Part 1: Description of This Building Olympiapark is a Postmodern collection of buildings located in Munich, Germany and was constructed for the 1972 Summer Olympics. Olympiapark consists of 4 main areas: Olympic area, village, media city, and park. The main focus of my paper is on Olympic Stadium which is pictured above. The design for Olympiapark was chosen through a national competition that was won by the German architect Günter Behnisch’s design company Behnisch und Partner. The 1 square mile area where Olympiapark was built at that time was known as Oberwiesenfeld (‘upper meadow-field’). Oberwiesenfeld before that was a dumping area for World War II debris and a landing strip. The area was designed to ‘be green’ and to make use of the flat land that was once used as a dumping ground. “The architects developed a theme thus shaping the area. They created a lake at the end of the elongated hill and molded the otherwise completely flat land using earth dams and landfills into a diverse park. The park contains embedded stadiums, sports halls and athletic residence buildings” (Berber 2008). The tops of the famous tent-like roof on the stadium is made of PVC-coated polyester fabric. Today Olympiapark is still in use for concerts and various other events. The Olympic Village where athletes once stayed during the games have now been converted into student housing for more than 9,000 people.
Part 2: One Characteristic of Postmodernism In This Building Olympiapark in Munich is the poster-child of Postmodern architecture. The building celebrates curved forms, uses materials not usually used in architecture, and is quite unique. The roof of the Olympic stadium is made to look almost like tents. Steel cable braces the structure and PVC fabric is draped over the cable frame. “If Modernist architecture is built on the principles of plane geometry, then PostModernist