Posts Tagged Olympic games 2012
Constructive criticism: Zaha Hadid makes an Olympian splash
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 29, 2011
Zaha Hadid's newly unveiled Aquatics Centre is this week's architectural star, but charming pop-ups on the Olympic periphery also deserve a look
Much excitement this week about a double act of great British icons, Zaha Hadid and Tom Daley, and the aquatics centre designed by the former, which now seems destined to be a temple for the latter's prowess. There was a feeling at the grand unveiling that a trick had been missed in not getting the great architect to put on her Miyake bathers and give interviews to architectural hacks while doing lengths.
Architectural hacks are easily distracted, so there was considerable interest in a row of glossy black hairdryers, each resembling a model of a Hadid concert hall or cultural centre, that had been laid on for the athletes. They are particularly important for synchronised swimmers, apparently. One of the most gorgeous spaces turned out to be the underwater view of the pool seen through the windows provided for TV cameras. It looks like an art installation.
There was less excitement about another just-completed Olympic venue, the media centre designed by Allies and Morrison. It is a very big box, without any of the metaphors of waves or swooping stuff that get newspapers interested. And no Tom Daley. Complaints have been heard from Hackney that they're getting the humdrum end of the 2012 architecture, such as the media centre, while the borough of Newham gets the glamour of the aquatics centre and the now-rising Anish Kapoor tower, the Orbit.
Perhaps the flurry of charming pop-ups on the Olympic periphery in Hackney Wick, each costing a very small fraction of the aquatics centre's £268m, will make Hackney feel better: Folly for a Flyover, the cinema/cafe built under a stretch of elevated road, closes this weekend; but the Yard Theatre, installed in an old warehouse by Practice Architecture, runs until October. It would also help if, after the Games, the media centre fills up with wealth-making creative industry types, as is hoped.
Other complaints have been heard this week from the well-heeled traditionalist architects Alireza Sagharchi and Robert Adam. As Building Design report, they're upset by remarks made by Paul Finch, chairman of Design Council Cabe, the government-appointed arbiter of architectural quality. In his Architects' Journal column, Finch celebrated the fact that none of the Olympic architecture is by the likes of Adam, Quinlan Terry and other architects who like to include classical details in their work. "None of it endorsed by the Prince of Wales," crowed Finch.
I happen to agree with Finch that none of the Olympic buildings would be improved by the addition of pilasters, entablatures, dentils or guttae, but he should have kept his trap shut. As Sagharchi and Adam said, his organisation is not supposed to have stylistic prejudices, and his remarks suggests that they do. Worse, they inflame the utterly sterile and boring Prince v architects, traditionalists v modernists controversy, which has done so much to lower the level of architectural debate in this country for 27 years. This month it is 20 years since the Prince-friendly Sainsbury wing of the National Gallery opened. Isn't it time to think about something else?
London 2012: Olympic flame will be lit in one year’s time, but still much to do
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 26, 2011
IOC hail progress as Tom Daley dives into Aquatics Centre pool, completed on time and budget
With 366 days to go, 2012 being a leap year, until the Olympic flame is lit in east London, organisers, the government and the International Olympic Committee are queuing up to hail progress to date.
Wednesday's events to mark the milestone, which will see the £269m Zaha Hadid designed Aquatics Centre formally handed over to organisers by the Olympic Delivery Authority and Tom Daley diving into the pool, will have an air of celebration.
"Marking one year to go, by diving in the Aquatics Centre is an incredible honour. Only a few years ago, this was a distant dream," said Daley, who finished fifth at the world championships in Shanghai on Sunday. "I can't wait for next year and the honour of representing Team GB." But although world class athletes are beginning to test the venues, there remains much to do.
Venues
The Aquatics Centre is the sixth and final permanent venue to be handed over to organisers by the ODA, which has spent £7.25bn of public money building them. Chairman John Armitt said the successful completion of the venues had helped boost the image of British contractors around the world.
