NowMunich

Architecture

Architecture in Munich

Munich keeps a baroque and Gothic core and rebuilt everything around it after the war. The 1972 Olympics is the hinge, and most of what came later still argues about structure and skin rather than mass.

• Museum Brandhorst

  ·

  Completed 2009

  Sauerbruch Hutton

  A museum for postwar art at the edge of the Kunstareal, the city's museum quarter. Sauerbruch Hutton hung thirty-six thousand glazed ceramic rods in twenty-three colours over a folded metal skin, so the surface changes with the viewing angle and resolves into fields only at a distance. The rods also absorb traffic noise from the street they face. The palette comes from the houses around it rather than from the collection inside.

• BMW Welt

  ·

  Completed 2007

  Coop Himmelb(l)au

  A delivery centre and showroom across the road from the company's headquarters, built as one covered room on the scale of a city square. Coop Himmelb(l)au anchored a corner with a twisting double cone of some nine hundred cut steel members, then lifted the roof off it as a single surface on twelve columns. Cars are handed over on the floor below, which the plan treats as a stage. It borrows the geometry of a civic building and accepts none of the obligations.

• Allianz Arena

  ·

  Completed 2005

  Herzog & de Meuron

  A football stadium on the northern motorway approach to the city. Herzog & de Meuron covered it in diamond cushions of ETFE foil, each lit from within and switchable between white, red and blue, so the building announces which club is playing before anyone arrives. The bowl inside is conventional; the argument is entirely in the envelope. It treats a stadium as a signal read at motorway speed.

• Olympiastadion

  ·

  Completed 1972

  Günter Behnisch · Frei Otto

  The main stadium of the 1972 Games, under acrylic panels hung from steel cable nets. Behnisch won the competition with one translucent roof over stadium, arena and pool, and Frei Otto's team found the tensile geometry that could span it. The roof follows the artificial hills the site was graded into rather than the buildings underneath. The Games were staged as a counter-image to Berlin in 1936, and this is the part of that argument still standing.

• Asamkirche

  ·

  Completed 1746

  Cosmas Damian Asam · Egid Quirin Asam

  A late baroque church wedged into a narrow gap on a shopping street. The Asam brothers built it beside their own house with their own money, so nothing in it answers to a patron: fresco, stucco and sculpture run together across every surface, lit from a window hidden above the altar. The plot was too narrow for width, so the composition goes vertical. It is what a church looks like when client, painter and sculptor are the same two people.