Grimmwelt Kassel

About this place

Grimmwelt Kassel, completed in 2015 by the Aachen practice kadawittfeldarchitektur, is a museum devoted to the lives, language and fairy tales of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, who did much of their work in Kassel. Rather than a free-standing object, the building is shaped like a piece of landscape: it grows out of the slope of the Weinberg, a listed hillside park near the city centre, clad in pale Cristallo quartzite that gives it a quiet, rocky presence among the trees. Its most generous gesture is the roof. The building steps up the hill in broad terraces that double as a public path, so anyone can walk up and over the museum to a plateau with panoramic views across Kassel — the architecture given back to the city as open space. Inside, the exhibition descends through flowing, interconnected rooms that treat the Grimms’ dictionary and tales as an immersive, contemporary experience rather than a glass-case archive. Built on the footprint of a villa destroyed in the war, Grimmwelt blends museum, topography and viewpoint into one walkable form.