There are still some months to go until the London Olympics, but already the site looks astonishingly complete. Engaging Places joined one of the tours which take an hour to travel around the Olympic Park, and discovered the impressive progress being made in every corner of the site and in every aspect of the planned experience.
From outside the Park its scale is not immediately obvious: the railways, the roads and canals that surround it, keep the Olympic Zone at a certain distance and blur the general idea of its shape and extent. The tight security the site requires also keeps it at arm’s length – and so does all the massive development surrounding it, from all the associated works generated by the Park itself to the enormous retail development at the Westfield site. This shopping centre will be the largest urban retail complex in Europe when it’s complete, and that gives an idea of the scale of the transformation underway in Stratford quite apart from the development of the Olympic site.
You approach the Olympic site down a little side road called Pudding Mill Lane. The Olympic stadium is the one building which announces itself in advance, clearly visible from the southern approaches to the Park and situated close to the edge. It’s a fairly straightforward, functional structure, suggesting a commitment to its real purpose and to the enduring principles of the Olympic Games.
This building is a much less dramatic and idiosyncratic structure than Beijing’s Olympic stadium, but this means that all the smaller buildings can still claim as much attention and don’t become overwhelmed by the focus on a single iconic gesture. It’s also interesting to note how the norms of stadium design have progressed: ten years ago this would have been a more surprising building, challenging certain expectations about the appearance of these structures, but now it looks robustly functional and focuses your imagination on the competitions and the drama that it will contain.
The minibus drives into the site from the chaotic functional space surrounding it – an essential mess of informal offices, parking facilities, security points, redirected circulation routes and so on – and very quickly the space opens out and the scale of the Olympic Park becomes obvious. The sheer size of the place makes a great impression. Even being driven across it, this feels like a massive piece of development. The individual structures are spaced across an open landscape and compete for attention – either signalling their purposes in their distinctive shapes or remaining more mysterious.
In between the larger buildings the work on the park, on the landscaping and planting, on the smaller facilities, is also progressing extremely quickly. Everywhere the impression is of the most difficult challenges successfully faced, and the ‘nice part’ happening now – the lovely details, the nuanced design – with the principal buildings there to cheer the remaining work, acquiring personalities as their presences become more familiar.
The bus moves north and east into the heart of the Park, pulling around the Olympic stadium and past the Energy Centre. Like the Athletes’ Village and the Media Centre, the Energy Centre – a miniature power station generating more power than the Olympic Park will require – reinforces that impression of the development’s enormous scale. In fact it’s all these supporting facilities that really suggest the true dimensions of what must have seemed like an overwhelming challenge in its earlier stages.
After the Handball Arena – one of the more modest designs, a smart quadrilateral that impresses with its simplicity – the distinctive form of the Velodrome begins to dominate the northward views. This looks like the Games’ outstanding building by some distance. It’s a truly beautiful structure, whose lovely form is realised in great materials to create something which feels like a really complete architectural statement (at least from a distance!).
The Basketball Arena is a mysterious white box with a pattern of sharply-defined protrusions, whose strategy for competing with the other buildings is definitely to encourage questions about its purpose. Is it the secret temporary HQ of the International Olympic Committee? No, instead it will be the home for Basketball but will then be dismantled after the Games, making it the largest of the temporary buildings and offering a different perspective on the questions raised by Olympic spending and the best way to reconcile the needs of the Games with the future of the Olympic Park.
The Aquatics Centre adopts an interesting strategy for achieving maximum utility during and after the Games. It has a core structure and two temporary wings, extending its spectator capacity, to be removed after the Games. The core structure looks like a more elegant building, so in this instance the paradigm is reversed: it feels as if the building will only achieve its ultimate form after the Games are finished. With its fashionable computer-generated curves the analogy with a chrysalis and a butterfly seems irresistible.
The Orbital is one of the final structures the tour approaches. This is an enormous piece of sculpture, resembling a rollercoaster twisting on an impossible vertical course, that will form a visual centrepiece and provide a viewing platform – in both senses a different way of seeing the Games. It’s interesting because it does not seem to make concessions to obvious notions of beauty. Would it be better without the platform so that it was really completely ‘useless’? Would this send a more interesting message, underlining the impossibility of justifying the Games themselves in purely utilitarian terms?
Back outside the Park we spill out of the bus clutching our maps of the site. Old Stratford still pushes in around the Olympic Park, pressing up against its boundaries. Will it eventually reclaim this space for purposes quite different to anything that we can imagine now?
The Olympic Stadium seen in the wider Stratford context. By Martin Deutsch via Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
You approach the Olympic site down a little side road called Pudding Mill Lane. The Olympic stadium is the one building which announces itself in advance, clearly visible from the southern approaches to the Park and situated close to the edge. It’s a fairly straightforward, functional structure, suggesting a commitment to its real purpose and to the enduring principles of the Olympic Games.
The Olympic Stadium in London. By Martin Deutsch via Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
The minibus drives into the site from the chaotic functional space surrounding it – an essential mess of informal offices, parking facilities, security points, redirected circulation routes and so on – and very quickly the space opens out and the scale of the Olympic Park becomes obvious. The sheer size of the place makes a great impression. Even being driven across it, this feels like a massive piece of development. The individual structures are spaced across an open landscape and compete for attention – either signalling their purposes in their distinctive shapes or remaining more mysterious.
In between the larger buildings the work on the park, on the landscaping and planting, on the smaller facilities, is also progressing extremely quickly. Everywhere the impression is of the most difficult challenges successfully faced, and the ‘nice part’ happening now – the lovely details, the nuanced design – with the principal buildings there to cheer the remaining work, acquiring personalities as their presences become more familiar.
The bus moves north and east into the heart of the Park, pulling around the Olympic stadium and past the Energy Centre. Like the Athletes’ Village and the Media Centre, the Energy Centre – a miniature power station generating more power than the Olympic Park will require – reinforces that impression of the development’s enormous scale. In fact it’s all these supporting facilities that really suggest the true dimensions of what must have seemed like an overwhelming challenge in its earlier stages.
The media centre at the Olympic site in London. By Martin Deutsch via Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
Cutting edge: the Velodrome at the Olympic Site in Stratford. By Martin Deutsch via Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
The Basketball Arena at the London Olympic site. By Martin Deutsch via Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
The Orbital is one of the final structures the tour approaches. This is an enormous piece of sculpture, resembling a rollercoaster twisting on an impossible vertical course, that will form a visual centrepiece and provide a viewing platform – in both senses a different way of seeing the Games. It’s interesting because it does not seem to make concessions to obvious notions of beauty. Would it be better without the platform so that it was really completely ‘useless’? Would this send a more interesting message, underlining the impossibility of justifying the Games themselves in purely utilitarian terms?
Back outside the Park we spill out of the bus clutching our maps of the site. Old Stratford still pushes in around the Olympic Park, pressing up against its boundaries. Will it eventually reclaim this space for purposes quite different to anything that we can imagine now?