"It's very satisfying to be handing it over on time and keeping within the budget. It's a great tribute to everybody that has played a part in this," he told the Guardian. "It is something that as a country and an industry we should be proud of and we should try to maximise opportunities in other parts of the world while memories are still fresh about what the industry can do."
Some venues, especially the velodrome that has already been nominated for the Stirling Prize, have garnered more plaudits than others. The clean lines and simplicity of the stadium have also been praised but there has been criticism of the ugly temporary "water wings" that have been attached to the aquatics centre to boost the capacity to 17,500 for the Games. When it was designed, the high cost was justified by the signature design, which will be obscured by the temporary stands. "When you're inside it, it's fabulous," says Armitt, diplomatically.
Despite outward appearances, the London organising committee still has a huge task. Each venue must be "fitted out", a task that includes the laying of the track in the main stadium, and several major temporary venues must be built from scratch. They include a 15,000 capacity hockey stadium, a 23,000 capacity arena for the equestrian events at Greenwich Park and a 15,000 seat bowl on Horseguard's Parade for the beach volleyball.
Tickets
London organising committee chief executive Paul Deighton has confirmed the last batch of 1.2m tickets that will go on sale from December will first be made available exclusively to those who took part in the initial ballot in April and have yet to get a ticket. Around 6m tickets have already been sold, considered unprecedented with a year to go, with only around 1.5m for football matches around the country and those final 1.2m across all sports – to be made available when the final seating configurations are decided – remaining. Next year, Locog also plans to sell "non-event tickets" which will allow entry to the park but not the venues.
Later this year, millions of free tickets for the live sites, with big screens and concerts in Hyde Park, Victoria Park and Potter's Fields will also be made available on a first come, first served basis. The mantra from Locog chairman Lord Coe and other organisers has been that while they understand the "disappointment" created by the huge demand, which saw 22m applications in the initial rush for tickets, they stand by the controversial process.
Transport
Ever since London was awarded the Games in 2005, transport has been considered a potential achilles heel. The ODA passed responsibility for operational matters to Transport for London last year, but retains an overall co-ordination role. The first stirrings of a backlash have already been felt about the so-called "Olympic lanes" that will whisk 18,000 athletes and officials around the capital during the Games.
They make up roughly a third of the 109-mile Olympic Route Network and have already sparked loud protests from London's black cab drivers. Meanwhile, much will rest on the ability of organisers to persuade businesses and individuals to modify their behaviour during the Games.
"The message must be business as unusual," said Armitt. They take some comfort from the variety of routes into Stratford, including the Jubilee Line and the new Javelin train from St Pancras, but will be desperate to avoid a millennium eve style meltdown.
On the nine busiest days of the Games there will be more than 1m Olympics-related journeys, with a report earlier this year warning of "extreme" conditions on a system already "creaking at the seams".
Security
Olympics minister Hugh Robertson said that security plans needed rethinking when the coalition came to power. Before she quit, Lady Neville-Jones led a government review that resulted in the government predicting security at Games time could be delivered for £475m, though the overall £600m envelope will be retained.
Ministers and organisers have sought to play down the significance of the resignation of Metropolitan police commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson, but he said in his own statement that a key reason for it was to allow time to get someone new in place for the Olympics. Locog will spend £282m on security within the venues, chiefly through contractor G4S, but there will also need to call on several thousand non-uniformed military personnel.
'Look and feel'
For all the operational challenges Coe's organising committee will face, in many ways the bigger challenge is building public enthusiasm for the Games to reach a crescendo around 27 July next year when the flame is lit. Coe has talked of Britain being a "slow burn" nation. He hopes the torch relay, which will begin at Land's End on 19 May and visit 74 locations in 70 days via 8,000 runners, will be the point at which cynicism is cast aside and enthusiasm ignites.
Part of the task will be to keep those without tickets engaged, through the big screens planned for cities throughout the country and cultural events that will culminate in Festival 2012. London mayor Boris Johnson has a budget to "dress" key areas of the city, including placing Olympic rings on the capital's landmarks. The BBC, which has promised to broadcast every event from every venue live, will also have a big role to play.
