The 1972 Olympic buildings of Munich's Olympiapark

Behnisch & Partner won the 1967 competition with a landscape rather than a set of monuments, and Frei Otto's engineers turned the sketch into 74,800 square metres of translucent acrylic hung from 58 steel masts over the stadium, the arena and the pool. What follows are the structures still standing under and around that roof, with what each one was built to hold in 1972 and what it does now: a working municipal swimming bath, a national athletics training hall, a concert arena, a housing estate.

Places in this collection

  • Olympisches Dorf — Built for the XX Olympiad to house the athletes and split at the time into a men's village and a women's village, on the north side of the…
  • Werner-von-Linde-Halle — Built west of the stadium as the warm-up hall for the track athletes and joined to it by a tunnel, so competitors never crossed open ground…
  • Olympia-Schwimmhalle — The competition pool of 1972, covered by the same acrylic canopy and glazed on its long side so the roof reads as continuous from the lake.…
  • Olympiahalle — Opened on 27 August 1972, the day before the Games, and used for the gymnastics and handball competitions. Behnisch & Partner sank the bowl…

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