the help of the EDP under the direction of the Deputy General Director Rudolf Blum and was able to reduce the long processing times with a significantly smaller personnel expenditure than the German Library and to appear before its Leipzig counterpart. In the unification agreement of 1990, the merger of the German library with the German library (including the German music archive in Berlin) to form the DDB (The German Library), based in Frankfurt. At this point in time, the German Library and the Music Archive had 4.5 million media units. In the early 1980s, the holdings comprised more than three million volumes and alternative magazines were required. Seven years after reunification and after five years of construction, a new library building was inaugurated in Frankfurt on May 14, 1997, with around 6 million media units. Building New building in 1959 The new building, inaugurated in 1959, was designed by architects Alois Giefer and Hermann Mäckler in the style of post-war modernism. The library buildings cost 2.5 million DM and were financed by the federal government.: They consisted of a storage tower with reading rooms on the two lower floors, which was raised to a height of 43 meters in 1968, and a two-story administration wing with a centrally arranged glass entrance front. In the early 1970s, the library was expanded to include an 18-storey, 53-meter-high book tower. After moving out in 1997, the building complex was used by the University of Frankfurt am Main. In 2004 the property was sold to the Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau, which had the ensemble, consisting of two storage towers, an administration wing and an underground car park, demolished for the construction of the West Arcade. New building in 1997 The Stuttgart architects Mete Arat, Hans-Dieter Kaiser and Gisela Kaiser won an architecture competition advertised in 1981. In 1985 they also received the planning contract. The new library building opened in 1997 cost 250 million DM. The building at Adickesallee 1 has a main usable area of 47,000 square meters. On its three underground floors there is an air-conditioned magazine area of around 31,000 square meters for 18 million media. The magazine space is sufficient until the 2040s. The storage space can optionally be enlarged by 10,000 square meters of the underground car park. The underground floors lie in the groundwater and are designed as a white tank with an additional external seal, the bottom