The Bavarian city of Munich, centre of southern Germany, is one of the country’s favourite tourist destinations, offering a unique combination of modern flair and traditional charm, all mixed together with a heavy helping of “Gemutlichkeit”, the special German term for hearty, happy, healthy togetherness.

Traditionally the city, famous for its breweries and beer halls, conjures up images of jolly red-cheeked, portly men in lederhosen, downing steins of beer. There is plenty of this fun to be had, but Munich and the Bavarian region has plenty more to recommend it to visitors. The city has numerous great museums, art treasures, hi-tech industries and gems of Gothic and Baroque architecture. It is also the gateway to the Bavarian Alps, drawing winter sports enthusiasts from near and far.

Munich itself was founded in 1158 on the River Isar, and acquired its name, Munchen (home of the monks) from its first monastery. It was the monks that started the beer brewing tradition for which the city is now world famous, particularly since it started celebrating an annual beer festival in 1810. Today close on six million people visit the Oktoberfest every year, and consume more than five and a half million litres of beer during its two-week run.

Allianz Arena Munich
Since summer 2005, the two German football clubs Bayern München and 1860 München have found their new football home in front of up to 66,000 visitors in the newly constructed Allianz Arena of Munich.
The Swiss architects, Herzog and de Meuron, designed a stadium with an energetically striking round form surrounded by a cushion cover that can be lighted in different colours depending on the event.

The stadium bowl with its three terraces consists of 96 concrete steel frames, which are put concentrically around the field. The roof construction is composed of 9,000 t steel, 60 % of which were used for the primary structure, which consists of lattice connectors designed as cantilevers, which are up to 62 m long and 10 m high. Because of weight reasons and out of aesthetic considerations, the upper and lower flange are designed as hollow sections with an infill in hollow profiles.

The connector construction is horizontally stiffened with 12 joints each. The 48 main cantilever connectors were delivered in single parts from the workshops and welded together on a moulding within the stadium. Two cantilever connectors with the intercostal girders and the lattice stiffeners (weight up to 106 t) were lifted in their assembly height of 50 mm by a 450 t lattice boom crawler. Dillinger Hütte GTS supplied 2,000 t heavy plates of S355J2G3 and S355K2G3 in the thickness range of up to 100 mm for this steel construction.

The shoulder area of the construction is carried out in steel composite construction. The secondary structure consisting of rectangular tubes was assembled onto the primary structure. These tubes serve as bracket for the 2,800 membrane pillows filled with air that form the roof and veneer wrapping and give the stadium an distinctive appearance.

Thus, the capital of Bavaria can call another very special attraction his own.