Olympic Village (Munich)

The 2012 Olympic Village as seen from the Olympic Tower

Connollystraße with the blue "Media Line" as a signpost

Nadisee

Olympia Tower as seen from Lerchenauer Strasse

Helene-Meier-Ring shopping street

Ecumenical Church Center in the Olympic Village

The Olympic Village under construction (1971).

The Olympic Village in Munich was created on the occasion of the XX. 1972 Summer Olympics to accommodate the athletes. It was designed by the architects Heinle, Wischer und Partner and placed under ensemble protection in 1998 together with the sports facilities in the Olympic Park . Today the 300 hectare area with over 6000 residents in around 3500 residential units is one of the most popular residential areas in Munich.

Location and structure

The Olympic Village is part of the Munich Olympic site and is located together with the former training facilities, now TUM Campus in the Olympic Park (Faculty of Sport and Health Sciences of the Technical University of Munich and Central University Sports Munich), in the Olympic Park , between Moosacher Straße (north) and Lerchenauer Straße (East), Georg-Brauchle-Ring (south) and Landshuter Allee (west) in the area of Oberwiesenfeld in the Am Riesenfeld district in the 11 Milbertshofen-Am Hart district .
While the former men's Olympic village in the north is now being used as a residential area as planned, the former women's Olympic village in the south is now a student housing complex. The former men's Olympic village consists of three streets (from the north: Straßbergerstraße , Nadistraße and Connollystraße ), which are accessed via the Helene-Mayer-Ring . A colored pipe system running on stilts, the so-called "Media Lines", serve as a signpost: orange for Straßbergerstraße, green for Nadistraße, blue for Connollystraße and yellow for Helene-Mayer-Ring. From the west, like fingers, two green spaces reach into these three streets and lead directly into the Olympic Park. To the south is the place of remembrance of the Olympic attack . In the center of the Olympic village is the local supply center in Helene-Mayer-Ring with shops, post offices and school and kindergarten facilities.

Urban planning and architecture

The Olympic Village was an urban planning experiment. It was designed as a “city within a city” and should continue to perform all functions of daily life even after being used during the Olympic Games. Consequently, in addition to apartments, there are also shops, schools, kindergartens and cultural institutions. Particular emphasis was placed on playing opportunities for children. The architects commissioned the Munich “Pedagogical Action”, which had already dealt with the development of game situations in cities in advance of an art-pedagogical background. In addition to playgrounds, special care was taken to ensure that the complex as a whole invites you to play with its varied design.

The residential complexes on Straßbergerstrasse, Nadistrasse and Connollystrasse are each laid out in terraces from the north and, together with the tall buildings in Helene-Mayer-Ring, shield the living areas from the noise of the busy Moosacher Strasse and Lerchenauer Strasse. The tallest building is the Olympia Tower at 88 meters . In each case towards the south towards the Green Fingers, the building height decreases from 6 to 12-story buildings in the high area to single-story bungalows in the flat area.

The surface of the Olympic Village is car-free; the four access roads Straßbergerstraße, Nadistraße, Connollystraße and Helene-Mayer-Ring are completely enclosed and give the impression of a tunnel system. The architecture is formally characterized by strongly uniform structures. With the exception of the facilities in Helene-Mayer-Ring and in the former Frauendorf, the residential units are laid out on a grid of 3.75 m. The south / west-facing balconies are continuously stepped and generously equipped with plant troughs. Last but not least, this terraced complex, which forces the floor plan to be reduced to higher floors, means that a large number of different apartments are available in the Olympic Village despite the formal similarity.

The design of the walkways is striking. The shops are centrally located in what the villagers call the shopping street in Helene-Mayer-Ring. On the way from the subway to the apartment you inevitably go through the shopping street. Between the buildings in the flat area there is a network of paths leading into the green fingers. This network of paths offers efficient cross-connections between the streets, so that every point in the village can be reached on foot within a few minutes. The "Media Lines" are a 1.6 km long system of tubes that run through the Olympic Village of Munich and converge at central points. It is a lighting system and a communication and media system in which projected information, sound, room division, sun and rain protection, heating and cooling are transmitted. At the same time, the coloring serves as an orientation system.

Fountains are part of the streetscape in the Olympic Village. The largest water area is the Nadisee with a diameter of 30 m. There are occasional festivities there, and on summer days it is a meeting point for children and families.

