Under certain circumstances, an underdog can also get into a frenzy. In this case it is Munich. On the playing field of architecture and urban planning, the city was last about where FC Bayern Munich was once: in the regional league. That was in 1963/64. But at that time – we’re still in football and in the early 1960s – some miracles happened.
At the time, FCB was so destitute that almost only young, unknown and inexpensive talent could play. One was called Sepp Maier. Two more nobodies were added: Franz Beckenbauer was one. The coach at the time, Zlatko Čajkovski, said of a certain Gerd Müller: “What am I supposed to do with this boy, this character, impossible.” The rest is history. If you say anywhere in the world today that you are a Bayern fan, then everyone usually turns away in boredom. Because they always win anyway. Calls itself Bayern gene.
The new construction of a cooperative residential building “San Riemo” has just been awarded the DAM Prize 2022 for architecture by the German Architecture Museum.
(Photo: Felix Hörhager/dpa)
So far it has been all the more interesting in architecture. For example, if you come from that obviously penniless and also unimaginatively managed sleeping beauty town, yes, Munich, which actually doesn’t play in the same league as Greuther Fürth and Arminia Bielefeld in terms of building culture. From Munich, exactly where high-rise buildings are banned by referendum because they compete with church spiers and Alpine peaks. Where pedestrian zones are considered an innovation in Sendlinger Strasse seventy years after their German invention in Kassel. Where you plan around an S-Bahn tunnel that a mole on a sit-in would have dug faster. Where riding a bike is considered an exotic oddity and cars parked on sidewalks a human right. Calls itself Munich-Gen. But is a suburb gene.
Munich: Where green city councilors prevent housing experiments such as the Werkbundsiedlung in the middle of the city for ecological reasons, while everywhere on the edges solar-covered, thickly insulated single-family houses that look like they were made with a jigsaw are being built from the hardware store’s stock – which are anything but are ecological. Where the CSU city council unveils a conspiracy by the Munich architectural community that could possibly lead to a Mafia-like variety of Freemasons. What the Munich architects really do once a month in the Donisl, plus more shocking things another time.
Munich still lives on from the English Garden and Maximilianstrasse. As a city of dwarves on the shoulders of giants
In any case, very few Munich architects are involved in the anti-urban, faint-hearted, shoebox-like ugly, identityless banal settlements around the city of Munich that have emerged like hazardous waste depots, for which the provinces would be ashamed in terms of building land and soil. Over the years, Munich has become a zone that is often to very often architecture-free, in which the friends of the old town sighingly polish the legacy of the Residenz period and owe the last architectural ambitions to the economy: Bayern Munich Arena and BMW world. It is best to remain silent about urban development.
The last publicly controlled feat is one from 1972: At that time, Munich had the guts of society as a whole to host the Olympic Games and to realize an entire urban space including infrastructure that is still unparalleled in the construction world today. Before that, everything that could be architecture and promised spatial identity was left to the ruling visionaries. The word participation, on which the ideas for the parcel post hall area are currently being shattered, had not yet been invented. Munich still lives on from the English Garden and Maximilianstrasse. As a city of dwarves on the shoulders of giants.
“Werk 12”, designed by MVRDV and Nuyken/von Oefele, also received the renowned architecture prize of the German Architecture Museum last year.
(Photo: CATHERINAHESS/Catherina Hess)
But now, in the midst of such gloom and depressive moods, they are suddenly there, the particularly strange circumstances mentioned at the beginning. Munich is on a remarkable run. If things continue like this, you will still find yourself delirious in the car parade on Leopoldstrasse, honking your horns around and shouting with delight because Munich is finally rising to higher spheres. The project speaks for itself, for example “San Riemo”. The residential building realized by the Summacumfemmer consortium and Juliane Greb in the Munich trade fair town of Riem (SZ from January 29) awarded the DAM Prize 2022. The residential building, organized as a cooperative and with ingenious floor plan ideas aimed at the open future of living in a society that is changing ever faster, can now be considered “Building of the Year” in Germany.
The renowned architecture prize, which the Deutsches Architekturmuseum offers, went to Munich last year. At that time, a building in the Werksviertel behind the Ostbahnhof was awarded: “Plant 12”, designed by MVRDV and Nuyken/von Oefele. If you add the significant architecture prize “Große Nike” from the Association of German Architects, which was recently awarded to a church center in Poing in the east of Munich designed by Andreas Meck, then you have actually already experienced the hat-trick. The Houses of the Year Award, which is presented by Callwey Verlag and went to a house in Olching near Munich some time ago, is something like a stepover for the gallery. And that the “Nike for Innovation”, which was awarded in the same year as the Great Nike, 2019, went to Florian Nagler’s car park development in Munich, which is outstanding in every respect, has become known as “stilt house“: given.
You have to take a closer look to understand what constitutes sustainable architecture
Munich, it must be said, has been collecting architecture titles for some time as if nothing else had ever done so. Which, see above, is not quite the case. Nevertheless, one will soon be very happy to sit in the Donisl to find out there that the next Pritzker Prize, the Nobel Prize for architecture, is finally going to Munich. Let’s see. Incidentally, it is also a bit symbolic that Munich is getting stronger while others drop the points. Berlin (airport, Humboldt Forum and the James-Simon-Galerie, which looks like it was built from matches) you want to hug almost every day. In Hamburg, in the light of general admiration, the Elbphilharmonie cleverly veils everything that has arisen in the shadow of this building in terms of brick furor and high-end poverty. And is Cologne meanwhile actually more than a collapsed city archive?
Besides, recent prices are also apt to be misleading. San Riemo is just as little photogenic as the corrugated iron house in Olching. And is a house, Plant 12, on which “Wow” can be read in large comic letters, really just this: wow? However, the fact that a church in Poing is throwing the Elbphilharmonie (Herzog & de Meuron) in Hamburg out of the race and a cooperative project in the trade fair city of Munich is knocking out the new Axel Springer building in Berlin designed by Rem Koolhaas are also signs of a long-overdue reorientation in the Architecture.
The epoch of shop windows and signature buildings is coming to an end, which should also apply to the phenomenon of star architecture as a whole. This means that you have to take a closer look to understand what constitutes sustainable architecture. And you have to shout out appreciatively to cities that have recently been located in the lower ranks: Don’t stop now! The fact that Munich shines has always been a misunderstanding. And secondly, to read in Thomas Mann’s novella “Gladius Dei” an ironic fiction in the past tense. But it could shine.