MUNICH ALLIANZ ARENA
Allianz Arena - the new Munich Stadium
In April 2002, the FIFA approved Munich's Allianz Arena as one of the
twelve sites for the 2006 World Cup in Germany. The new stadium will
host the opening game of the tournament on 9 June 2006.
Tickets online
On June 9th, 2006 the Allianz Arena will host the opening match of the
football world championship.
For buying tickets you might want to consult the official homepages of the two Munich football teams that share the new Allianz Arena stadium:
FC
Bayern
There is also an English version of the homepage. The schedule for all
matches in 2005/2006 will be published by the end of June 2005.
TSV 1860
Internationally, the "Lions" are surely the lesser
known local team. There is no English version of their official
hompage (but a Chinese one).
For information about the World Cup in Germany consider this very informative page by "Germany Tourism" where you will find all the prices for the tickets.
Tickets are on sale during several periods of time. Whether your team will play the Arena Stadium will be decided in November 2005. Consult the homepage of the FIFA football asociation for more information:
This official homepage has a version in French and Spanish as well as in Chinese, Japanese and Corean language.
PICTURES ALLIANZ ARENA - PHOTOS ALLIANZ ARENA
Official Homepage
Allianz-Arena.de
The official homepage of the stadium has an English language version.
You will find heaps of information and lots of photos. 66 000 seats
is the capacity of the new stadium - only 3000 seats more than the
Munich Olympic stadion that was home to Munich's two football teams
before the inauguration of the new Allianz Arena.
The architects Herzog& De Meuron (who rose to
international fame with the London "New Tate" and currently
are responsible for the new Bejing Olympic Stadion) opted for a
construction that in its lightness refers to the "old"
Munich Olympic stadium which ranges among the most spectacular and
best known pieces of post-war architecture in Germany.
The Olympic stadium used acrylic tiles to span a tent-like roof
in sweeping structures held by high steel masts. Similarly, Herzog
& De Meurons white monolith has an overwhelmingly new and uncommon
roof that barely meets the word for it. The stadion's circumference is
800 m (for wanderung around clockwise you will need one whole hour).
This concrete structure is covered by a skin of more than 2784
pillows all inflated with air and stuffed with up to eight light bulbs.
This skin of plastic pillows floats on a steel construction
soaring above the 7 stories of the concrete base.
The material of the skin is called ethylene-tetraflourehtylene - ETFE. The skin is only 0,2 millimeters thin! Nonetheless, this material - produced by the Bavarian company Covertex that specialices in artificial membranes - will withstand heavy weather, snow and rain. The kink is that those pillows can be illuminated in different colours. From the nearby autobahn visitors approching the stadium and its parkdecks (the largest parkdecks in Europe, made for 11 000 cars!) will be guided by the colours of their teams: red and white for Bayern Munich, white and blue for the Lions. From a distance, the new stadium might look like a gigantic Zeppelin (length:259 meters, width: 227 m, height: 50 m. However, the plastic skin of the new stadion is fireproof.) - this facade just has no corners or right angles at all and is said to have a soothing effect on fans prone to hooliganism. A new skin for the old ceremony...
All seats are thus protected against rain. But the new stadion's lawn has been taken care of, nonetheless. The growth of the green grass will be fostered by the plastic roof that lets in 98% of the ultraviolett radioation of the sun. The wind as well - which is important for having healthy, regrowing grass - is being let in by openings around the playing field. What's more, nature comes into play on the so called "Esplanade". Visitors approach the stadium walking on the roof of the vast parking deck next to the station that has been turned into a roof top garden or park - quite a lot of park on a parking lot, 543 m long and 136 m wide.
The name of the stadium is the name of its sponsor: the Allianz insurance company donated 110 hundred millions of Euro to have their logo and name associated with what many consider the most attractive soccer stadium in the world. Total costs: about 340 million Euro. Another 300 million plus will be invested by the Federal Republic of Germany, the Bavarian "Land" and the City of Munich to enhance autobahn, subway and infrastructure, thus preparing Munich for the World Football Championship in 2006 whose opening game take place in the Allianz Arena.
If you happen to own a very large and rich company, too, you might be lured into renting one of the 106 luxury boxes that go for 90 to up to 250 thousand Euro per annum. There, the view across the stadium is marvellous. You may have your own private box decorated according to your whimses and have the stadium catering service bring in the champagne. Some boxes even have their own shower.
How to get there
From U-Bahn Marienplatz take the Munich subway U6 to Fröttmaning which is the northeastern outskirt of the city.
Architects
www.allianzgroup.com
Read the article of Allianz Group's homepage on Herzog &
De Meuron architects who now are responsible for the construction of
the new Beijing stadion for the olympics which will be hosted by China
in the year 2009. "They shot to fame in the year 2000 by
transforming the Bankside power station in London into the Tate
Modern", the Allianz homepage says.
http://architecture.about.com
For information and photography on the Tate Modern read this page by
"About.com". Herzog & De Meuron stated that they
actually started to enjoy the constraints they had to face
transforming an existing structure, and compared their approach to
"a kind of Aikido strategy where you use your enemy's energy for
your own purposes. Instead of fighting it, you take all the energy and
shape it in unexpected and new ways."
www.gsd.harvard.edu
A very extensive and up to date page on Herzog & De Meuron's work
(who took to simply numbering their projects. You cannot manage more
than 30 at a time, they say). Excellent photography and webpage
design, a website worth visiting.
www.you-are-here.com/europe
Very good website on architecture in Germany. A click for "Munich"
brings up Allianz Arena Fröttmaning, and also the Fünf Höfe
shopping mall, the Goetz art gallery - these are the three buildings
by Herzog & De Meuron in Munich. Also featured is the Olympic
stadion by Frei Otto / Behnisch + Partner built in 1968 for the Munich
Olympic Games. This is the predecessor of the new Allianz stadium.
English
German