Yudu - RIBA September 2011

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