Legacy
Given the relatively smooth progress of organisers to date, much of the controversy has centred on the legacy claims that helped secure the Games in the first place. The Olympic Park Legacy Company has taken on responsibility for the park after the Games and must prove it can make a commercial success of it while meeting the needs of local residents.
The fate of the stadium, the object of a furious row between Spurs and West Ham, is mired in high court litigation and it will face searching scrutiny over the affordability of thousands of homes that will be left behind, partly the athletes village.
One of the biggest challenges for the OPLC will be finding a tenant for the cavernous media centre, although there are renewed hopes that a major broadcaster may take an interest.
But even more of a challenge is the "soft legacy", with figures showing that the number of people playing sport is resolutely refusing to budge and ongoing debate about whether the predicted opportunity to get more young people engaged in sport, build links between clubs and schools and raise the profile and quality of coaching, is really being seized. They were famously planting the trees in Athens the day before the opening ceremony, but the landscaping on the Olympic Park is starting to take shape.
More than 4,000 new trees are planned, with 1,500 already planted. Over 300,000 wetland plants have been planted and there are bold claims for the Park that will be left behind. Eventually, there will be up to 11,000 new homes on the site, in the heart of an area that the Olympic Park Legacy Company hopes will be resurgent. Westfield, the giant shopping mall at the entrance to the Park and on which politicians are relying for many of their legacy claims about jobs and regeneration, opens for business in September.
London 2012: The flatpack Olympics | Jonathan Glancey
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on June 15, 2011
The innovative 'Meccano' construction of the new basketball arena could democratise the Games
The words "Olympic Games" and "white elephant" have a habit of appearing in the same sentence. The fear, engendered in recent decades, is that the two-week Games tend to encourage host cities and nations to spend promiscuously on ambitious new sports venues that struggle to find fulfilling and profitable new uses when athletes, crowds and media circuses disperse.
If a gold medal could be awarded for the Olympic white elephant event, then Athens would surely be the recipient. It seems a shame, given that the Olympics originated in Greece and were restored there for the first time in about 1,500 years in 1896, that when it lavished about £7bn on the 2004 Games Athens succeeded in hanging a throttling chain around its financially stretched neck.
Not that other cities have fared much better; silver and bronze medals might be presented to Atlanta (1996) and even Beijing (2008). However, in hosting the Games for the third time next year, London might just have learned something from these past mistakes. True, the 2012 London Olympics are expensive, and they have been wrapped in hyperbole and hysteria, and yet the unveiling of the 12,000-seat basketball arena last week shows that something is beginning to change.
The structure, designed by Wilkinson Eyre architects and the KSS design group, might look flamboyant, yet its "Meccano" construction, as Dennis Hone, chief executive of the Olympic Delivery Authority has described it, ensures that it can be deconstructed after the Games, with much of it reused. Its 12,000 plastic seats seem destined for Silverstone and other sporting venues, while the external structure may be shipped to Brazil for the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics.
It is not too hard, then, to imagine a future Olympics held in temporary and reusable buildings. Not only would this save cities from debt, redundant venues and white elephant awards, it would also mean that the Games could be held in those with precious little money to throw away. A low-cost travelling Olympics could tour the world, taking in cities that might gain greatly from the event but could never begin to think of the equivalent of Zaha Hadid's Aquatics Centre at Stratford. Could we yet see an Addis Ababa, Dhaka or Havana Olympics?
The idea of demountable and reusable structures is nothing new. Tents and other temporary buildings have been around since the ancient Olympics were first held in Greece in or around 776BC. Whether circuses, military encampments or the seasonal courts of Mongol emperors, impressive and sometimes very beautiful architecture has blossomed with the suddenness of summer poppies only to vanish just as quickly. And, to bloom afresh when needed.
This month has witnessed the debut of the fine new demountable Garsington Opera house at Wormsley Park in the Chilterns, designed by the architect Robin Snell and engineers Buro Happold. This 600-seat venue will be put up and down in a deer park over the next 15 years. When it is up, it is a big, serviceable and handsome structure; when it is down and stored for the next year's season, it will be as if it had never existed.
