Next stop: Olympic Center. For more than ten years, no bus passenger who had had to get off at the historic waiting room via the loop at Brundageplatz has heard that. The central bus station, which was set up for the 1972 Summer Olympics, was shut down in 2007. For years the site was rotting away, now the construction work for the long-awaited beautification of the desolate place is beginning.
No museum, hotel or retirement home will be built there – all of these considerations have already been made for the bus station. But the broken roof comes away for now. From 2023 it will be renovated.
So that the space underneath can also be used during the celebrations for the 50th anniversary of the Olympic Games, “roof components that can no longer be repaired” are being dismantled, as a spokeswoman for Stadtwerke München GmbH (SWM) says. Until now, the old bus stop area had been cordoned off because the dilapidated roof affected road safety.
It has to be restored after the festival, because the station was part of the traffic and architecture concept of the Olympic master builders Behnisch & Partner and Günther Grzimek. Although the roof itself is not a monument, it is part of the protected Olympiapark ensemble, for which the city would like to be included in the World Heritage List. A radically different use of the fallow land is therefore problematic.
A collage-like art installation
However, there will be an interim use this year. Once the parts of the roof have been dismantled, the Berlin artist Clemens Behr will begin to set up an installation there together with the Museum of Urban and Contemporary Art (Muca). He mixes materials and lets them merge with their surroundings. Last year he published a magazine called “Barriermüll” in which he shows compositions he created from discarded objects found on the streets of Berlin.
In Munich in 2020 he created a large-scale mural for the Schwabing art space BNKR in the bunker on Ungererstraße. At the former bus station, he wants to address the assembly and dismantling of the roof construction in his artwork. “The installation thus refers to a transitional phase and takes up the white band of the attic,” says an announcement for the project. From June onwards, the area around the installation should be accessible to the public, according to SWM.