Posts Tagged Sport
Olympic companies call for end to ban on promoting work on games
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 11, 2012
Architects, engineers and technology companies speak out against protocol enforced by London 2012 organising committee
David Cameron is facing calls to end a ban on companies involved in the London Olympics from publicising their work on the games and has been warned that the gagging order is undermining job creation and economic growth.
Architects, engineers and technology companies have spoken out against a protocol, enforced by the London 2012 organising committee, which has prevented firms from entering projects for awards, publishing photos of completed arenas and even submitting work to exhibitions.
Olympic organisers said the rules were intended to protect the rights of major sponsors, but many suppliers say they clash with ministerial statements that the Olympics will provide British business with an economic boost.
On Monday, Cameron said "all credit" was due "to the people involved in providing these venues, getting them ready on time and on budget".
Ken Shuttleworth, the designer of the handball arena, said his firm has had a tussle with Locog over whether it could feature the venue in his company's own annual report, while Locog shut down attempts by a non-commercial trust to stage an exhibition about the London 2012 venues and suppliers.
Zaha Hadid, the architect of the aquatics centre and Sir Michael Hopkins, the architect of the velodrome, are among those covered by the no marketing rights protocol, but it is the dozens of smaller, less high-profile suppliers who are most concerned.
They have said they are being constrained when pitching for work on events such as the football World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in Brazil 2016.
"There is a contradiction between what different sides of government are saying," Roger Hawkins, whose firm's £110m redesign of Stratford station was prevented by the Olympic Delivery Authority from being entered for a Civic Trust award, said.
"We would love to promote our work on this complex technical project because we have developed skills that we would like to market into other opportunities. We are not allowed to do that, and there is a level of frustration in the design team about that."
Deborah Saunt, whose DSDHA firm designed the tallest tower in the athletes' village, said the rules "run contrary to common sense".
"We feel we have produced a new model of social housing, but we can't go out and promote it," she said. "Normally we would be publishing this globally, but here we have to wait until we are asked to talk about it. This is a missed opportunity."
STL Communications, an Oxfordshire telecoms firm that won the contract to provide hundreds of phones to be used by organisers to co-ordinate the opening and closing ceremonies, has written to Cameron demanding a rethink.
The firm told the prime minister the gag means it may have to forego 20% business growth.
"It is hard to understand how somebody providing tiles or doors is going to ambush Adidas or BMW by marketing their involvement in the games," Jim Heverin, a partner at Zaha Hadid Architects, which designed the aquatics centre, said.
Locog said a large proportion of the funding for the staging of the games comes from sponsorship by companies purchasing exclusive rights to promote their association with the games.
"Without these sponsors the games simply wouldn't happen, so we require suppliers not to advertise their involvement in order to protect our sponsors' associations with the London 2012," a spokesman said.
"Contractors are able to factually refer to the work they have done on the games when pitching for new business or refer to it on their websites alongside other examples of their work."
Peter Murray, a trustee of the Building Centre Trust, which was refused permission to stage a London 2012 exhibition, urged Locog to "ease up".
He said: "It is in the national interest that we make the best of the Olympics over the next nine months. I can see no problem in people using it from a branding point of view. As long as people do it in a responsible way, it can only enhance the economy."
London Olympic Village – in pictures
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 8, 2012
When it opens this summer it will house 17,000 athletes, and after the Games become 2,800 homes
Stirling prize: Zaha Hadid’s Brixton school beats Olympic velodrome
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 1, 2011
Evelyn Grace Academy wins the 16th RIBA Stirling prize, giving Hadid top award for second year running
Architect Zaha Hadid's Z-shaped school in Brixton, south London, has beaten the hot favourite, the Olympic velodrome, to win the 16th annual RIBA Stirling prize for architecture.
Victory for Evelyn Grace academy gives Hadid's practice a Stirling prize for the second year running, although it is the architect's first major building project in Britain. Last year her practice won for the Maxxi Museum of 21st Century Arts in Rome.
"Schools are among the first examples of architecture that everyone experiences and have a profound impact on all children as they grow up," said Hadid. "I am delighted that the Evelyn Grace academy has been so well received by all its students and staff."
The prestigious £20,000 award, handed over by the Royal Institute of British Architects, the Architects' Journal and construction products manufacturer Benchmark at a ceremony in Rotherham, is intended to celebrate the best new European building "built or designed in Britain". It was expected to go to Michael Hopkins's eye-catching east London Olympic venue, popularly known as "the Pringle". But Hadid's school triumphed with its bold approach to solving a difficult problem: how to bring four schools together on a small site under one "academy" umbrella. Evelyn Grace had to be squeezed into 1.4 hectares, while the average secondary school takes up more like 8ha. The school is also situated in the area of the capital with the highest crime rate in western Europe.
