42
Analysis | Olympics | Aquatics Centre
FAR LEFT: Exterior view of the Aquatics Centre with the two temporary seating wings.
LEFT: Hadid’s sculptural concrete staircases evoke Saarinen’s TWA terminal.
BELOW RIGHT: The main event space is epic, but in games mode also introverted.
BELOW: Compared to the event space, the Olympic- sized training pool is calm and clinical.
than treble, putting the ‘ow’ in his wow. With Mills dismissing the only two truly
affordable looking projects, by FaulknerBrowns and Bennetts Associates, none of the four remaining serious contenders would necessarily have been cheaper. Make’s looked like two inverted velodromes placed in tandem, with possible economies in its lightweight ETFE roof. Massimiliano Fuksas’ seriously parametric design looked like the Pillsbury Doughboy caught in flagrante, while Behnisch and Partners’ effort looked like it had picked up the highly glazed Crystal Palace National Swimming Centre and carelessly dropped it onto the Lea Valley, leaving tax payers to pick up the pieces. Dominique Perrault’s circular platform floating on the River Lee meanwhile looked like a grand projet, no doubt for a grand prix. Complex designs for the budget, they all seemed to suffer from the need to get a handle on how a nigh-on 18,000-seater sports venue could be reduced to 3,000 in legacy mode. But the main story here is that Hadid’s
legacy mode Aquatics Centre is going to look great, despite the contentious 3,000 tonnes of steel holding up its roof. This is because the roof hits the main concrete structure at only
two points on the north side and one wall on the south, now connected by a hulking black sinusoidal timber underbelly, stretching 160m along the site and 90m across it. The curve rises to the south of the site as it sails over the diving pool. As Jim Heverin, project architect to the scheme, explains, this is to differentiate between the two disciplines. This might seem a trite formal move if Hadid didn’t use other, more subtle devices to compound the effect. Orthogonal glazed openings in the white concrete of the swimming pool’s bowl lean in to accelerate the eye along the pool’s length. Either side of the north glazed wall in the pool’s bowl, Hadid’s staircases rise with the swish of Eero Saarinen’s TWA terminal, and revealed beyond it is the training pool area. Unlike the drama of the main hall, this is low, still and calm, lit artificially through hundreds of rhomboid openings – translucent leaves in the pool’s concrete canopy. In the main space, multi-levelled diving
boards lean into the area’s higher space as they rise, evoking those of the Hong Kong Peak competition that first brought Hadid to our attention. But they’re also a homage to the catenary curves of Vasili Osmak’s 1935 diving
‘Geometries crash together visually, generating the spatial drama that a more considered and measured approach might not have yielded’
board at Kiev’s Dynamo Sports Club. And from this it’s only a small leap of the imagination to Hadid’s diploma: Malevich’s Tecktonik, its forms floating bizarrely against a cobalt curve of the Thames. Like the Maxxi Centre in Rome, the Aquatics Centre generates an internal space that seems to allude to earlier thinking and simpler spatial effects before Hadid, and then the rest of us, became wrapped up in parametricism. Similarly, internally at least, the temporary
seating for the games mode works rather well, its vertiginous hypotenuses counterpointed
WWW.RIBAJOURNAL.COM : SEPTEMBER 2011
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117