Site-Specific Architecture

On Oct. 13, 1967, the submissions by Behnisch & Partner together with Jürgen Joedicke emerged the winner among the 101 entries. The jury chaired by Egon Eiermann almost unanimously chose the extraordinary design but doubted whether the tent-roof structure with its wide spans could be realized in practice. The idea arose only briefly before the competition entry was submitted and took its cue from the German Pavilion at the Montreal World Expo, the brainchild of Frei Otto and Rolf Gutbrod.

Werner and Anita Ruhnau designed the “Spielstrasse” in contrast to the conventional arts and culture program and the customary museum shows by the organization committee. The avantgarde street theater with countless experimental art actions at Oberwiesenfeld was the only art form to feature critical political content. It was, however, discontinued after the murder of the Israeli athletes on Sept. 5, 1972.

Otl Aicher’s visual design conveyed a completely new image for the Federal Republic of Germany in the sense of a corporate identity. He developed a new visual language based on pictograms, symbols, and shapes to enable communication, orientation and the realization of the Games without language being needed. The bright, fresh colors, derived in part from the colors in the Bavarian countryside, were destined to give the Olympic Games an unmistakable mood, ensuring they had a relaxed, joyful, and tolerant character.

While devising the competition entry, the team studied various site maps created to reflect different sets of shapes in order to discern the possible positioning of the stadium, the sports hall, and the aquatics hall on the flat plain of the Oberwiesenfeld. The maps were drawn by Carlo Weber, with locations both north and south of the traffic artery (Mittlerer Ring) considered in this content. Moreover, the Olympic Village and Central University Sports Grounds needed to be accommodated, too.

New load-bearing solutions had to be found for the roof idea, which was ten times the size of its role model: the German Pavilion for the Montreal 1967 World Expo (Frei Otto and Rolf Gutbrod). Behnisch & Partner along with various engineers developed a series of variants, but it was Frei Otto who came up with the successful solution: He divided the roof surface over the stadium into individual segments and suspended them from supports located behind the stands.

The various proposals for covering the roof included one using wood, which Olympia-Baugesellschaft preferred owing to the stabilizing effect of the bowls. In this context, Behnisch & Partner also planned the point-supported suspended roof for the Federal Horticultural Show, the Euroflor, in Dortmund in 1969: the sun-sail as it was called.

The developer first chose the roof skin made of transparent acrylic glass in response to a call by the ARD and ZDF TV channels, who were going to broadcast the event in color for the first time, for a transparent roof. Numerous companies were involved in working out the details, for example in developing the cables and the Perspex for the roof skin and its connections to the swivel nodes of the cable net. To assemble the roof, the engineers directing work draped the net with the nodes already machine pressed on to it across the stands and screwed it in place. The net was then pulled up and into place using an ingenious concept, before being tensioned and covered. The sports and the aquatics halls were both equipped with a suspended climate skin made of PVC-coated polyester fabric with a pleated filler.

It fell to the engineers at Leonhardt und Andrä led by Jörg Schlaich to develop the entire network structure with all the network detailing. He resorted to the old technique of cast steel for the innumerable nodes, mast heads, and tensioning elements to redirect forces, each of which was different; the casting molds were no longer made of wood but of polystyrene. Particularly impressive among the different foundation types used are the abutment for the large stadium tensioning cable and the strand bundles, which are not anchored in the clamping block. The concrete structure for the stadium was the brainchild of Swiss bowl engineer Heinz Isler, who had previously provided structural advice during the competition.

Günter Behnisch consciously invited avant-garde and highly experimental architects and artists from various fields of expertise to handle the smaller tasks. Among them were Graz-based architects Günther Domenig and Eilfried Huth, who together with Behnisch & Partner designed the seemingly futuristic Restaurant Nord. Munich architect Peter Lanz masterminded Restaurant Süd.

Günther Domenig and Eilfried Huth also designed the restaurant pavilion in the entrance area of the aquatics hall. The readily accessible organic sculpture made of welded and bent bright blue round steel is clad with a chromed nickel and steel mesh. Technical elements are left readily visible and emphasized with their coat of red paint.

According to the guideline of an “Olympics in parkland”, the landscape architecture was absolutely key. The concept Behnisch & Partner came up with and for which Carlo Weber then provided the drawings combines all the main elements of the site-specific architecture: overarching links to parkland and downtown Munich, existing elements, an artificial lake, modulated terrain, the forging of overarching green links, buildings in the park, transportation, and the principles for planning the parkland.

Landscape architect Günther Grzimek took the basic Behnisch & Partner concept and developed it into multi-faceted “utility landscape”. Many of the elements could not predetermined in the plan but instead arose through intense collaboration between the architects, landscape planners, Munich’s Municipal Parks Dept. – and the dozer drivers on site.

Günther Grzimek divided the paths into a web of covered, more strongly frequented main paths on the embankments as well as small side paths and tracks, in order to avoid the impression of broad walkways down which people would march. Different surfaces such as gravel, turf pavers, or paving stones as well as the newly developed “Olympia-Mastix” guaranteed a natural appearance without the feel of asphalt. The illuminations concept was also calibrated to fit the respective landscaping.

Behnisch & Partner devoted much attention to the transitions between the buildings and the landscape, between indoors and outdoors, and to how smaller structures and furniture were inserted into it. The elements and details arose from the respective situation and its specific character and not in line with some uniform design principle. The edges of the individual buildings were eliminated through the choice of transparent spatial delimiters, and the shape of the terrain, the ground and the greenery thus brought into the halls.

Bar a few exceptions, the highly differentiated situations obeyed the principle of creating an “organic sculpture” made up of landscaping elements – hill, embankments, hollows, paths, lake, trees, bushes, meadows, etc. The basic topographical elements offered various options for withdrawal or active appropriation in line with people’s social needs for privacy and communication. Quiet niches alternate with open areas for games, sports, or communicative activities.

A fundamental goal of the plans was to ensure the sustainability of the landscaping concept over and above the Games. Günther Grzimek created a place for everyday use that “encouraged visitors” to make active use of their leisure time and functioned to offset the way green spaces had been squeezed out of the city. He succeeded in realizing a social utopia that reflected the social upheaval of the 1960s: There are no set, predefined usages, and instead options are offered that enable the greatest possible freedom and selfdetermined appropriation.