Although the £45m Millennium Dome on the North Greenwich peninsula, designed by the Richard Rogers Partnership for an act of bullish political folly (the Millennium Experience: an entire herd's worth of white elephants), costing the nation £1bn, has eventually found a new use as the O2 music arena, it might have been better if it had been a real tent – rather than simply looking like one – that could have been taken down and re-erected only when a fresh purpose had been found for it.
The Wilkinson Eyre-KSS design shows that a new generation of flatpack architecture can be as impressive in its own way as the domed and brocaded marriage tent of Alexander the Great, hung from 50 30ft columns of silver and gold for his 9,000 guests must have been. And, the fact that such splendour, in modern idioms, could work for events in cash-poor cities makes the idea of such temporary architecture all the more attractive. It has, too, the added bonus of promising to keep white elephants well at bay.
• This article was amended on 15 June 2011. The original said the Olympics were restored in Greece for the first time in about 1,500 years in 1906. This has been corrected.
Olympic basketball arena’s design hailed as ‘template for future’
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on June 8, 2011
The £42m venue is designed to be deconstructed after the Games and its seats sold off to other event organisers
The 12,000-seat basketball arena at the Olympic site in east London has been hailed by organisers as a template for future games, after the latest completed venue was unveiled on Wednesday.
The completion of the basketball arena leaves just one venue at the park still to be finished, the landmark Zaha Hadid aquatics centre.
The £42m basketball venue is designed to be deconstructed after the Games as part of an original plan to avoid white elephants, with the 12,000 seats destined for Silverstone and other sporting venues and the Scottish manufacturers of the external structure in talks with Rio 2016 to ship it to Brazil.
Dennis Hone, chief executive of the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA), said building a temporary indoor venue of its size was unprecedented and could form the basis of an International Olympic Committee plan to bring down the cost of hosting the Games.
"It makes a lot of sense, especially if you want to take the Games beyond the richest cities in the world. To do that, you've got to bring the costs down," he said.
Hone said the decision was made to make it a temporary venue in order to roughly halve the cost and avoid a white elephant that would have found it hard to compete as a concert or conference venue with nearby rivals such as the O2. He described it as "Meccano" construction.
The distinctive white arena, which sits in the north end of the park between the athletes' village and the much-praised velodrome, will be lit in the colours of the Olympic rings at night to provide a focal point.
Across the Olympic Park, two years of planning and design and four years of construction work are coming to an end, with only the controversial £269m aquatics centre of the major sports venues still to be completed.
Hone defended the addition of two temporary stands to either side of the swimming complex. The huge cost of the design was justified by politicians and officials at the time by claims it would provide as a distinctive architectural statement amid a sea of otherwise functional designs.
But visitors to the Games will not see the full sweep of the Hadid design because it is dwarfed by the temporary "water wings". Hone urged critics to reserve judgment until they had been inside. "You'll see the whole pool in front of you with monitors above your head with all the stats and information. I want everybody to hold fire on that until they see inside."
But he accepted that there had been a "trade off" between ensuring the building had a viable legacy as a 3,000 capacity swimming venue and the design.
"I think it's going to be stunning internally. But I accept that there is a trade off between getting in the maximum number of people and the exterior aesthetics of the building," he said.
The £486m main stadium has already been completed, as have the velodrome, the handball arena and the media centre. Outstanding work includes the completion of the BMX track, a temporary water-polo venue and the temporary hockey stands that will seat 15,000 during the Games.
The ODA estimates that it will spend £7.3bn of its original £8.1bn budget and Hone said that keeping the construction to time had been a key factor in mitigating risk and weathering changes in the economic climate.
"We have had the best of British construction. It has been a showcase for what the best of British construction can do," he said. "The ODA has between £600m and £800m worth of work still to complete, chiefly in "stitching together the landscape of the site".
Hone said positive public perceptions of the Games to date were largely down to the success of the ODA and its partners in avoiding an Athens-style meltdown.
It has also helped rehabilitate Britain's ability to deliver big projects in the wake of the bitter disputes and delays that marred the £757m rebuilding of Wembley and the non-delivery of the Picketts Lock stadium in 2001.
"As a management team and an organisation we set our stall out to say if we hit time the rest would take care of itself," said Hone, the ODA's former finance director who was promoted to chief executive in February after David Higgins left the team to run Network Rail.
"If you finish with a year out, the bargaining power or leverage can stay with the client. Without being complacent, we can say that the Olympic Games venues are sorted."
While ODA has been responsible for building the venues, the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games (Locog) – which has its own £2bn privately raised budget from sponsorship and ticket sales – still has substantial work to do to make them ready for Games-time.
The Olympic Delivery Authority is expected to officially hand over the venues to Locog, chaired by Lord Coe, to mark the "one-year to go" point on 27 July this year.
Olympic velodrome in race for building of the year prize
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on May 18, 2011
The London 2012 Olympic velodrome, nicknamed the giant Pringle, has been put in the long list by RIBA for the Stirling prize
The velodrome for the 2012 Olympics, nicknamed the giant Pringle for its crisp-like curves, is in the running to be named building of the year after picking up a design award from the Royal Institute of British Architects.
The 6,000-seat building, completed in February, is the first construction at the £9bn Olympic park in east London to be granted an award by RIBA.
The creators, Hopkins Architects, were advised by Sir Chris Hoy, the multiple gold-medal winning track cyclist, and the award looks set to be the first of many for the park. The 80,000-seat main stadium has already been applauded for its simplicity, and, meanwhile, the aquatics centre, designed by Zaha Hadid, is still being built, and a giant viewing-platform, designed by Anish Kappor to resemble a twisted roller-coaster, is halfway to completion.
The RIBA's long list, for contenders for the £20,000 prestigious Stirling prize, includes the velodrome, a project led by Sir Michael Hopkins, who designed Portcullis House in Westminster.
On the list of 97 buildings granted RIBA awards is the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, refurbished and rebuilt by Bennetts Associates; the Evelyn Grace city academy in Lambeth, London, designed by Hadid; and the Faustiono winery in the Ribero del Duero region in Spain, designed by Foster and Partners.
An elegant but austere pavilion cafe, designed by Caruso St John Architects, in the grounds of Chiswick House, the 18th-century neo-Palladian villa in west London, is one of the smallest projects but is being tipped by some for a place on the RIBA shortlist.
The president of the institute, Ruth Reed, said the list illustrated the health of British architecture in spite of the recession hitting construction. In August 2009 about 30% of architects were without jobs or enough work to keep busy, according to the institute, and about 4,000 architects were made redundant.
"In spite of a terrible worldwide recession many exceptional buildings have been and continue to be built in the UK and overseas," said Reed. "Even in constrained times committed clients working with talented architects can achieve architectural excellence."
However, so thin have the opportunities been in the UK that some of British architecture's biggest names only won prizes for projects in Europe. Last year's Stirling Prize winner, David Chipperfield, won awards for a shopping centre in Innsbruck and a museum in Essen, but nothing for a building in the UK.
The legacy of Labour's education building programme continued to be rewarded with 14 schools and nine university buildings granted awards.
An architectural experiment by the writer Alain de Botton was recognised, with prizes for two private holiday homes he commissioned and which he lets through his group, Living Architecture.
One of the homes is a tar-black house with a concrete and wood interior designed by the Glasgow firm Nord Architecture and set on the shingle beach of Dungeness, in Kent, near the home of the late film-maker Derek Jarman. The second is a balancing barn in Suffolk, by the Dutch practice MVRDV, which cantilevers unnervingly off a hillside. The homes offer people the chance to experience cutting-edge architecture – though a week in the balancing barn in September costs £2,604.
