Because Olympic stadiums are often national stadiums it is not unusual for them to be used for football, be that by the national team, a local club, or for international tournaments. The Olympiastadion, as the name suggests, was built specifically for the 1972 Summer Olympics but with a view to both Bayern München and TSV 1860 München – who were at the time on a similar level – making it their home. It also hosted the final of the 1974 World Cup, the 1988 European Championship, and no less than three European Cup/Champions League finals. It will never hold a fourth. Nor is it likely that the German national football team will ever play there again. Instead, they’ll use the Allianz Arena up the road, just as Bayern Munich have been doing since its inauguration in 2005.
The Olympiastadion, designed by the firm Behnisch & Partner, was radical for its time, and deliberately so. The Association of German Architects had prudently advised against constructing anything monumental, anything that might echo the might of Berlin’s Olympiastadion and the associations with National Socialism that might come with it. The site earmarked for development was Oberwiesenfeld on the city’s periphery, a former airfield with few existing structures, large enough to accommodate not just the stadium but many of the facilities that would broadly constitute the Olympic Park: a multi-purpose arena (Olympiahalle), swimming pool (Olympia Schwimmhalle), Olympic Village, even an Olympic Tower (Olympiaturm). The games' motto was to be 'The Cheerful Games' (Die Heiteren Spiele) and was indicative of the governing committee’s approach. The complex was intended to be open and navigable by foot, helped along by Otl Aicher's revolutionary pictograms denoting what sport was attached to which venue. (Aicher's company also came up with the first official Olympic mascot, a multi-coloured dachshund by the name of Waldi.) This sense of visual cohesion – what today, although not back then, would be regarded superficially as branding – applied to the project as a whole: to the publicity posters, the iconography, and the architecture.
The idea to erect a sort of tent over various buildings that comprise the Olympiapark was inspired by the work of German architect and structural engineer Frei Paul Otto, who had designed the West German Pavilion for the 1967 International and Universal Exposition held in Montreal. So specific was this requirement that Otto was taken on as a development consultant, working alongside civil engineers Fritz Leonhardt and Wolf Andrä, under the direction of structural engineer Jörg Schlaich. A joint effort then, but born of Otto’s vision – the similarities between the roof of the Olympiastadion and that of the Expo pavilion are manifestly apparent.
The body of the Olympiastadion itself is predicable enough: a circular counter-sunk bowl, in the same vein of, say, the Rajko Mitić Stadium in Belgrade. This single tier sweeps upwards on its western edge, thereupon supported by exposed concrete brackets overhanging a single-story of atriums, offices and amenities. Inside, the seats are various shades of green, presumably to mitigate against the effects of sun bleaching, which complements the yellow-painted edges of the radial gangways and the dashes of pale blue that signpost the vomitories. A tired gantry of press booths overlook the western terrace like an afterthought. Everything else is concrete and steel grey, and immaculately kept.
The roof is something else. Shaped like a crescent with the tips cut off, eight huge masts hold it in place by way of a multitude of cables, the transparent, panelled roof rising and falling between them. The square acrylic panels vary in condition, some discoloured, others distorted, but are collectively harmonious. And it really is like a tent, the canopy mimicking the effect of a taught flysheet. The plexiglass roof extends beyond stadium’s concourse, which has the effect of blurring the boundary between the interior and exterior, as well as the verdant and undulating landscape that surrounds it, which includes a lake.
The overall effect is satisfying but it comes at a cost. For one, a large section of the ground is completely exposed to the elements, amounting to around 15,000 seats out of capacity of just under 65,000. Plans were in fact drawn up to add a second covering opposite the existing one, but all there is to show for that are two anchoring blocks that were to hold the leading tension cables in place. Even with the extra coverage the Olympiastadion was never going to be cosy. It’s just too big, lets in too much light and the nature of the roof leaves large sections exposed at the back, open to the wind and the rain. It is a summer stadium, not a winter one, but that’s the point, that’s what it was created for.
The Munich Football Arena – one of many Allianz arenas that have cropped up over recent years – was meant to address the shortcomings of the Olympiastadion. Again, it was also supposed to be the home of both of Munich’s football clubs, and was until 2017 whereupon TSV 1860 sold their share to Bayern and subsequently returned to the Grünwalder Stadion, which had consequences.
When the stadium was completed in 2005 the seats were coloured a ‘neutral’ grey. For context, the stadia built for the European Championships in 2004, held in Portugal, were big on colour, and the apogee of postmodernism. The Estádio Municipal de Braga was the exception, a brutally minimal structure furnished with grey seating. It won an award but set no trends. Munich’s Allianz Arena was bland by comparison yet at least made a virtue of it: three continuous tiers of comparable depth, with no discernible features to distinguish one side from the other. It was this uniformity and absence of visual clutter that rescued it from being just another modern football stadium.
In 2018, following TSV’s exit, Bayern embarked on a process called ‘Bayernization’. Arsenal did the same thing with the Emirates in 2009, and what it amounts to is a sort of gaudy populism. Raw concrete stairwells were painted red and the middle tier’s grey seats were coloured the same. The club’s name was spelt out among the chairs on one side of the ground, the motto ‘Mia San Mia’ on the other (in a proprietary font known as FC Bayern Sans) and the badge incorporated behind one of the goals. Beneath the terraces, the same grim underground carpark atmosphere prevailed (although the museum is rather impressive).
But the Munich Football Arena was never about what it looked like from within, it was all about the exterior. Supported on a lattice work of steel, the whole stadium – the roof and the façade – is covered in rhomboidal shaped cushions made from a material called ethylene tetrafluoroethylene (ETFE). These cushions – over 2,800 of them – are inflated to a differential pressure of 3.5 Pa, providing the stadium with an unusual visual texture. From afar the whole thing looks like a massive white tyre laid on its side. Up close the effect is of something less substantial. The panels are in fact translucent, to allow them to be backlit in a colour of your choosing, and look more vulnerable than they probably are. To regulate the amount of light that gets in, there are adjustable roller blinds attached to the underside of the roof. None of this is structural – it is to do with aesthetics and comfort. It’s the same approach employed at the San Mames in Bilbao, and many other stadia besides, where everything functional is tucked away, unseen.
There can be no doubt that the Munich Football Arena is a more comfortable place than the Olympiastadion or that it is better appointed. To some, it may even be prettier. What it isn’t is better located. It could be said that Fröttmaning is not too dissimilar to what Oberwiesenfeld must have been like in the 1960s, before the Olympic Stadium was built upon it – a desolate wilderness on the outskirts of town. There’s a grass heath to the west (Südliche Fröttmaninger Heide), an Autobahn arcing to the north, a municipal sewage treatment works south-east, a train-depot to the south-west, and a large concrete esplanade leading from the U-Bahn to the ground. Compared to the environment provided at the Olympic Park, it all feels a bit bleak. I guess it all depends on the time of the year.
