A stadium of Olympic importance must respond with corresponding attention to the primary functions it hosts. Orientation to sun and wind have to ensure equitable outdoor conditions for all competitors. The stadium itself must accommodate hundreds of thousands of spectators, most of them visitors to the city. Traffic, parking, circulation, site lines to the playing field, exterior event lighting, and safety concerns such as ease of egress in an emergency—all these and many similar programmatic factors are underscored by the international scope of the Olympic events that occur here.
The 20th Olympic Games of 1972 were to be conducted from August 26 to September 11, hosting 7123 athletes from 121 countries. They would participate in 23 different sports featured in 195 events. There were 600 medals to be awarded.
Special circumstances also influenced design thinking. Two questions dominated the work at Munich. The first issue that arose was speed of construction—deadlines were absolute and the time line for developing 32 million ft2 (735 acres or 294 hectares) of site (including the Olympic Village) was short. Speed of construction and the risk of delays would have to be considered. Second, what would happen to the complex after the Olympics? Given the costs associated with such a grand occasion and the extensive facilities that would remain, their future use had to be designed for. A temporary structure would be insufficient, and a monumental one would be a perpetual burden.
A third consideration emerged later with the requirements of broadcast color television. The first live coverage of the Olympics, as well as the first satellite relay color broadcast, was transmitted worldwide from the Tokyo Olympics in October 1964. By then, color television had become the standard and had achieved considerable market penetration. Television revenue, in only its third Olympic showing, provided US$17.62 million (US$64.31 million in 1995 dollars, but still a small amount as compared with the US$894 million already contracted for the 2008 Summer Olympics). Television would have its say. As a media event, the Games would also be host to 4587 journalists from around the world.
Like most events of global proportions, the 1972 Olympics presented Munich with an opportunity to overhaul its infrastructure. Not only would the existing site be reclaimed, it had to be reconnected to the city. Freeway and subway systems were extended, and new bus routes were established.
Aside from urban reintegration, the design team also had to consider the impact of broadcast television requirements for lighting, shadow reduction, and acoustics. Finally, the huge roof would produce mass amounts of rainwater runoff that had to be retained on-site. Other than the requirement of very conservative foundations for the innovative structure, there was no mention of special considerations in the building code.
To realize his metaphor for an open and modern society and to express all the essentials of forces acting on the problem, Behnisch decided on a soft, sculptural treatment for both the enclosure and the reclaimed topography of the site. This was a direct resistance to monumental forms. It led him to burrow the stadiums into the site and then to mold the roof forms into extensions of the new earthworks.
Cable net structures posed a number of direct challenges. First, accumulated snow loads can lead to leaks or structural failure. This had been dealt with in Montreal, at Otto’s German Pavilion of 1976, by placing large fans under the canopy to melt snow off the top. Second, although fiberglass and Teflon-coated fabrics came into use shortly after, there was no good solution at that time for a permanent canopy material. Canvas was a decidedly temporary material. Finally, there were acoustical problems. Tensioned fabric is reflective of sound energy and can cause noise defects. The doubly curved contours of tensile structures are particularly susceptible to focusing sound.