uA photo from 1973 helps to get an idea of how outrageous the Olympic village in Munich must have seemed at first from a mountain top. Liselotte Vogel looks seriously into the camera, Vogel points down: to the park landscape that was built on the ruins of the war, to the now iconic tent roof that flows around the stadium, Olympic hall and swimming pool. He’s wearing a heavy suit with a tie, she’s wearing a plaid pleated skirt, both appear as if they’ve been placed in the austere concrete setting. Visually, they seem to belong more in traditional Munich than in its bold expansion to the north.
In fact, the Vogels were pioneers; they were among the few residents of the new settlement in June 1973, ten months after the Olympic Games, which Vogel had brought to the city. In the evenings, the developer had the lights switched on so that you wouldn’t notice how many of the 3,200 apartments were empty. The Munich residents looked irritated at the towering concrete landscape of high and low, receding and diced buildings, the apartments did not sell. Newspapers and trade press wrote about a “ghost town”, a “non-city”. The whole world knew one house, the two-storey bungalow in which the Israeli Olympic participants had lived and which a Palestinian terrorist commando stormed on September 5, 1972. The fact that the Olympic Village had become a place of horror and mourning five days before the end of the Games may also have contributed to the hesitant start of subsequent use.
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