Olympic velodrome threatens to give London games a good name | Richard Williams
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on February 1, 2011
There is so much noise surrounding other permanent facilities that the success of the velodrome is in danger of being overlooked
Sir Chris Hoy can uncross his legs. The lavatory he asked for is exactly where he wants it to be, close to the track at the Olympic velodrome, ready for riders who feel the need to answer a last-minute call of nature before tightening their toe straps for the pursuit or the keirin at the 2012 Games.
In the Tour de France the competitors can just hop off the bike on some deserted country road, or even pull down their shorts and irrigate the scenery as they freewheel along. Such relief is hardly possible in a crowded velodrome, making Sir Chris's khazi just one of the impressive details to be found in a structure that threatens to give the London Games a good name.
So much noise continues to be made about the scandals surrounding other permanent facilities in the Olympic park – notably the uncertain future of the main stadium and the outrageous £180m cost overrun on the aquatic centre – that the success of the velodrome is in danger of being overlooked. Here is an arena that was properly planned, properly costed and delivered on time, to specification, and within its £90m budget. So it can be done.
The building was 24 hours away from being handed over to the organisers as a finished article when I was shown around the other day. To get there, a visitor to the Lee Valley park passes by the unremarkable main stadium, its looks compromised by the absence of the "wrap" intended to provide its visual signature but cancelled in order to save £7m on a building costing almost £500m, and the swimming pool, an aesthetic disaster thanks to the need to flank Zaha Hadid's surprisingly unremarkable core design with two temporary grandstands in order to bring its capacity up to Olympic requirements.
Then the eye falls on the swooping roof of the velodrome, rising elegantly at its two ends to echo the banked turns inside and supported by exterior walls of warm red cedar, a hint of the wooden piste itself. Here is something of genuine beauty, an elegant example of form following function.
You might have guessed that it was designed by a cyclist. Mike Taylor, a senior partner at Hopkins Architects, a practice noted for creating the canopied Mound stand at Lord's, led the design team. He rides, which helped him to listen with a sympathetic ear to Hoy's suggestions, such as the request to ensure that the opening of the main spectator access doors does not create a cold draught for the riders (the solution involved industrial "air curtains"). Hoy also asked for the design to incorporate seating around the top of the banked ends to create an unbroken wave of noise as the riders circulate.
Ron Webb, an Australian former champion who specialises in track design, created the piste itself from 54km of Siberian pine. Shipped from Archangel, sawn into narrow strips in a German mill, it is secured with 360,000 nails into a 250m ribbon that rears at either end into a 42-degree banking. Previously responsible for the Manchester and Sydney velodromes, Webb reportedly reckons that this is one on which records will be broken.
I'm going on about this because so many big building projects in Britain invite scorn for their flaws of design and execution, and in the case of sporting arenas for their farcically inept legacy planning, too. I was tagging along with a visiting party from the Save the Herne Hill Velodrome organisation, a group dedicated to preserving the 450m shallow-banked concrete track used in the 1948 Games, for whom Taylor has created a striking set of plans to ensure the south London track's rescue from its present state of dilapidation and its revival not just as a centre for community and schools use but, as the architect puts it, "for getting people started on the way to the high end of the sport".
Herne Hill looks as though it is going to survive. And so will the 2012 velodrome: a building which, whatever the fate of its troubled neighbours, will in time become a perfect, much loved monument to whatever achievements it may witness.
Panorama: Inside the London 2012 velodrome
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on November 15, 2010
Want to see what it'll be like to whizz around the velodrome at the 2012 Olympic games? Here's 360-degree view
Out of an urban backwater, the 2012 Olympic dream takes shape
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on November 15, 2010
The debate about the cost and 'legacy' of construction will outlast the 2012 Olympic Games, but no one can deny the new venues are a bold addition to London's landscape
The seduction of construction is a powerful thing. It is the way that the sheer fact of building, the churning of mud and materials into frames and buildings, and the choreography of workers and machines, convinces us that something is being dealt with or transformed. Before the purposefulness of building, doubts recede about the purpose of what is being built.