Rather than building the sort of glass atrium that has been adopted by many new schools, Hadid's team opted to spend the money on better-lit classrooms and corridors with more space. But her design does have one remarkable, central feature: a bright-red 100m sprint track running right through the site. There is also a multiuse Astroturf pitch, while another quiet corner is home to a wildflower garden.
RIBA president Angela Brady, who chaired the judges, said: "The Evelyn Grace academy is an exceptional example of what can be achieved when we invest carefully in a well-designed new school building. The result – a highly imaginative, exciting academy that shows the students, staff and local residents that they are valued – is what every school should and could be."
The school is run by the Ark (Absolute Return for Kids) Academy organisation, a charity set up by Arpad "Arki" Busson, the hedge-fund multimillionaire.
The final shortlist of the six rival structures competing for this year's award included not just Hopkins's velodrome, but Rab Bennetts's careful remodelling of the Royal Shakespeare and Swan Theatres in Stratford-on-Avon, an innovative cultural centre in Derry, the re-facing and transforming of a 1980s office building in north London, and the extension of the Folkwang Museum in Essen, Germany, by David Chipperfield Architects, who have also won the Stirling prize before. This was the first year previous entrants were eligible for consideration and all six shortlisted practices had been shortlisted before.
Full coverage of the prizegiving ceremony will be broadcast in a special edition of BBC2's Culture Show on Sunday.
Stirling prize: Zaha Hadid’s Brixton school beats Olympic velodrome
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 1, 2011
Evelyn Grace Academy wins the 16th RIBA Stirling prize, giving Hadid top award for second year running
Architect Zaha Hadid's Z-shaped school in Brixton, south London, has beaten the hot favourite, the Olympic velodrome, to win the 16th annual RIBA Stirling prize for architecture.
Victory for Evelyn Grace academy gives Hadid's practice a Stirling prize for the second year running, although it is the architect's first major building project in Britain. Last year her practice won for the Maxxi Museum of 21st Century Arts in Rome.
"Schools are among the first examples of architecture that everyone experiences and have a profound impact on all children as they grow up," said Hadid. "I am delighted that the Evelyn Grace academy has been so well received by all its students and staff."
The prestigious £20,000 award, handed over by the Royal Institute of British Architects, the Architects' Journal and construction products manufacturer Benchmark at a ceremony in Rotherham, is intended to celebrate the best new European building "built or designed in Britain". It was expected to go to Michael Hopkins's eye-catching east London Olympic venue, popularly known as "the Pringle". But Hadid's school triumphed with its bold approach to solving a difficult problem: how to bring four schools together on a small site under one "academy" umbrella. Evelyn Grace had to be squeezed into 1.4 hectares, while the average secondary school takes up more like 8ha. The school is also situated in the area of the capital with the highest crime rate in western Europe.
Rather than building the sort of glass atrium that has been adopted by many new schools, Hadid's team opted to spend the money on better-lit classrooms and corridors with more space. But her design does have one remarkable, central feature: a bright-red 100m sprint track running right through the site. There is also a multiuse Astroturf pitch, while another quiet corner is home to a wildflower garden.
RIBA president Angela Brady, who chaired the judges, said: "The Evelyn Grace academy is an exceptional example of what can be achieved when we invest carefully in a well-designed new school building. The result – a highly imaginative, exciting academy that shows the students, staff and local residents that they are valued – is what every school should and could be."
The school is run by the Ark (Absolute Return for Kids) Academy organisation, a charity set up by Arpad "Arki" Busson, the hedge-fund multimillionaire.
The final shortlist of the six rival structures competing for this year's award included not just Hopkins's velodrome, but Rab Bennetts's careful remodelling of the Royal Shakespeare and Swan Theatres in Stratford-on-Avon, an innovative cultural centre in Derry, the re-facing and transforming of a 1980s office building in north London, and the extension of the Folkwang Museum in Essen, Germany, by David Chipperfield Architects, who have also won the Stirling prize before. This was the first year previous entrants were eligible for consideration and all six shortlisted practices had been shortlisted before.
Full coverage of the prizegiving ceremony will be broadcast in a special edition of BBC2's Culture Show on Sunday.
London 2012 park sparks architectural argument between old and new names
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on August 1, 2011
Design Council chief celebrates Prince Charles' lack of involvement as traditionalists complain about 'overt prejudice'
A new skirmish in a long-running and often bitterly fought architectural "style war" between modernists and traditionalists has broken out over the stadiums and arenas of the London Olympics park.
