TROPOLISM

The Allianz Arena, a new football stadium in Munich, is almost complete.

The main site is here, and the gallery of construction is here. My favorite is picture #7, shown above.

The best part: it reminds me of the triangulated geometry in Gunther Behnisch & Frei Otto's 1972 Munich Olympic Stadium. There's nothing worse than a city that abandons a bizarre architectural trope for something really average and overdone. Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron's new stadium has all the tensegrity without all the yucky cables, all the lightness without the heaviness-that's-trying-to-look-light. It has a scalelessness about it, like a pillow, or a big soccer ball, that heightens the surreal effect of the light-projections and patterns.

And all we get is the hyper-average corpora-tectural West Side Stadium, like it was straight out of an Ellerbe Beckett rendering from 1993.