BUISSNES TOWERS, MUNICH, GERMANY

architect

Murphy/Jahn—Helmut

Jahn, Rainer Schildknecht, Philip

Castillo, Stephen Kern, Steven Cook,

Charles Bostick, Joachim Schuessler,

Jan Müller-Gauf, Ingo Jannek, Isabell

Klunker, Dan Cubric, Carl D’Silva,

Francisco Gonzalez-Pulido, Colleen

Caulliez, Michaela Fuchs, John

Manaves, Nabil Mekdaschi, Patricia

Siesler, Frank Weingardt, Mark

Verwoerdt, Dieter Zabel

A wedge-shaped swath outside the city center, but prominently located next to a ring road and near a freeway, became available when Munich officials held a redevelopment competition in 1999. Officials intended the office-building development to signal a new life for a district full of warehouses that have gradually emptied. Eventually, a row of office buildings should fill in behind the Highlight Munich Business Towers, separated by a landscaped zone from future housing development.

Planners sought two discrete slabs on this conspicuous location in order to avoid an overbearing mass. The developer, Bürozentrum Parkstadt München-Schwabing, did too, but for a different reason: It wanted construction to be phased so that the offices could be brought onto the market gradually. In spite of a local glut of space, 50 percent of the Highlight Towers are now rented.

The pair of thin, offset parallelogram towers (one 33 floors, the other 27) seem to present the unwrinkled, expressionless face reminiscent of Modernist buildings the world over. But the effect is sculpturally dynamic as the sharply angled roofs and the thin slabs of the towers appear to slip by each other as the viewer moves around them on the ring road or the autobahn.

The effect is especially dramatic at night, with the shifting towers outlined by strings of blue lights and lit from within the external stair and elevator shafts by narrow red and green stripes. Design partner Helmut Jahn placed the towers in the middle of the site to avoid the noise and pollution produced by the ring road. A six-story office block on the south side doubles as a sound barrier, with the freight elevator and the stairwells shielding workers from traffic noise. A seven-story, four-star designer hotel, the Innside, wraps the towers on the north. The two bridges (one of them two-level) that link the towers are the project’s bravura gesture. Jahn, collaborating with his favorite structural engineer, Werner Sobek, pared them to a minimum: two long beams that support glass-panel floors, walls, and roof. The idea is that as many as eight bridges can be clipped on and off as desired, permitting floors in both towers to be combined in contiguous floors of about 26,700

square feet. The scheme offers enormous leasing flexibility.Up close, the towers are undeniably light on their feet. Murphy/Jahn claims that the steel structure has one of the highest slimness ratios in the world, 1 to 10. The buildings’ small footprint liberated two thirds of the site for a landscape by Peter Walker, which opens the site visually to nearby park space. Above a 750-car, three-level garage, Walker united the site by drawing large concentric circles of black and white stone that run from the courtyards into the lobby. German codes demand natural ventilation and offices with windows that open, along with strict limits on energy use. In the past, Jahn and other designers have met these requirements with costly double curtain walls separated by an insulating airspace. At the Highlight Towers, Jahn and Sobek trimmed the extra cost by designing a single-layer facade of large, triple-glazed, fixed-glass panels, alternating them with tall, narrow ventilating panels.

Not just technically innovative, the project has become an urban landmark honed to a simplicity that keeps it sophisticated.

I had not expected the towers to be so magnetic in person. They draw your gaze from different vantagesbecause of the intriguing way their relationship to each other changes. With the project’s inward focus and hidden entrances, it is not pedestrian friendly at street level now, in spite of the open space. That should change if the towers help to draw new development, animating the street. In their prominent and convenient location, the Highlight Towers also are waking up Munich, whose citizens liken their city to Sleeping Beauty’s castle submerged in slumber.