Prince Charles's favourite architects have accused the head of England's national architectural review body of "overt prejudice" after he made a barbed attack on the heir to the throne's love of traditional buildings, and heaped praise on the resolutely modernist designs that will be beamed around the world as the backdrop to next summer's games.
Paul Finch, chairman of the Design Council Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, the government-funded design watchdog that vets major planning applications with the help of government funding, applauded the selection of Zaha Hadid, the avant garde Iraqi-born architect who designed the sinuous aquatics centre, and Populous, the designer of the main 80,000-seat stadium.
But, more provocatively, Finch celebrated the fact that the country's leading traditional architects, who are favoured by the Prince of Wales, were not in any way involved. "One of the good things about the London 2012 Olympics is the realisation that we have a set of buildings produced not by Quinlan Terry, Robert Adam, John Simpson, but by Hopkins, Hadid, Populous, Make, Heneghan Peng et al," he said. "None of it endorsed by the Prince of Wales, none of it to do with heritage."
The Traditional Architecture Group, whose members include Terry and Adam, both leading exponents of classical buildings inspired by architects from the past, including Sir Christopher Wren and Andrea Palladio, has complained to the culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, and communities secretary, Eric Pickles, that Finch's remarks, made in the Architects' Journal, displayed "significant prejudice against one style or architectural philosophy at the highest level". The group said its members were "dismayed and alarmed".
"His is a fundamentally prejudicial point of view from someone in a senior position," added Adam. "He shouldn't be in the position he is in."
Prince Charles has previously enraged some British architects by speaking out against modernist designs. In 2009 Richard Rogers was dropped as the designer of a £3bn housing development at Chelsea Barracks after the Prince questioned his design in a private letter to the Qatari client. In 1984 he torpedoed a modernist extension to the National Gallery in London by complaining it was "like a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend".
Now the prince's architectural allies feel they have found in Finch a lightning rod for their own simmering sense of injustice that a parallel "modernist establishment" is seeking to marginalise them with the result that some traditional architects believe commissions for Olympic projects were effectively closed to them. "It was considered a waste of time to go for the Olympic work," said Adam, a classicist who has designed a new 4,000-home settlement in Wales with the Prince's Foundation for the Built Environment.
Lord Rogers chaired the selection panel for the aquatics centre and Ricky Burdett, professor of urbanism at the London School of Economics and a close ally of Rogers, was hired as chief design adviser to the Olympic Delivery Authority. Finch continues to chair the panel scrutinising designs for stadiums and arenas for the Olympics.
The firm of Sir Michael Hopkins, who designed the Portcullis House MPs' office, was responsible for the velodrome which is favourite to win this year's Stirling prize for the best building designed or built in Britain. Make, a firm led by Ken Shuttleworth who was a lead designer on the gherkin tower in London, has designed the handball arena, while Heneghan Peng, a Dublin-based firm, has designed a sinuous complex of footbridges between the main stadium and the aquatics centre.
In his remarks Finch singled out Terry, who provided architectural advice to Prince Charles in his successful attempt to block the modernist redevelopment of Chelsea Barracks, and John Simpson who was hired to carry out alterations to Kensington Palace.
The Traditional Architecture Group has asked Pickles, whose department funds the Design Council Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, to instruct councils to ignore the watchdog's views until Finch apologises and retracts his remarks. "It is the policy of this and recent governments to favour no architectural style in planning decisions," wrote Alireza Sagharchi, the group's chairman. "Yet by contrasting some better-known traditional architects with those working on the Olympics, Mr Finch has expressed his very clear bias against traditional architecture." He asked for assurances that Finch's views would "not be allowed to taint the planning system", according to Building Design magazine.
In response Finch said: "I will respond to them when they show me the courtesy of writing to me and I will be only too happy to point out the many apparent errors in what passes for their analysis."
A spokesman for the Department for Communities and Local Government said: "These are opinions expressed in a magazine article, not official advice to central or local government. As such we have no comment to make."
Finch's comments in favour of the modernist appearance of Olympic Park architecture appear to undermine the neutral stance he advocated last year when asked about a proposal by Prince Charles's Foundation for the Built Environment to take on some of the design review role now undertaken by the Design Council.
He said: "The public interest is better served by concentrating on the quality of a piece of architecture rather than style which can come down to superficial visual appearance. It comes down to whether their advice would be independent and disinterested and they obviously have a stylistic preference."
