Tanzbrunnen Köln

Frei Otto built a folding star-wave tent on this ground for the Federal Garden Show of 1957, and the lightweight roof he tested here on the right bank of the Rhine pointed forward to the tented canopies of the Munich Olympic park. The name comes from something earlier and simpler: a fountain of 1949 by Josef Op Gen Oorth, set in the Rheinpark between Deutz and Mülheim, around which people danced. Otto's tent was renewed in 2003. The open arena takes some twelve thousand standing, with a smaller theatre of about a thousand seats beside it, and the site now runs to several hundred events a year — concerts, festivals, cabaret, markets — with the river and the towers of the old city across the water.