Garching was small Bavarian village, until the Free State of Bavaria decided to implement a technology and urban planning policy whereby science should be clustered north of Munich.

This urban planning policy was in line with the principles advanced by the International Congress of Modernist Architects (CIAM) in the 1933 Athens Charter.

In 1966 the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities established the Walther Meißner Institute for Low Temperature Research in Garching.

[4] However, Garching only promoted itself as science city, by incorporating the local nuclear reactor, affectionately known as "atomic egg", in the official coat of arms in 1967.

[6] A photojournalist lamented, that "photographers would rather go visit the kampas, the dangerous natives on the banks of the Ucayali River, than Professor Heisenberg in the Max Planck Institute.