Pillow talk

Architectural Review, The, June, 2005 by Kester Rattenbury

On paper, it's a bad day for looking at buildings, but Herzog & de Meuron's new Munich stadium answers well to the drizzle, its translucent, ETFE duvet looming like a ghost on the agricultural motorway flatlands.

The planned entrance sequence isn't quite finished and there's a slightly puzzled La Villette feeling of expectation as you walk over the biggest car park in Europe (in true contemporary fashion, a landscaped hill, planted with sedum and tufts of native grass). This changes to reassurance as you are scooped up into the circulation spaces which run between stadium and ETFE skin.

The stadium itself is about as simple and dramatic as it could be. 'Everything we did was about focusing on the pitch' says Jacques Herzog. This includes the lack of refining of details, the screening of the roof, the 'lens' aperture sized to get the best light on to the pitch and optimised sightlines. Every seat feels close to the pitch and there's not much sense of inevitable seating hierarchies. The pitch 'almost seems square'. It's designed 'almost optically', to give maximum exposure to the game.

The only exception to overt detail was in the seats, originally developed for Herzog & de Meuron's stadium in Basel, which are 'soft and pleasant to touch'. These are grey, because the stadium will be home to two teams. Bayern Munich and 1860 Munich, and team colours are deliberately stripped out of the building. Instead, lights behind the ETFE pillows mean the stadium can be illuminated red, white or blue, depending on who's playing; colours which will just filter as background to the pitch itself.

The neutrals continue right round the perimeter circulation, but the metallic silver walls explode into gold for the vast restaurant, its gold ring ceiling pitched somewhere between the Palast der Republik and Bavarian Rococo. Yet it is surprisingly practical and flexible--a 'flat chandelier', as Herzog calls it.

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There's a balance here between 'cooking up the atmosphere' on the pitch itself and the calmness of the circulation; what Herzog calls 'a peaceful strategy'. This is certainly not the usual stadium credo, as the current belief seems to be that architecture means masts. Instead, Herzog & de Meuron treat the stadium as a venerable and extraordinary building type with a history linking Greek theatres and the Coliseum to Anfield (Herzog's own favourite) and Wimbledon Centre Court. He says old English stadia--hugely devalued are the best examples of the stadium type and takes their spatial conditions seriously, as architects. The Beijing Olympics will make a different kind of demand. That's why this firm--with their conceptual art approach (in their youth they paraded artworks in the Basel carnival in Joseph Beuys felt suits)--are now beginning to rival HOK as expert stadium designers, while continuing to be the major international curators' architect of choice.