Munich Olympic Stadium Roof

The roof of the Olympiastadion in Munich, Germany, and the adjoining Olympic Park buildings is one of the most famous lightweight roofs ever built. Its sweeping canopies of transparent acrylic panels on steel cable nets were the first use of such a tent construction on this scale.

Origins

The stadium was the main venue of the 1972 Summer Olympics. Its design was meant to evoke the skyline of the Alps and to contrast with the 1936 Berlin Olympics. The architects Behnisch & Partner, led by Günther Behnisch, won the competition, announced on 13 October 1967. An employee, Cordel Wehrse, is credited with proposing the tent roof idea.

Design team

The engineering of such a roof had never been attempted at this size. Frei Otto, the leading pioneer of tensile structures, was brought in as development consultant, with engineers Fritz Leonhardt and Wolf Andrä. Jörg Schlaich directed the construction work, with John Argyris also assisting.

Structure

The roof is a lightweight tent construction: large sweeping canopies of acrylic glass panels stabilised by steel cables. The transparent covering shelters the seats while letting daylight through. The roof originally covered almost 45,000 seats; after later changes the stadium has fewer than 40,000. A planned extra tent roof over 15,000 seats in the eastern stands was never completed.

Completion

The stadium roof was completed on 21 April 1972, and the stadium opened on 26 May 1972. The tent roof cost about 170.6 million Deutsche Marks, out of a total Olympic project cost of about 1.35 billion.

Significance

The roof showed that a large, permanent, tensioned cable-net structure could be designed, analysed and built reliably. It remains one of the best-known examples of tensile roof architecture.