AfE-Turm

AfE-Turm ('AfE Tower') was a 38-storey (30 floors on its south side and 22 floors on its north side), 116 m (381 ft) skyscraper in the Westend district of Frankfurt, Germany. It was the tallest building in Frankfurt from 1972 to 1974. The building was part of the Bockenheim campus of the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University and until 2013 housed the offices and seminar rooms of the departments of Social Sciences and Education. AfE is an acronym for Abteilung für Erziehungswissenschaft (Department of Pedagogy); however, this department never moved in because it was closed before the construction of the tower was finished, which happened in 1972. The tower was demolished on 2 February 2014. Planning and construction of AfE-Turm began in the early 1960s. The building became necessary in 1961, when the College of Pedagogy was incorporated into the University, and the old Bettinaschule in the Westend turned out to be inadequate, even as a provisional arrangement. The building inherently lacked the required functionality. The north side of the tower housed the library of the social sciences, as well as seminar rooms with 1.5 times the floor height. The south side consisted of offices only a single floor high, which required an intricate system of staircases and split-levels between the two halves, considerably complicating orientation.