3XN Buries an Arena Under Munich's Olympic Park and Wraps It in 260 Hockey Sticks

Building a large arena next to one of the most celebrated architectural sites on earth is either bold or foolish. The 1972 Munich Olympic Park, shaped by Frei Otto and Günther Behnisch, is a protected landscape whose tensile canopies and sculpted topography set a standard few subsequent buildings have matched. 3XN chose to respond not by competing with that legacy but by disappearing into it, pushing the majority of SAP Garden's program underground and capping it with a flower meadow. What rises above ground is a low, oval volume wrapped in 260 aluminum pilaster strips modeled on the profile of a hockey stick, held to a strict 21.5-meter height limit so it never breaks the sightline to Behnisch's Olympiahalle.

Opened in September 2024 on the footprint of the demolished Olympic Velodrome, the arena is home to EHC Red Bull Munich and Bayern Munich basketball. It seats 10,700 for hockey and 11,500 for basketball, thanks to a "Dual Rise Single Frame" grandstand system developed by Red Bull and ELAN that has never been used in another venue. Three additional ice rinks, a gaming hub, VIP suites, a rooftop terrace, and a full restaurant are folded into seven levels, four above ground and three below. The project was designed in collaboration with CL MAP as local architect and Latz + Partner as landscape architects, with engineering by Buro Happold. The result is a building that reads from a distance as a gentle hill and up close as a precisely detailed machine for spectator sport.

Deference as a Design Strategy

From the air, the most striking quality of SAP Garden is how little of it you actually see. The arena's green roof, nearly 8,000 square meters of flower meadow, merges with the existing parkland. Pedestrian paths cross the artificial hill above the buried training rinks as though nothing were beneath them. The oval footprint and asymmetric profile avoid the monolithic symmetry typical of modern arenas, instead echoing the gentle undulations of the surrounding landscape. It is a rare case of a 62,500-square-meter building that makes its site feel more expansive rather than more crowded.

The 21.5-meter height cap was not arbitrary. It was set to preserve views to Behnisch's nearby Olympiahalle, treating the 1972 ensemble as a skyline that must not be interrupted. The oval form, asymmetric in both height and plan, takes its cues from the organic geometry of Otto and Behnisch's work, but interprets it in aluminum and glass rather than tensile membrane. The ambition is democratic in the same spirit as the original park: a public rooftop terrace gives anyone a panoramic view of the city, whether or not they have a ticket.

A Facade of 260 Fins

The pilaster strips are the building's signature gesture, and they reward close inspection. Each of the 260 aluminum fins has a 4mm wall thickness and ranges from 11.6 to 18.2 meters in length, with individual elements weighing up to a metric ton. Their curved profiles are explicitly derived from the shape of an ice hockey stick, a detail that is playful without being cartoonish. Seen obliquely, the fins create a dense moiré pattern of white and grey that shifts as you move around the 404-meter perimeter. Seen head-on, the gaps between them reveal narrow strips of glazing and the warm glow of interior spaces at dusk.

What is less visible but equally important: the fins are not merely decorative. Spring connections integrated within each strip absorb the thermal movements and structural loads transferred from the 5,000-ton steel roof above. The facade is, in effect, a structural mediator between a massive roof and the ground, managing forces from temperature swings and wind while maintaining its visual rhythm. Frener & Reifer, the facade consultant, deserves credit for engineering that translates an organic concept into something buildable and maintainable.

The Bowl: Two Sports, One Room

The central bowl is where the engineering ambition becomes most legible. Eighteen lattice girders, each weighing roughly 170 tons, span the arena to create a column-free interior capped by an exposed steel truss ceiling. The structural honesty is a welcome contrast to arenas that bury their engineering behind suspended ceilings and LED screens. Here, the steelwork reads as architecture, not infrastructure.

The Dual Rise Single Frame grandstand system allows the arena to toggle between hockey and basketball configurations without dismantling stands. For basketball, removable telescopic seating covers the rink, and the adjustable stands shift in height and rake to bring spectators closer to the court. It is the first venue in the world to deploy this system, and the payoff is visible in the seating geometry: tight sightlines in both configurations, without the compromised views that plague most dual-sport venues. Digital media and dynamic lighting complete the transformation, shifting the arena's color palette to match the branding of whichever team or event holds the floor.

