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Munich, Germany
We ain't sure where you stand, you ain't machines and you ain't land
Until Herzog and de Meuron had to screw things up with their way cool translucent glowing Allianz Arena, the Olympic Stadium at Olympiapark was the place to watch football in Munich. The complex, designed by the well named structural engineer Frei Otto in collaboration with architect Günter Behnisch (you know, Stefan Behnisch's dad), was built for the ill fated 1972 Munich Summer Olympics and includes a roof that manages to stretch over all of the important parts of the Olympic Stadium, the Aquatic Center and the space between.
And while Olympiapark was not the home a World Cup Stadium, it was the home of Munich's Fan Fest. Each of the host cities had a site where fans could gather for free (after passing through security) to enjoy the games on large video screens, drink liquor in mass quantities and, well, I guess that was about it.
At the Olympiapark U-Bahn station, BMW World is in the process of a major renovation and expansion to its public museum. With new construction designed by international favorites Coop Himmelblau (a firm whose name translates to Blue Sky Cooperative, they're not just a guy named Coop), the new building connects through underground passages into the totally renovated original museum, the windowless metal bowl that has been there for at least a generation.
The happy Munich of lederhosen and pretzels the size of your head (as opposed to the slightly more ominous Munich of Beer Hall Putsch fame) is centered around the Marienplatz. The geographic center of the old walled city, the Marienplatz is dominated by the Rathaus (not necessarily a house of rats but rather a house of weasels- rathaus is the German word for city hall), a building that's only a hundred (or so) years old. Still in that hundred (or so) years it has grown quite a following and reputation. Its central tower is home to a world famous glockenspiel, a clock that includes a series of slow moving, slightly animated statues that circle around and attempt to tell a coherent story that probably makes sense to someone else. Still the glockenspiel (possibly funded and founded by local pickpocket concerns) draws huge crowds every day at noon when the plaza fills to near capacity with people fixating on and photographing the event as if something much more magical is happening.
There was a point in World War 2 when the Germans started to realize there was an excellent chance that things might not go as well as originally planned. In a rare example of a historically good move by the Nazis, they started an effort of carefully photographing and documenting the historical center of Munich (their so called capital of the Nazi movement) in detail and in preparation of a future rebuild. After the war and all of the bombing, Munich ended up in the political realm of the relatively affluent West Germans and was rebuilt according to the photos and documentation left behind. The end result in 2006 is just about seamless- a well preserved, well appointed city with enough statues and fountains and glockenspiels and flowerboxes to just about make you forget about all that unpleasantness a few generations ago.
