In the Bogenhausen district of Munich, five towers of different heights are grouped in a park that spans both sides of the Einsteinstrasse, claiming the urban dimension of architecture.
The project proposes a strategy of densification in an area surrounded by residential blocks, single-family houses, and scattered office buildings of the nineteen-sixties and seventies. The landscape and the architectural concepts blend into a proposal that emerges from the specificity of the object to the complexity of the whole.
The five buildings originate from variations of a single, 1,100-square-meter, polygonal plot. Here, in a combinatorial game, towers based on the same geometric figure are rotated at different angles and given a semi-symmetrical form, to thus achieve better lighting and ventilation.
The dimensions of the base of each tower’s lower floors vary, adapting to the conditions of the site and the surrounding streets.
Varying in height as well, the towers are finished off on the top floor with planes set at different angles and oriented to avoid obstructing the view from certain points in the city, such as the Prinzregentenstrasse.
The specific location of each building respects different property boundaries in such a way that its development and construction can easily be carried out in separate stages.
Four of the buildings are destined to be offices and are capable of accommodating other uses on the lower floors, while the fifth will be a hotel, located on the plot that is accessible from the Truderingerstrasse.
The buildings are linked by their common pentagonal shape and by their material consistency. Geometry and landscape coexist in a proposal conceived as a strategy combining a limited set of variations on a theme that establishes the rules of a game.
Like pieces of an unexpected board game, the five towers express in their abstraction a tense relationship between one another. They observe each other; they rise up or remain compact, turning into an endless reflection of mirrors.
Interstitial spaces are transformed into the unpredictable protagonists of an urban chessboard, where the relative position of the buildings seems to confirm -paraphrasing Marcel Duchamp- that while all architects are not chess players, all chess players are architects. Source by Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos.
- Location: Munich, Germany
- Architect: Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos
- Architect in charge: Fuensanta Nieto, Enrique Sobejano
- Project architect: Claus Thiemann
- Project team: Giovanni D’Angelo, Kerstin Junker, Samuel Lindell, Tim Lindner, Constantin Mercier, Fernando Nasarre, Danie Schilp
- Associated architects: lauber + zottmann architekten, Munich
- Landscape architect: Keller Damm Roser, Munich
- Structural engineer: bwp Burggraf + Reiminger, Munich
- Mechanical Engineer: Ingenieurbüro Hausladen
- Client: Bogenhausener Tor Inmobilien GmbH, Zurich Versicherung AG
- Total floor area: 125.000 m2
- Photographs: Roland Halbe, Courtesy of Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos
