Lab Campus at Munich Airport takes flight

The area at the airport, on which an innovation center is to be gradually built, is 70 football pitches in size. The first two buildings, Lab 48 and Lab 52, are now finished and partially occupied. On Wednesday, July 12, the Lab Campus will be officially opened with guests from politics and business. Flughafen München GmbH (FMG) announced in advance that Amplimind, a joint venture between Audi and Lufthansa Industry Solutions, will be another tenant from the research and technology sector on the airport site. The Technical University of Munich will also move into rooms there. FMG announced that "promising talks" were being held with other interested parties.

According to a press release, Amplimind wants to advance the digitization of the mobility industry at the company's new headquarters. It is expected to be ready in the first quarter of 2024. Around 65 employees will develop digital solutions in Lab 48 in an office area of around 550 square meters. In April, the Airport Academy, the airport's training center that was previously located in Schwaig, moved into the neighboring building Lab 52, whose architecture is reminiscent of a spaceship.

Seminars, workshops, meetings, events and conferences will take place on around 7000 square meters. According to the website, around 3,200 seminars a year with 16,000 participants are planned there, including dangerous goods seminars, security training and courses on crisis management and IT security.

FMG has recently been able to record some successes. The corona pandemic also had an impact on the rental market for office space, and this development affected the airport operators when marketing the Lab Campus. However, FMG managed a coup that became known at the beginning of February. The Department of Aerospace and Geodesy at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) will occupy space in the two existing buildings. How many exactly, contract talks are currently being held, FMG announced. The same applies to the start of the rental period. In February it was said that the TUM wanted to use the first rooms in the coming winter semester.

The TUM department at the Ottobrunn/Taufkirchen campus is growing very quickly. The number of students and professors is expected to double in the coming years. Parts of the Lab Campus are being rented as an interim solution, and this is where most of the courses will take place in the future. Construction and relocation to the airport site are to take place gradually.

Lab 48 was ready for occupancy in October 2022, with 29,400 square meters of space available on five floors. The offices can be designed flexibly. LAB 52 opened in the first quarter of 2023. With an area of 16,000 square meters, it is significantly smaller, half of which is freely rented out.

The first tenant at the Lab Campus was Argo AI, a technology company active in the field of autonomous driving. It wants to test and develop its vehicle systems there. The German air traffic control also moved in in autumn 2022.

There are no other concrete construction plans for the Lab Campus yet. "The buildings are planned and built according to needs," explained Henner Euting from the FMG press office. We also have to wait and see how much space the TUM will take up. The Lab Campus concept goes beyond the mere rental of office space and showrooms. The aim is to "build a lab campus community" with networking events or workshops. The vision: The tenants on the campus should connect and jointly develop innovative topics and questions about new forms of work and future mobility.

There was also criticism in the districts of Freising and Erding when the plans were presented in 2018 - above all because of the planned scope of the project with several thousand additional employees at the airport, who will need apartments in an already overheated market. The fear is that traffic will also increase significantly.

This article was originally published in German by SZ: https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/freising/flughafen-muenchen-lab-campus-lab-48-lab-52-airport-academy-tu-muenchen-amplimind-buerogebaeude-innovationszentrum-1.5970748

Image copyright Lab Campus