Yudu - RIBA September 2011

Analysis | Olympics | Overview

LEFT: Tales of the riverbank – landscape plan for the site in games mode.

a further barrier that will not go away. More fundamentalist critics such as the Hackney- based ‘psychogeographer’ Ian Sinclair, have questioned the validity of the whole Olympic exercise amid nostalgia for what has been lost on the site, from prized allotments to small businesses. It is certainly the costliest possible way to achieve a sort of top-down regeneration, a Heseltine-style grandee’s approach. In the building of the main Olympics site,

(RIBAJ, April 2010) and provision made for large but not overwhelming levels of post-Olympics development. And many of the venues are good, in design terms: of the big three, Hopkins’ velodrome is the best for many, but the admirably lean main stadium by Populous runs it close, so different from the spectacular – and spectacularly over-engineered – ‘Bird’s Nest’ stadium by Herzog & de Meuron in Beijing. Zaha Hadid’s Aquatics Centre attracted much unfavourable comment when it was being built (there’s an awful lot of steel in there) and suffers from the temporary spectator stands shoved on either side: but inside it’s gorgeous. Elsewhere, everyone from Make to Stanton Williams via Wilkinson Eyre and McAslan have stepped up to the mark. Of course, more opportunities for small practices would have been nice.

The main downside? Not enough benefit to

the East London community. You are not aware, travelling through those boroughs, that the Olympics have helped much at all. Stratford may now have the best transport links of just about any edge-city in the world, a colossal new shopping centre, a school by AHMM, and a huge amount of new housing – but nobody would deem Stratford a new Utopia, and a little further afield nothing much has changed at all. While the Legacy plan makes new links across the natural barrier of the River Lea, local critics have complained they are not ideally placed: east of the Lea, cut off as much by railway lines as the river, will still feel comparatively isolated. Immediately to the west of the site, the thundering dual carriageway of the East Cross Route down to the Blackwall Tunnel is

cost eventually trumped sustainability. What was trumpeted as the ‘greenest games ever’ with large amounts of construction material movement through the revived waterways known as the ‘Bow Back Rivers’, did not meet those expectations. Much-reduced road freight costs during the recession proved more attractive. Moreover, there was a bad moment when the post-Olympics housing element was redesigned to be less dense, in consequence sprawling more and consuming some 10 per cent of the original legacy park design, including the loss of a large oval meadow earmarked for public events at the north end of the site, overlooking the landscaped channel of the River Lee. It is remarkable how little fuss was made about this. Easier, obviously, to decimate public open space before it exists. But for all the carping (or justified criticism, depending on your view), we have done well with the construction of the Olympics. I like the main site, its English informality, the way it is joggled into its awkward site rather than being laid out in Beaux-Arts fashion as Beijing was. I like the way that outlying places such as Greenwich Park and Horseguards Parade have been pressed into service. As readers of this magazine will be well aware, I do not like – at all – the ridiculous folly of the ArcelorMittal ‘Orbit’, which I see as wholly unnecessary and hideously ill-conceived. This sculpture/ observation platform by Anish Kapoor, Cecil Balmond, and Kathryn Findlay is surely the classic solution to a wholly imagined problem. I would be delighted to be proved wrong. But that was foisted on a reluctant Olympic Delivery Authority. Other than that, I think we can be impressed by the achievement of delivering the XXX Olympiad in 2012. Let us hope – and as I write London is convulsed with rioting and looting – that the event itself in 2012 runs as smoothly. n