The residents in Fürstenried-West and Neu-Forstenried will soon experience a déjà vu: while the AEZ shopping center on Königswieser Strasse is being demolished to make room for a larger building complex of shops and apartments, Engadiner Strasse 2 is about to be demolished a similar project. The shopping center built in 1961 is to disappear and be replaced by a new building with apartments. The company Immobilien Kontor GmbH & Co. KG from Munich has submitted an application for a preliminary decision to the city administration for their project. It pursues the urban planning goal of “compensating for the oversized expanse of the Schweizer Platz with a stronger spatial composition”.
The client initially thought about a general refurbishment of the shopping center in the center of the quarter. However, he came to the conclusion that today’s requirements for retail space could only be met by a new building. In this way, more space can be created for shops, restaurants, services and apartments. The floor space for retail and services would grow from the current 2,700 square meters to 3,700 square meters, and that for living from 6,250 square meters to 8,560 to 9,740 square meters, depending on the variant. A big advantage of the new building concept: the car parking spaces, previously above ground, disappear in an underground car park.
The apartments are to be divided into four buildings of different heights and staggered to create a “moving silhouette”. According to this concept, a passage, partly open at the top, connects Schweizer Platz with Engadiner Straße and brings together the entrance areas of the large shops. The roof of the retail area should be accessible and “intensively greened”. The access roads to the garage and the delivery area in the north-eastern part of the property on Engadiner Strasse have hardly changed. Loud charging processes should be relocated to the building in a soundproof manner.
The importance of the shopping center for supplying the area is likely to increase due to the forthcoming densification around Appenzeller Strasse. A strong focus of the planning is therefore a full-range grocery store, which should be larger than today’s Rewe market. A drugstore or organic market with a sales area of 400 to 500 square meters, smaller shops and “some gastronomy” round off the concept. The number of apartments is given as 122 to 140.
The investor promises that the green space balance will “improve noticeably”. If 14 percent of the property is green in the existing development, the proportion increases to 16 percent. Added to this is the greening of the roof area. If the local political committees deal with the plans in the near future, goodwill can probably be expected due to the importance of the shopping center for Fürstenried-West. Residential construction is desirable anyway. The only concern that can be heard is that too much could be built at the same time in the district and public life could be severely dimmed.