Every design for Ulm

Stand at the foot of the Ulmer Münster and tip your head back: until October 2025 its spire was the tallest church tower anywhere in the world. Below it lies a city founded around the middle of the ninth century, a royal palace site and later a free imperial city, where the Blau and the Iller join the Danube and the river marks the border with Bavaria and the twin town of Neu-Ulm.

Ulm stirs a quiet pride in the people who know it. The citizens here wrote down the oldest constitution of any German town, the Großer Schwörbrief, and the Schwörhaus still recalls it. Albert Einstein was born here, Hans and Sophie Scholl grew up here, and from the riverbank generations of Danube Swabians once set off downstream in flat boats known as Ulmer Schachteln to settle in south-eastern Europe. Round the Rathaus and the Metzgerturm the old town keeps its medieval scale, while the ring of forts of the Bundesfestung Ulm crowns the hills, and on a clear day the Alps show on the horizon.

If you grew up here, the map draws your childhood: the Danube banks, the alleys under the minster, the way home across the river.