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IT IS, OF COURSE, bigger than it at first appears. What you see from outside the Olympic Stadium is the ultra-lean steel structure of the upper tiers and the underside of their neat precast components: inside, there is a bowl of 25,000 seats, nearly one-third of the 80,000 total, dished into the ground. This sunken section was meant to be the legacy mode, a near-invisible smaller multi-purpose stadium. But this is not the only reason for the stadium’s relatively understated impact: it has also been kept deliberately as compact as possible, partly because of its tight island site in a skein


RIBA JOURNAL : SEPTEMBER 2011


of waterways, partly to reduce the length of sightlines from the furthest seats. Freestanding stadia, it is unarguable, are


all pretty much the same and have been since Roman times, when someone came up with the idea of effectively combining two conventional theatres to form an ellipse. Et voilà! The Colosseum. The Romans also had no trouble stringing a tensioned canvas canopy across the top. Add to that the multiple tiers and vomitoria and porous perimeter and you have the brief for a modern stadium: fast to fill, fast to empty, adequate shelter, uninterrupted


sightlines, sense of focus. To reinforce this point recently, architect Populous (which worked with Peter Cook on the scheme) took a plan of part of the Colosseum, split it down the middle and mirrored it with the equivalent wedge of the 2012 Olympic Stadium. Once the scales had been harmonised (the Colosseum is 189m by 156m by 50m high, the Olympic Stadium is 312m by 256m by 63m high) it was hard to tell them apart. But, basic form aside, it is equally true that


all stadia are not the same. London’s is by way of a minimalist riposte to Beijing’s maximalist


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