Charles's tastes: rated and hated
• Charles praised Dharavi, one of the largest slums in Mumbai, for its "underlying intuitive grammar of design", saying it represented a better model for housing populations in the developing world than western architecture
• He backed Quinlan Terry's alternative designs for Chelsea Barracks which were inspired by the work of Sir Christopher Wren, the 17th century architect of St Paul's cathedral
• Poundbury in Dorset is the most complete version of Prince Charles' architectural vision, including the fire station which has been described as "the Parthenon meets Brookside"
• When talking to soldiers destined for service in Afghanistan in 2008 he said the Ivor Crewe building at Essex University "looks like a dustbin from the outside"
• Earlier that year he warned a series of planned skyscrapers in London would be "not just one carbuncle on the face of a much-loved friend, but a positive rash of them that will disfigure precious views and disinherit future generations of Londoners"
• Charles said the brutalist concrete Birmingham Central Library, designed in 1974 by John Madin, looked like "a place where books are incinerated, not kept"
Olympics Aquatic Centre – review
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 30, 2011
Zaha Hadid's London 2012 Aquatic Centre hasn't come cheap at £269m, but it is the Olympics' most majestic space
From the outside, it's a car crash. Or a UFO crash. Or, to use the watery metaphors that are de rigueur when talking about Zaha Hadid's £269m Aquatic Centre, it is like a vast turtle waving over-sized flippers. A great roof, whose beauty should come from the way its great weight came down to the ground at three points is engulfed with even bigger temporary structures, blown-up, go-faster versions of what might be seen at a county cattle fair, needed to house the 15,000 temporary seats for the Olympic Games. They will be taken away afterwards, leaving a 2,500 capacity, which is the most that any non-Olympic swimming event is likely to attract.
Then, once spectators have negotiated the crowd management arrangements, which the building accommodates somewhat clumsily, they will enter a space that can only be described as stonking, a room big enough for more than 17,500 people. It is impressive because it is big, and purposeful, and will contain large crowds, but also because the architecture rises to the occasion. The architects' moves are confident and equal to the scale of the place. They don't fumble or tinker. More than that, the interior has a feeling of wholeness. It feels moulded or carved, not assembled. It looks like a body more than something constructed out of pieces.
The big thing is the roof, steel-framed and timber-clad, which floats and undulates, but is also palpably substantial. Officially, it's like a wave, but, with its combination of weight and agility, it's very like a whale. At either end a concrete bowl, containing the pools, the permanent seating and support spaces, rises to meet the roof where it descends. Along each side, in the gaps formed between the bowl and the roof, huge glass walls will be installed after the games, opening the space to the sky and the surrounding park. Now these gaps open to steep banks of temporary seats, contained within the great flippers that are so problematic on the outside. Inside, they are continuous with the rest of the space, and add to its drama.
The work focuses on the two pools, for swimming and diving, coming down to a few human bodies in water, small and fragile relative to the whole, a shift in scale that is somehow achieved smoothly. The diving platforms are moulded out of the same concrete as the rest of the lower structure, making them extensions of the architecture rather than additional pieces of concrete.
Another pool, for practice, would be part of the experience too, visible behind a wide glass wall, but International Olympic Committee (IOC) regulations have required an unfortunate temporary partition. It's something to do with keeping athletes and officials apart, which is clearly very important, but it blocks the view. Elsewhere the interplay of architectural and sporting demands is happier. The greys of the structure are offset by strong primary colours: the blue pools, the yellow and red of the lane markers, and an interesting pinkish light filtered from the outside through translucent walls in the temporary extensions.
The Aquatic Centre is the London Olympics' most majestic space: the most potent, the most charged. It is also 2012's most difficult child, the first venue to be designed, the last to be finished. It was accompanied along the way by stories of escalating budgets (nervous builders, and near abandonment of the design). Built, it has compromises, like the view-blocking partition and the flippers, about which Hadid does not even try to pretend to be happy. As originally conceived, the awkward temporary extensions would not have been there, as there was to be a roof big enough to cover both temporary and permanent, but this proved too extravagant.
The obvious comparison is with the £93m, 6,000-seat Velodrome, another wavy-roofed work completed last February, seemingly with the smooth precision of a high-performance bike. The Velodrome's roof required 300 tonnes of steel; the Aquatic Centre's – about the same size but with admittedly more difficult conditions – uses 3,000 tonnes. The Velodrome, trim and taut, is also a handsome building, and promises to be a powerful venue.