Current usage and perception

The Olympic Village is now a residential area with around 6,100 residents. The residential value of the Olympic Village is considered to be very high, around 90% of all removals only take place within the Olympic Village. The residential area has many green spaces. It is inhabited by 90 percent of the owners and has the highest density of academics in Munich. The Olympic Village received a special prize as part of the city's “Child and Family-Friendly Living Environment” competition (2006).

The perception of the Olympic Village was not always positive, especially from the outside. The architecture, which has echoes of brutalism , was already heavily criticized in the 1970s (“concrete desert”), and later difficulties in maintenance were also noticed. After the Olympic Village was placed under ensemble protection, the pedestrian areas have been redesigned since around 2000; the terraced arrangement of the balconies has grown in well, so that the initially sober impression is no longer prevalent. In 2013 the renovation of the listed Olympia Tower was completed. The Olywelt eG is committed to the motto of living better together with the occupation of 36 shops and the design of the shopping street with the aim of "village customer relationships".

Student residence

The bungalows in the south are now used by the Munich Student Union as student dormitories and are referred to as the Oberwiesenfeld student area or Studentendorf (to distinguish it from the student town of Freimann ). Both high-rise buildings and some of the terrace buildings are also used as student dormitories. There are around 1,800 student accommodation units in total. The painting of the bungalow front doors and facades, which is an expression of European youth culture, is characteristic. From 2007 to 2010, over a period of three years, the bungalows were demolished in sections and rebuilt in agreement with the monument authorities, since an energetic renovation of the exposed concrete building did not seem sensible. By reducing the building width, 1,052 bungalows are now available instead of 800.

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Olympic village 2007 with the student village bungalows before they were demolished and rebuilt

Contemporary criticism

The architecture critic Manfred Sack wrote in 1972:

“In spite of all the violent protests, the Olympic builders did not advertise an architectural competition for the village and directed the fat fish into the net of the Stuttgart architects Heinle, Wischer and Partner, who are particularly cunning in cost prophecy. The architects, who are so highly preferred, immediately took care of self-defense by using a so-called “optimization process” "for the first time", a kind of monarchistically controlled, internal competition with rigorous checklists and expert filters. This is how the Olympic Village came into being. In Munich, where social housing construction is currently stagnating alarmingly, it was turned into a socio-politically dubious but architecturally debatable experiment. "

- Manfred Sack: Olympic living is only for the rich. In: The time. No. 33/1972, August 18, 1972.

In the same year, Der Spiegel criticized the fact that from the project to develop a "model example of modern social housing", a "luxury quarter" was ultimately planned through the selection of the design by Professor Erwin Heinle, which was "reserved for money citizens only". The rents came to 14 DM per square meter instead of the 4.20 Marks that were common for new buildings in social housing in Munich at the time.

A Spiegel article from 1982 speaks of 12,000 residents on 220,000 square meters and cites the renowned architecture magazine "Bauwelt", which the Olympic Village after its completion as "gigantic speculation", "un-city", "ghostly scenery" and "spectacular Agglomeration of backdrop-like living conditions ". During the planning phase, the architect Erwin Heinle allowed himself to be persuaded to raise the building by three floors and to forego certain architectural qualities such as generously dimensioned apartments in order to be able to implement the lavish terrace houses, extensive green areas and the overbuilding of the access roads in return. 70% of the residents are young families, most of them with a high school diploma, which among other things was motivated by the child-friendliness of the settlement to move there.

Clubs and organizations

EIG Resident Interest Group e. V.
Kulturverein Olympiadorf e. V.
SV Olympiadorf München e. V.
Students in the Olympiadorf e. V.
Village seniors Olympiadorf e. V.
German Scouting Society Sankt Georg - Tribe Peace Christ
Association of Christian Scouts Munich-Moosach Olympic Village Tribe Monseñor Óscar Arnulfo Romero
Olywelt eG
ODBG, Olympiadorf operating company
Ecumenical Church Center in the Olympic Village , Am Helene-Mayer-Ring 23/25

literature

Natalie Heger: The Olympic Village in Munich. Planning experiment and model city of modernity. Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-496-01483-6 .
Nick Frank, Christian Vogel, Anne Berwanger: Habitat - The Olympic Village in Munich. Volk Verlag, Munich 2015, ISBN 978-3-86222-190-5 .
The Olympic Village in Munich: A place steeped in history | Between Spessart and Karwendel | Documentation | BR , 2018, [1]