There is no better place in Britain to experience this effect than at the east London site of the 2012 Olympics. Here, 10,000 people are working over nearly 250 acres to turn billions of pounds into an array of large, singular buildings. Yet more are working on the adjoining site of the Westfield Stratford City shopping mall. Platoons of cherry pickers extend their long mechanical necks towards the sloping wall of the velodrome, so that its impeccably sourced timber cladding can be installed. Hills of spoil rise and fall, as mud is removed from one place to another. A forest of scaffolding fills the void beneath the aquatics centre's big, wavy roof. The miracle of completion is beginning to occur, in which pristine finishes emerge from the seeming chaos, looking as predicted in architects' drawings made some years ago.
Modern buildings are built in packages – concrete, steelwork, glazing and so on. This is a landscape made in packages, a series of huge dollops of construction, each with its own intentions and aesthetics, and with no great connection with its neighbours. What they do have in common is their Olympic purpose and a project-managed smoothness; most buildings have a certain stylishness, without being provocative or awkward. They will also be held together by the accommodating greenery of the Olympic Park at the centre.
Thus there is the shiny, white, shrink-wrapped basketball arena, a temporary structure that will come down after the Games. There are the two waves of the velodrome and the aquatics centre roofs, one a trough and the other a peak. There are the glitzy wrappings over the brute forms of the shopping mall and its car parks, and the ranks of un-villagey blocks of the "athletes' village", more dominating and assertive than most new housing has, in recent decades, dared to be. There is the black brick box of the critically acclaimed electrical substation by the architects Nord.
Most conspicuous is the stadium, now looking almost as it will be when the Games open. It has a simplicity rarely seen in modern arenas, which are usually engulfed in corporate facilities and conference suites. On the outside, it is a triangulated structure of big, black, steel struts, through which the underside of the concrete terraces can be seen. Inside, it is a simple bowl, albeit jazzed up by patterns of black-and-white seats based on the Olympic logo's "shattered" look. One reason for its directness is that it is designed so that the steel superstructure can be dismantled and put up somewhere else, leaving a smaller stadium just for athletics. This plan is now unlikely to go ahead: the most likely option seems to be to convert it to a football ground, with occasional athletic use.
Most convincing is the 6,000-seat velodrome, whose architects Hopkins and Partners say that they wanted the "tautness and energy" of race cycling to be realised in their building. Its roof, made of a net of cables and plywood panels, is crafted to keep materials and scaffolding to the minimum, allowing more of the budget to be spent on the detail. It also admits copious daylight and connects easily with the surrounding park. At its centre is the timber track, a marvellous sloping and curving thing, which inspired in me a (previously undetected) desire to watch cycle races.
It's plain that the architecture of the London Olympics will be less spectacular than that of Beijing – there will be nothing like the Bird's Nest stadium – but the spaces in between will be less bleak. There will be a park, rather than a vast apron of paving. 2012's values are delivery, efficiency and quality, uplifted by a public art programme and the architects who thrive best are those, like Hopkins, who make something positive out of the constraints. True, Anish Kapoor's big red Orbit sculpture, now under construction, strives to inject a steroidal boost of excitement, but it remains to be seen how successfully.
The Games site is well run – it has a good safety record, in contrast to the Beijing Olympics where the number of deaths were almost certainly more than the official figure of six. Many of its venues are ahead of schedule. It is also on budget, once you accept the audacious hike to £9.3bn from the original £2.4bn. Usually, clouds of bad press swirl around the Olympics, about escalating costs and time overruns. Similarly with British public construction projects like the Scottish Parliament. London 2012 might therefore have been doubly cursed, but it is proceeding with extraordinary serenity, a triumph of both project management and PR.
For the sake of posterity and future bidders for the Olympics, certain things can't be said too often: that it is insanely wasteful to spend this much money on a fortnight's fun, or that the Games usually depress rather than boost tourism in the host city. That supposed regeneration benefits only come about with the help of yet further funding. That things of value, like the gentle wilderness of allotments that once stood on this site, get destroyed.
