Willy-Brandt-Platz.

It had been known for a few months that the European Central Bank (ECB) would like to expand. For this reason, the City of Frankfurt brought a high-rise tower with a height of around 60 meters (197 feet) on the site of the ECB into the discussion.

But regardless of this development, the area around Danziger Platz seems destined for further high-rise developments. After all, there is little urban fabric worth preserving there, and the area is already developing dynamically. However, according to a spokesman for the City of Frankfurt, new high-rise buildings in the Ostend (lit. “East End“) are to be given the unique selling proposition of the ECB, which means that new towers in this area will tend to be lower. Details can be read in this article by local newspaper FNP (in German).

The area south of Frankfurt Central Station and east along the banks of the river Main has not been a major focus of high-rise development for a long time. The Campanile was once planned here, but this area has stagnated since construction of Westhafen Tower and the IG Metall tower. That is likely to change with the new high-rise master plan.

Update October 12th 2020: According to an article by Bernd Günther in the German F.A.Z. newspaper, the Local Advisory Board 4 for the Ostend district calls for a say in the discussion about new high-rise locations (external link – in German). Politicians from the parliamentary groups have named three possible locations for buildings with heights of 75, 70 and 50 meters west of the Ostbahnhof (East Station).