The moving trucks roll up at the beginning of November. Hundreds of employees in the city’s personnel and organization department will then move from their previous offices in Landsberger Strasse and in the town hall to the “Rhythm and Bloom in Kustermannpark”, as the owners christened the office complex along the railway tracks between Rosenheimer and Balanstrasse. The authority has rented around 12,500 square meters in a 40-year-old building that has been extensively renovated. The responsible architecture office CSMM prefers to speak of a “revitalization” of the building, which is “a visible sign of the city’s climate-friendly future”.
Ultimately, the decision was made against demolition and a replacement building on Rosenheimer Strasse, says Timo Brehme, the managing director of CSMM. Instead, the raw concrete of the existing building was preserved, gutted and redesigned. “80 percent of the total energy that goes into the construction of such a house goes into the shell alone,” says Brehme. “That shows how valuable and important concrete is for the ecological balance.”
And yet a number of builders – especially in Munich – prefer a demolition and a new building to the renovation of real estate. “The problem is that the share of the actual construction costs in a project is getting smaller and smaller due to the increased land prices,” says Brehme. “If someone can afford to pay 20,000 to 25,000 euros per square meter, then he often thinks: I’d rather tear that down and build something new.” Especially since higher rents can then also be demanded.
For around ten years, CSMM has been entrusted with the redevelopment of the office complex at Kustermannpark, which first belongs to the US investor Ares, from 2017 to the Blackrock company and since 2019 to the insurer Swiss Life and the London real estate investor Henderson Park. A total of 75,000 square meters of office space is available there. After the takeover, Henderson Park and Swiss Life christened the project “Rhythm and Bloom”, whereby the respective first letters stand for the addresses of the buildings on Rosenheimer Straße and Balanstraße. While the renovation of the Bloom part, which belongs to Swiss Life, has been completed, there are still several construction sites in the rhythm part. Among other things, an entrance hall and catering areas are to be created on the ground floor of the two northernmost buildings. In addition, the interior is still pending in the houses. “It will definitely take another year,” Brehme estimates.
Afterwards there should be a little more calm in the northern part of the Kustermannpark, which was created on the former industrial site of the traditional company Kustermann. Where there was once an iron foundry, operated by one of Munich’s first steam engines, up to eleven-story office and residential buildings were built from the early 1980s.
They are closely interlinked with a nearly 30,000 square meter park, which with its green spaces, playgrounds and football fields is an important recreational area – not only for the residents, but also for the surrounding residential areas in Ramersdorf and Haidhausen. The uproar was correspondingly great when an investor’s preliminary considerations for a redensification in the peripheral zone became public a few years ago. In the summer of 2017, however, Lord Mayor Dieter Reiter (SPD) rejected these considerations.