But, barring unforeseen disasters, there is every reason to suppose London 2012 will be a success. Crowds will come and there will be the usual dramas and hyperbole. Such events generate their own momentum, and even the calamity-hit Delhi Commonwealth Games managed to leave behind a vague feelgood factor. I'll hazard a guess that most people in Britain will feel moderately pleased that the Games happened here. Whether it will be £9.3bn-worth of moderate pleasure is debatable, but by then few will mind any more. It will be a question for another city.
Panorama: Inside the London 2012 Olympic stadium
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on November 14, 2010
A 360-degree view from where the VIPs will be seated
Stirling prize shortlist: big names stop the judges in their tracks
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 20, 2011
The six architects on the Stirling prize shortlist 2011 have all been there before. But could a political dark horse say 'on your bike' to the bookies' Olympic favourite?
It's never worthwhile to reduce the Stirling prize shortlist to some overriding theme, but having said that, there is one thing that unites this year's six architects: they've all been shortlisted before. Some of them several times – this is Zaha Hadid's fourth building, and David Chipperfield's seventh, which puts him in joint second place in the Stirling prize league table alongside Richard Rogers, with Norman Foster just one ahead. Does this suggest there were clear frontrunners in the Stirling race, or that a big name counts for more and smaller practices don't get a look-in?
Anyway, on with the reckless speculation. The traditional Stirling winner is a large public building, but in the current cash-strapped construction environment, there have been few of these to trumpet.
Which makes the absence of two of the main buildings on the London Olympics site conspicuous. No plaudits for the main stadium by US-based architects Populous – understandable in a way since its brief was practically to be as bog standard as possible – at which it succeeds (having a silly name for your practice doesn't help either).
And nothing for Zaha Hadid's Aquatics Centre – also understandable given its troubled history of redesigns, budget increases, temporary "water wings" imposed on it, and the fact that, er, it still isn't finished.
That leaves Michael Hopkins's Velodrome with the podium all to itself. As expected, it's currently the bookies' favourite and deservedly so. It's a handsome, unfussy building, quietly distinctive (enough to earn it a nickname: "the Pringle") and engineered as efficiently as a track bicycle. It's already had the thumbs-up from the Team GB cyclists, too, who described it as "the best in the world".
Looking at the other contenders, laudable though they are, they're not necessarily game-changing. AHMM's Angel Building reconfigures a 1980s office building with Louis Kahn-style barefaced concrete and a sheen of Mad Men mid-century glamour – very nice but perhaps too conventional to win. Bennetts Associates' Royal Shakespeare Theatre makes new sense of a messy accumulation of older buildings, but it's not a scene-stealer like the Tate Modern. Zaha's Evelyn Grace Academy is a consolation for the Aquatics Centre, and proof that her swooshing parametricism can work within tight budgets and design guidelines (is that Z-shape a touch of covert branding?). The fact that Zaha won the prize last year could hamper her chances, though. Likewise David Chipperfield's Museum Folkwang extension in Essen, another refined, sharp-edged German culture house for his collection.
Chipperfield already won with one of these in 2007, the Museum of Modern Literature in Marbach, and was shortlisted for another, the Neues Museum, last year. Perhaps he should design a Museum of German Museum Designs.
That leaves a dark horse: An Gaeláras by Dublin-based O'Donnell & Tuomey in Derry, Northern Ireland. It is the first purpose-built Irish-language cultural centre in the UK, a product of the Good Friday agreement, and thus freighted with political relevance (there hasn't been much of that in Stirling world since the Scottish parliament won in 2005). But it's also a beautiful design on a hostile site. Despite being walled in on three sides, it boasts a sculptural four-storey atrium criss-crossed by stairs and galleries, smartly mixing colours and materials – the type of space that stops you in your tracks. Uplifting and finely crafted, it could well tick all the boxes.
Architecture, Art, Art and design, Awards and prizes, Comment, Culture, David Chipperfield, guardian.co.uk, Norman Foster, Olympic games 2012, Richard Rogers, Stirling prize, Zaha Hadid
No Comments