‘Dancing beneath a star-shaped, undulating canopy’
In 1950, the architect Josef Op Gen Orth built a fountain in the facility with an accessible circular centrepiece that would also serve as a dance floor – hence the name ‘Tanzbrunnen’. Nearly 55 m in diameter, the fountain comprises approx. 2,000 m² covered in water.
On the occasion of the German Federal Garden Show in 1957, as one of his first fabric-roof structures, Professor Frei Otto developed the star-shaped undulating roof of the Tanzbrunnen (several years later, he also designed the world-renowned roof of Munich’s Olympic Stadium). Bold for its time, the structure extended out over the centrepiece of the Tanzbrunnen and portions of the open spaces. ‘Dancing beneath a star-shaped, undulating canopy’ became a famous saying. The grounds and the fountain were extensively renovated for the German Federal Garden Show in 1971.
Tanzbrunnen develops into the most beautiful open-air stage
Since 1994, the roughly 30,000-square-metre cultural and leisure park with open-air area has been perfectly complemented with the Theater am Tanzbrunnen. This multifunctional indoor stage is suitable not just for product presentations but for gala events and rock concerts as well.
The turn of the millennium was marked by extensive restoration work on the entire facility. The roof construction of the current undulating, star-shaped canopy is made of coated polyester polyplan offering cover over an area of 500 square metres. New toilet facilities were also built for the open-air area, and the previous backstage building was replaced by a new one on the same site. The fountain went back into operation in the summer season of 2000, and the canopy roof was reinstalled in 2001.
Another ‘textile construction’ was erected in 2003: With its area of 350 square metres, the entrance marquee, which is held in place by a steel arch 50 centimetres in diameter and 48 metres long, provides protection for arriving guests, even in inclement weather. Anyone who has experienced an open-air concert with an audience of up to 12,500 people in the Tanzbrunnen on the banks of the River Rhine will be certain to remember the evening, and not just for the music. It is not by accident that many concert-goers consider the Tanzbrunnen to be the most attractive open-air theatre in Germany.