Underground Empire: Three Hidden Rinks

The three subterranean training rinks, with a combined ice surface of approximately 5,400 square meters, are concealed beneath the artificial hill that extends the park's topography. One rink seats 600 spectators; the other two accommodate 200 each. The decision to bury them was both contextual and practical. Keeping them underground preserves the park's visual continuity and simplifies the thermal challenge of maintaining frozen ice below a surface crossed by pedestrians in the Bavarian sun.

Excavation was enormous. More than 270,000 cubic meters of gravel and soil were removed over two years, with the dig extending below the water table and requiring dedicated flood prevention measures. The foundation stone was laid in February 2021, and the last bolt in the steel roof went in more than two years later, in May 2023. The sheer logistics of building three levels underground in a protected park, adjacent to landmark structures, while keeping the surrounding landscape intact, represent an engineering campaign as impressive as the architecture above it.

Hospitality, Locker Rooms, and the Interior Life of an Arena

The interiors reveal a level of spatial ambition unusual for sports facilities. The circular locker room, with individual player stalls radiating beneath a glowing disc ceiling, treats what is typically a utilitarian space as a piece of architecture in its own right. The VIP dining suites overlook the bowl through glazed walls, maintaining the connection between hospitality and sport that is the commercial engine of modern arenas. Three tiers of VIP areas, eleven boxes, and a variety of dining and conference spaces are distributed across the seven levels.

The restaurant and communal dining halls use timber furnishings and ribbed ceilings to create warmth against the arena's otherwise technical palette. A dedicated gaming room positions e-sports as a first-class program element rather than an afterthought. The overall interior strategy is one of flexibility: digital media and adaptive lighting allow each zone to shift identity depending on the event, the season, or the sponsor, without requiring physical renovation.

Threshold and Approach

The arena's base is a recessed glass plinth that creates a generous, sheltered zone at ground level. Pedestrians and cyclists pass through this threshold freely, and the visual transparency at the base stands in deliberate contrast to the opacity of the finned volume above. The effect is an arena that feels lifted off the ground, hovering on a band of light, rather than planted as a fortress. Entry points are legible and inviting, scaled to foot traffic rather than vehicular flow, which reinforces the park setting.

Plans and Drawings

The drawings tell the story the photographs cannot. The site plan reveals the arena's oval footprint nestled between the existing park grid and adjacent parking structures, while the floor plans show the two bowl configurations, hockey and basketball, differing not just in court geometry but in the position and rake of the stands. The sections are the most informative: the curved roof profile reads as a single sweeping gesture, but beneath it the stacking of concourse levels, VIP tiers, and underground rinks becomes visible, making clear just how much program has been compressed into this deceptively low-slung form. The unrolled facade elevation, with its alternating red and blue shading, maps the structural rhythm of every pilaster strip across the full 404-meter perimeter, a document that doubles as a kind of architectural score.

Why This Project Matters

Most modern arenas announce themselves as events. They spike skylines, flash LED skins, and demand attention. SAP Garden does the opposite. It buries more than half its volume underground, caps itself in wildflowers, and holds its profile below a height line dictated by a building completed over fifty years ago. That restraint, exercised on behalf of a protected cultural landscape, is itself a radical act in a building type defined by spectacle. The fact that the arena delivers 62,500 square meters of program, four separate ice surfaces, and a world-first grandstand system while maintaining that discipline makes the achievement genuinely rare.

The project also demonstrates that contextual architecture does not require stylistic mimicry. 3XN did not replicate Otto's tensile forms or Behnisch's acrylic panels. Instead, they read the site's organizing principles, organic geometry, democratic access, landscape primacy, and reinterpreted them in contemporary materials and construction techniques. The result is a building that belongs to its place without pretending to belong to its era. For anyone designing large public infrastructure on sensitive sites, SAP Garden is now the benchmark.

SAP Garden, designed by 3XN in collaboration with CL MAP and Latz + Partner (landscape), Munich, Germany. 62,500 square meters. Completed 2024. Photography by Angelo Kaunat, Rasmus Hjortshoj, and Franco Casaccia.

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