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Analysis | Olympics | Olympic Stadium

LEFT: Intermediate spaces are adroitly handled, with views opened up between levels.

RIGHT: The concourse level beneath the precast seating tiers houses ancillary structures.

‘Bird’s Nest’ by Herzog and de Meuron. The amount of chunky steel in that one was enough to make grown engineers weep, let alone environmentalists. The London stadium is not only lean but pragmatic: for instance it uses a lot of standard-issue steel flange- bolted gas pipe available from stock, most visible in the triple ring beams circling the roof. The decision to use this off-the-peg tubing, says Populous’s Philip Johnson, meant the stadium became a little less sleek, but at this scale you’d hardly notice. Besides, it seems to fit nicely with the demountability – though if West Ham football club does indeed take over the stadium, it will not be removed down to the basic bowl. This was something which rivals Tottenham Hotspur would have done, to build a soccer rather than an athletics stadium back on top. Dismantling it would have created certain

problems – could you really re-use all that steelwork and seats and precast units somewhere? But leaving the structure as it stands carries its own, different problems of course. As no less a luminary than footballer Robbie Savage wrote in The Mirror when West

‘ The stadium is not only lean but pragmatic... it uses a lot of standard-issue steel flange- bolted tubing, most visible in the twin ring beams circling the roof’

Ham’s legacy bid was approved: ‘Every time I see a stadium with a running track around it, my heart sinks. I’ve played in a few… some of the games might have been decent but I guarantee you the atmospheres were pathetic. Footballers need to feed off a crowd. You

can’t do that when they’re far away and you’re isolated on what feels like your own little island… At West Ham there will be constant reminders that they are playing in the 2012 Olympic Stadium. They’ll feel like tenants in their own manor.’ That problem has now been partly resolved

with the proposal of retractable seating over the track – something that has worked perfectly well for years at the Stade de France in Paris. Of course a smaller club like West Ham (average attendance in 2010-2011 was 29,198 in a ground with a capacity of more than 35,000) cannot possibly fill such a large stadium. You would have to be FC Barcelona to do that on a regular basis. But the club can use the stadium’s income-generating potential for large events. This is all highly relevant as, after all, the Olympics and Paralympics together run for just

WWW.RIBAJOURNAL.COM : SEPTEMBER 2011