Part of the complication comes from the fact that the centre was designed before London won the bid. London was in danger of being seen as the safe-but-boring option, with dull buildings, and Hadid's design could be waved in front of the IOC as evidence of stardust. The problem was that the people who would eventually be the clients for the building, the organisations set up after London won the bid, didn't exist then, and the brief was not as developed as it would be later. When designs come first and clients second, there is often trouble.
But there may also be a mismatch between the processes of something like the Olympics and architecture as conceived by Hadid. Architecture, for her, is something that should make its presence felt, intervene, change things, perhaps get in the way. Her style seems to be about dynamism and weightless modernity, but her buildings are actually massive. They are slow, not fast. They reflect an old idea, common to Palladio and Le Corbusier, that architects sculpt and shape and compose. Hence her roof, which dips down in the middle to suggest two different spaces within in the overall enclosure, one for swimming and the other for diving.
What London 2012 wants is a great whirring delivery machine, driven by the inexorability of the project's deadline, where as many details as possible are determined in advance by specifications and regulations. They want architects to slip into the machine noiselessly, if possible with a bit of elegance, like Hopkins Architects at the Velodrome. With Hadid there is more of a grinding and crashing of gears, but she set out to achieve "a really great spatial experience", and did so.
I am sure that the Aquatic Centre could have been built more cheaply and easily, and without its crashes of permanent and temporary. It is a building that will be at its best after the games, when the flippers have been replaced by the great glass walls, although it will then face a new risk of being too grand for a public pool. The wavy roof risks being too small for the Olympics and too big for its afterlife. It can only be hoped that, whatever plans are made for its future upkeep, they are equal to the ambitions of the structure.
But, given that the whole £9bn Olympic extravaganza spends money that could have had more prudent and practical uses, it does not seem so terrible that a small fraction of its extravagance should go on a space as magnificent as this. Many hundreds of millions will be flushed away on more boring things, such as consultants' fees and security that may or may not be necessary.
Lastly, a note to the IOC. While the Centre offers 17,500 seats for watching swimming, only 10,000 will be able to watch diving events. This is in accordance with IOC specifications, which seem to assume that people find diving a bit boring. Evidently, the specification writers haven't heard of Tom Daley.
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.
Response: There is no modernist conspiracy in how we judge architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on August 4, 2011
Getting ready for London 2012 is about focusing on the buildings, not heritage politics
Robert Booth's article (London 2012 park sparks architectural argument between old and new names, 31 July) implicates the newly merged Design Council Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (Cabe) charity, by association, with its chairman Paul Finch's recent article in the Architects' Journal written in a personal capacity. Surely Finch is able to express his admiration for the architecture for the 2012 games without it being seen as the official position of "England's national architectural review body"?
I am a trustee of Design Council Cabe, but I write this primarily as an architect who has presented schemes at Cabe that have been praised – and others that have been criticised. I have also chaired reviews and am confident that the process shows the necessary impartiality.
The request referred to in Booth's article that the communities secretary, Eric Pickles, should "instruct councils to ignore the watchdog's views until Finch apologises and retracts his remarks" would be extraordinarily counterproductive if implemented.
The whole intention behind the arrangements for design review is that a group of reviewers – only some of whom might be architects – use their knowledge and experience to discuss and comment on design proposals. It is the varied viewpoints that are on offer that validate the process.
There is no conspiracy-peddling modernist dogma, so readers need not be concerned with the inference that "Prince Charles's favourite architects" would never get a good Cabe review. They should know, however, that very little "traditional architecture" or classical design actually appears before us.
With the motto for the Olympic Games being "Faster, Higher, Stronger", you can forgive progressive architects getting a bit excited. What we all want is better-quality architecture, and the focus of Finch's article decries the problems brought on by a clumsy procurement process, making good architecture – of whatever style – a rarity.
It is indeed refreshing to see the London 2012 Olympics producing a set of exciting schemes built with confidence and without the need for any kind of heritage lobby intervening to force a late change in direction. How members of the Traditional Architecture Group might have approached these projects is an interesting but hypothetical question.
Not all of the venues involve "resolutely modernist designs" – let's not forget that some celebrate historic sites, such as the equestrian arena at Greenwich and beach volleyball in Horse Guards Parade. Design review of these stadia actively encouraged them to integrate architectural heritage – hardly the "significant prejudice" claimed by the Traditional Architecture Group.
Design review, in my experience, is much more focused on the important issue of the spatial relationships that proposed new buildings will create with their surroundings, and raising their sustainability credentials. This has nothing to do with questions of architectural style.
Architecture, Art and design, Comment, Comment is free, Communities, Olympic games 2012, Prince Charles, Society, Sport, The Guardian, UK news, Zaha Hadid
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