The general area comprises four separate sub-areas:[2] The park is located in the Milbertshofen-Am Hart borough near BMW Group headquarters and the "Uptown" skyscraper of O2.

After 1945, the Oberwiesenfeld area remained fallow, and was known as a "Trümmerberg," which in German refers to a hill erected from the rubble resulting from the destruction caused by bombings during the war.

Apart from infrastructure projects such as the Oberwiesenfeld Ice Rink, the area remained largely vacant during the post-war decades and presented an ideal site for the construction of the Olympic Stadium and complex.

Officials sought to integrate optimism toward the future with a positive attitude toward technology, and in so doing set aside memories of the past, such as the Olympic Games of 1936 in Berlin under Hitler.

The architecture firm of Günter Behnisch and its partners developed a comprehensive master plan for the sports and recreation area, which was under construction from 1968 until 1972.

The eye-catching tensile structure that covers much of the park was designed by German architect and engineer Frei Otto with Günther Behnisch.

On 3 November 1969 it had chosen the name "Olympiapark" for the subway station at the Olympic village, set on the U3 line of the Munich U-Bahn.

In 2007, the U3 line was extended to continue on to Oberwiesenfeld station at the northern end of the Olympic Village and Olympia-Einkaufszentrum mall at the far areas of the Park.

As these areas are remote from the northern part of Olympiapark, they are primarily of interest for the annual Tollwood music festival held there each summer.

This venue became an integral part of Olympic history when the US swimmer Mark Spitz won 7 gold medals there during the 1972 Munich Games.

This amounted to a remarkable comeback for Mark Spitz, who had fallen short of the 5 gold medals expected of him at the 1968 Mexico Olympics.

The venue also saw significant success by the young women's team of the GDR, which was later found - albeit, the matter was essentially an open secret - to be the result of an extensive doping programme.

The Olympic Icestadion was built from April 1965 by the plans of Rolf Schütze and opened on 12 February 1967 with the ice hockey game between FC Bayern Munich and SC Riessersee.

[5] The German architectural firm Ackermann und Partner designed an elegant light-weight tensile structure spanning 100 meters length-wise.

On the right side of the Icestadion 1991 the new training hall for the Icesport world championship was built over the parking area after the plans of Kurt Ackermann[7] The Olympiaturm has an overall height of 291 m and a weight of 52,500 tonnes.

The Russian hermit Timofej Wassiljewitsch Prochorow built the church in 1952, along with his wife, without a building permit, from remains of a nearby rubble mountain.

[8][9] This was the site of the Munich massacre in the second week of the Games, when eleven of the Israeli team and a West German policeman were murdered by Black September Palestinian terrorists.