Congress Forum

Where the Karcher sugar refinery once worked — for a time the largest such plant in Germany — Frankenthal built itself a concert and congress house instead. It opened in 1991 to a design by Alexander Freiherr von Branca, the architect of Munich's Neue Pinakothek, who clad it in natural stone and set colonnades along its flanks, classical shapes rendered in abstract. Inside there are two rooms: a galleried main hall used for theatre, concerts and balls, and a smaller Spiegelsaal suited to chamber music and lectures. A conference wing was added in 2005.