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THREE DAYS INSIDE the belly of a whale will do weird things to you, as the Old Testament’s Jonah will attest; so who knows what a week inside the leviathan that is Zaha Hadid’s 2012 Olympic Aquatics Centre will do for the likes of Tom Daley and Rebecca Adlington? But as the introspection resulting from 72 hours in a whale turned Jonah from lowly tradesman and all-round coward into a fearless evangelising prophet, I’m expecting great things. Hadid’s sweeping £268m Aquatics Centre

is the last of the permanent Olympic Park structures to open, and it did so on the day that marked a year to the opening of the games themselves. And while there is no doubting the visceral power of the space internally, the two temporary wings that allow the centre to accommodate the 17,500 spectators, needed for when the building is in games mode, are what all the critics had a bone to pick with. But then for Hadid, meeting all the demands

of the building, from its visionary design to hard-nosed completion, meant that she was always going to be caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. Being the ‘starchitect’ design for the Olympic bid committee, it exemplified the compromises inherent in making buildings fit the needs of a final user that hadn’t been consulted at the time, and had no input to the original design. Its sweeping flourish of a roof became the signature for London’s 2005 Olympic bid, and only when the prices came rolling in did anyone comprehend the costs associated with getting nearly 18,000 spectators under its tsunami-sized wave. Keith Mills, then chief executive of the 2012

bid, always said the Hadid’s design was chosen because of its ‘wow factor’, but maybe even he didn’t imagine the initial budget would more

LEFT: Looking across to the south wall, one of the three spring points for Hadid’s huge roof, gives the viewer a sense of the scale of the venue.

RIBA JOURNAL : SEPTEMBER 2011

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