Inspired by Success: Volkwin Marg's 75th Birthday on 15.10.2011

Laudation by Knut Göppert - published in Stahlbau 10/2011.

Inspired by the successes that our office (schlaich bergermann und partner) had with our light roof structures in the 1990s, I met Volkwin Marg and his team in 2000 in the course of planning the refurbishment of Berlin's Olympic Stadium. For me right then began a new era of cooperation with architects, the architects of gmp – von Gerkan, Marg und Partner, in designing large-scale sports venues.

While our design services for the large stadiums in Stuttgart and Kuala Lumpur hat generally been a constructive response to a pre-defined problem, working on the Olympic Stadium in Berlin brought an additional aspect to analysing the task at hand. In the sense of a holistic approach, not only the content and the structure are must be considered but also the importance and the message of the task have to be taken into account. Mr. Marg described it fittingly: "We do not want anything other than the aesthetic unity of function, structure and importance."